"From the beginning, I wanted to give a sense of the variety of scale of the studio’s projects, from the more intimate objects like the Christmas cards to large-scale mockups like those for the Paternoster Square vents. [...]
Thomas is trained as a designer and not as an architect and he has always made things as a way to test his ideas. He often mentions how unusual it is that most architects have never actually made anything themselves." – Brooke Hodge
— LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design
When news broke that Heatherwick Studio would be collaborating with BIG on Google's campus expansion, many were hearing Thomas Heatherwick's name for the first time. "Provocations", the first exhibition devoted to Heatherwick Studios to be shown in North America, will make sure that Heatherwick... View full entry
Florida is largely seen as the U.S. state that is most vulnerable to the effects of global warming. But even uttering the term global warming in official communications can get employees at the state’s Department of Environmental Protection in trouble...“We were told not to use the terms climate change, global warming, or sustainability,” said Christopher Byrd, who worked at the DEP from 2008 to 2013. — Slate
On Tuesday, Gov. Rick Scott, an open skeptic of climate change (who is also openly, "not a scientist") denied the allegations. "Well, first off, that's not true," Scott told reporters. "At our Department of Environmental Protection, there's lots of conversation about this issue. From my... View full entry
Leading scholars from around the world will convene in Chicago, April 15–19, to present new research on the history of the built environment at the 68th Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians. But the conference isn’t just for academics. SAH aims to engage... View full entry
thresholds 44: workspaceeditors: christianna bonin | nisa ariCALL FOR SUBMISSIONSWhen an employee at Google’s Mexico City office takes a post-lunch plunge into the on-site ball pit, is she working or playing? And when an employee in one of Foxconn’s factory sites in China leaps from his... View full entry
This week Amelia, Paul, Donna and Ken discuss the somewhat controversial Google Headquarters design by BIG and Heatherwick. On a completely different note, we also discuss the new, and the nation's first, slavery museum, Whitney Plantation, in Louisiana. As always, you can send us your... View full entry
Epic Games, the company best known for Gears of War, has a very different plan for this generation of video games — one that expands far beyond what games are typically assumed to be. [...]
In this future, or present if you ask Sweeney, lessons learned from one field, say an architect designing a virtual building, can be applied to games or film, and likewise. Sweeney believes the potential application of the engine across all fields increases exponentially as information is shared.
— theverge.com
“There was an intense flowering of experimental and futuristic architecture in the 1960s and 70s, which the young African countries used to express their national identities,” says [Swiss architect Manuel] Herz, who has curated an exhibition of more than 80 buildings from sub-Saharan Africa, showing at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, until May. “But we simply don’t know about it... we wanted to show this incredible cultural wealth that also exists.” — The Guardian
Usually the projects of African "big man" leaders, the modernist buildings were often constructed for propagandistic purpose and tended to be designed by European architects. Noted architectural photographer Iwan Baan took many of the photographs in Herz's exhibit. View full entry
“Silicon Valley has been the cradle of a series of innovations that, over the last decades, have propelled technology and [the] world economy, but all of the resources, all of the intelligence, has been invested into the immaterial, the digital realm, the internet,” asserts Bjarke Ingels of... View full entry
The HY-Bol Pavilion, designed and built in the summer of 2014 by students of the Spitzer school of Architecture at City College New York, was the culmination of a series of courses devoted to the expression of complex geometric curvature. Contemporary architecture theory has witnessed an new... View full entry
The push is on to incorporate brain science into design and architecture...
Hopefully, the days of windowless classrooms to prevent vandalism and distraction are over.
— Al Jazeera
Science once agains confirms what we already know, and architects turn it into a marketing tool. View full entry
Along the highways leading from Los Angeles into the Coachella Valley desert, there are two types of sign-posts. One is the rocky, harsh faces of the imposing mountains – the closer the mountains are cut to the side of the road, the narrower the perspective and the less intimidating the... View full entry
While hard to imagine today, Paris’s most iconic monument was largely reviled when it was first built for the 1889 World’s Fair. On February 14, 1887, as construction was just beginning, a group of some of most notable Parisian artists, writers, architects and intellectuals – including... View full entry
Already a couple years old, but a great piece by Tom Sachs on the beauty and nature of plywood. h/t kottke.org View full entry
Spirit of Space, in collaboration with Trahan Architects, has created a short film featuring the award-winning design of the Louisiana State Sports Hall of Fame and Regional History Museum in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The museum was recently awarded the prestigious 2015 AIA Institute Honor Award... View full entry
"Citizenfour," in fact, enlarges and underlines ideas about architecture, privacy and culture that run more subtly through a number of Oscar nominees. Several [...] movies exploit the dramatic appeal of the constricted, labyrinthine, tightly packed, claustrophobic or paranoid space: the crowded backstage corridors of "Birdman" by Alejandro G. Iñárritu; the tunnels, hallways and dollhouse-like spaces of Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel"; the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Ava DuVernay's "Selma." — latimes.com
Related: Julia Ingalls' Material Witness series on Archinect View full entry
