A basic Cartesian building is suddenly animated by internal program event, its evidence on the facade observe a new status of synergy, almost as if natural forces become managed by human construction skills of the 21. century. It simple yet complex appearance contributes to awareness of natural causality yet becomes a playful attribute to Istanbul’s awaking suburbia. — http://robotafr.wordpress.com/
United States Artists has honored the USA Fellows for 2011 at a festive event earlier this week in Santa Monica, CA. Fellowship grants of $50,000 each were awarded to fifty outstanding performing, visual, media, and literary artists or artist teams. USA Fellowships are presented annually in the disciplines Architecture & Design, Crafts & Traditional Arts, Dance, Literature, Media, Music, Theater Arts, and Visual Arts. — bustler.net
The five fellows in the Architecture & Design category are Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano, Elena Manferdini , J. Morgan Puett, Jenny E. Sabin, and Mabel O. Wilson. View full entry
The Eames made structure and nature one. This is going green 1949 style, bitch. Believe that. — Ice Cube
Ice Cube drives Inglewood blvd. describing the Los Angeles that he knows. He talks of landmarks like The Forum, Five Torches, Cockatoo Inn, Brolly Hut, and Watts Towers. He refers to the 110 as "Gangsta Highway". Cube says coming from South Central LA teaches you how to be resourceful. The video... View full entry
If firmness, utility, and delight are the enduring pinnacles of architectural achievement, then it would appear architecture’s moral destiny is a foregone conclusion. But is it possible that opportunities for valuable cultural insight are being lost out of deference to this legacy? We examine forces, trends, and ideas that enhance the significance of the built environment despite, or due to, their deviant nature. — MAS CONTEXT
Latest issue of MAS CONTEXT now available on-line - fresh content from Lebbeus Woods, Paul Shepheard, Jürgen Mayer H, formlessfinder, Luis Urculo, and...MAS! Also includes the next part of the 3-part video series "Architecture and the Unspeakable" from our studio: the Shibuya Tower Project... View full entry
Speaking at the V&A last week, the former Foreign Office Architects partner said that she was "dubious" about volunteers who see working in these places as an "easy option". — Architectural Record
Moussavi, who teaches at Harvard and runs her own practice in London, said: "It's quite telling that Harvard students, when they want to be activists, have to go to these areas of the world. It's tougher to be an activist in America. View full entry
The source of the disconnect between San Francisco's transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called "level of service," or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. — Eric Jaffe
Changing a city from being car-centric isn't just a matter of building better bike lanes and drawing up better bus routes. Sometimes, developers have to go up against restrictions which won't let them build at all if it interrupts too much car traffic. View full entry
Nona Yehia and Jefferson Ellinger established the architectural firm, Ellinger/Yehia Design LLC in 2003 to investigate links between architecture, landscape and technology. In 2004, the firm opened an office in Jackson Hole, Wyoming to further explore these inter-relationships. Architects... View full entry
Technologies, such as building information modeling and integrated-product delivery, have enabled architecture firms to design better buildings and deliver them more quickly and more efficiently. Yet in today's fiercely competitive global marketplace, efficiency and speed alone are not enough to guarantee market viability. The real differentiator is design—as an engine of innovation and a productive force for creating economic value. — Michael Speaks, archrecord.construction.com
...the city should reverse its approach, zoning neighborhoods like Midtown, Lower Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by thinking first about the shape of public space instead of private development. — New York Times
Lautner's homes have appeared in Hollywood movies, but the architect himself wasn't particularly well-known when he died in 1994. Still, in 2011 — the centennial year of Lautner's birth — his hometown of Marquette, Mich., has honored him with two exhibitions: one at Northern Michigan University's DeVos Art Museum and one at the Marquette Regional History Center. — NPR
John Lautner's homes have been featured in many movies, but few people actually know who the architect was who came up with the designs. His space-age designs were probably a favourite of the cinematic because the designs themselves look like something which might be dreamed up by a set... View full entry
For many Americans who bought more home than they could really afford in the giddy days before the crash, the big-house dream has become a nightmare in the ashes of foreclosure and regret.
So after all that, how does 84 square feet sound?
— New York Times
In its five-year history, DesCours has become my favorite annual art outing, but it hasn't become any easier to describe. You'd be accurate if you called it a self-guided nighttime tour of lighted experimental architecture installations set in little-seen downtown locations. — nola.com
Superman has gotten a makeover — well, another makeover — two years ahead of turning 75 years old in 2013.
As the first and most widely known representative of the spandexed set, Superman remains the popular face of that uniquely American creation, the superhero.
But America has changed a lot since 1938. And as it did, that face changed, too.
— npr.org
It is not uncommon today for an architect to give a public lecture about a building and gloss over the parameters of its program or the specific needs of its users, speaking instead mostly about the building's site — its measure, tendencies, desires, structure, mythologies, meaning — as if the problem of architectural design was primarily one of site response. — Design Observer
Is there such thing as a building that is "sensitive" to landscape, or are they all various forms of aggression? View full entry
Is it a building filled with art with some people in it, or a building filled with people with some art in it? There needs to be enough social space to make people feel comfortable in what can be an austere environment, the white box. You shouldn’t feel like you need to be quiet in the public spaces. — New York Times