Young Chinese firm FangCheng Architects has sent us their proposal Bridge Urban Life Typology, a city-wide network of bridge buildings which won the team the Second Prize at the 1.100.10000 Ideas Competition. The contest sought for innovative ideas to rapidly add 240,000 affordable housing units for more than 800,000 people in China's mega-boomtown Shenzhen. — bustler.net
Daniel Toole is a 26-year-old, Seattle-based architect who has, quite accidentally, found himself immersed in the hidden world of alleys. Recently awarded a travel fellowship by the local American Institute of Architects branch, he headed to Japan and Australia to study this arguably under-appreciated urban form. — theatlanticcities.com
Directed by Ai Weiwei (China, 2012). Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012.
Ordos 100 is a construction project curated by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. One hundred architects from 27 countries were chosen to participate and each design a 1000-square-meter villa to be built in a new community in Inner Mongolia. The 100 villas would be designed to fit a master plan designed by Ai Weiwei.
— youtube.com
In 2008, the substantially updated town center of Plessis-Robinson, a suburb of Paris, was named “the best urban neighborhood built in the last 25 years” by the European Architecture Foundation. A composite of six connected districts ranging in size from 5.6 to 59 acres, the revitalization comprises public buildings, retail, market-rate and subsidized affordable housing, parks, schools, gardens, sports facilities, and a hospital. Construction was begun in 1990 and took a decade to complete. — switchboard.nrdc.org
In an international design competiton for the rapid development of satellite cities along Chinese high speed rail corridors, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Beijing Bohai Innovation City master plan has just been named the winning submission. — bustler.net
Foreclosed, a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, shows ways of radically rethinking suburbia, homeownership and housing. But are such drastic measures what the suburbs really need? — Next American City
Also, see on Archinect: The CRIT: Thoughts on MoMA's Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream View full entry
At the urging of billionaire Paul Allen, planners are considering raising the height limit for new buildings in certain areas of the city — bendbulletin.com
Winners have been announced at the Bab Al Bahrain Open Ideas Competition with the proposal "Pearl Dive" by Swiss architect Lukas Lenherr taking home the $15,000 First Prize. [...]
Significance was added to this competition by the recent political events that have taken place across the region, encouraging questions about social representation, public identity, urban integration, sense of place, and historic importance.
— bustler.net
The saga of Cabrini-Green compels us to engage some hard and fundamental questions. It is not enough to ask: who benefits from public housing redevelopment? We must also ask: how we measure such benefits and who gets to do that measuring? — Places Journal
When the last of the Cabrini-Green towers was demolished by the Chicago Housing Authority a year ago, where did the residents go? Urban historian Lawrence Vale looks at the politics and policies of subsidized housing in the city and interviews the developer of the mixed-income "village" that... View full entry
ARTIST Damien Hirst has unveiled plans to build more than 500 landmark eco-homes in Ilfracombe, which he hopes will regenerate the town and provide a national blueprint for environmental housing.
Architects working for Hirst, said to be the richest living artist in the world, hope to submit a planning application for the development at Winsham Farm in six months.
— thisisnorthdevon.co.uk
Mr. Soleri, however, will discuss his marvelous, flawed creation with disarming frankness. Has Arcosanti, for instance, lived up to its potential? “No. Don’t be silly,” he said, and then laughed. — NYT
Michael Tortorello recently visited Arcosanti to check in on the status of the famed, Utopian urban laboratory. He finds it in transition as last fall, Mr. Soleri finally retired (at age 92) as the president of the Cosanti Foundation. Jeff Stein, 60, formerly dean of the... View full entry
In a few cities, such as coastal Wenzhou and coal-rich Ordos, the collapse in property prices has sparked a full-blown credit crisis, with reports of ruined businessmen leaping off building rooftops; some are fleeing the country. — Foreign Affairs
Prospects just few years ago looked great and China had jobs for everybody who were laid off in American market. But now the wind has changed direction. People who were speculating in Ordos and the like places are no where to be found and the bubble is about to burst. View full entry
What’s the best place to build a wetland? How about at the site of an old MTA bus lot in South Los Angeles? It took more than $26 million and nearly three years to complete the transformation from parking lot to urban wetland. Open to the public as of February 9, the new South Los Angeles Wetland Park that doesn’t only efficiently process storm water runoff–it also provides crucial community green space. — blog.archpaper.com
Who needs a fancy designer when builders all over the country know how to construct a peaked-roof single-family house?
The Museum of Modern Art’s small but magnificently ambitious new show “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” makes an overwhelming case that the two camps need each other now. Today’s suburb has little to do with the outwardly tidy, seething, monochrome world of Updike or Revolutionary Road.
— nymag.com
Related, on Archinect, The CRIT: Thoughts on MoMA's Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream View full entry
About 200 meters east of his doorstep, behind a high red wall under the perennial watch of large, uniformed men in unmarked vans, was Zhongnanhai, a sprawling, closed compound home to the offices and reception halls of the central leadership of China. "They must have run out of space," Sun said, flicking away his cigarette. — The Atlantic
Prompted by the recent destruction of 24 Beizongbu Hutong Jonathan Kaiman examines the preservation challenges faced by Beijing's hutongs. Specifically, the historic neighborhoods adjacent to Zhongnanhai, a sprawling, closed compound home to the offices and reception halls of the central... View full entry