The Chicago City Council voted on Wednesday to approve the zoning proposal for the 300,000-square-foot Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will be located near Soldier Field. — NBC News
According to a press release issued by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art President Don Bacigalupi said that “[The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art] will also deliver nearly 200,000 square feet of new green space and accessible parkland along the lakefront for all... View full entry
Minus a TV, a temporary bus shelter at S. 6th Street and the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis has most of the cozy comforts of your living room: pillows, books, board games, a clock, a rug and string lighting. [...]
High-traffic bus stops can be flash points for safety concerns, and projects like Living Room Station represent an opportunity to bring in creative thinkers and builders to improve the experiences for riders, passersby and neighbors
— masstransitmag.com
Spiffing up materials the city puts out to promote safe driving “is definitely not what this is about,” Reynolds said. “It's going much deeper into the way we think about designing the streets. Art has the power to get people to sit up and pay attention and jolt them out of their normal ways of thinking. We can infuse unexpected elements into the design of the streets and the way of moving through the streets.” — The Los Angeles Times
For more on the (changing) art of street navigation: • What Do Pedestrian Traffic Icons Say About Your Culture?• Los Angeles has Created the Perfect Parking Sign• Seeking identity through city fonts• From California to Texas, car culture is losing its monopoly View full entry
Hippie modernism focused not on rigorous form but rather on a kind of socially inspired bricolage. Hippie modernism has been not only misunderstood but also underestimated. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of a ‘design science revolution’ inspired the hippie bricoleurs to shoulder their generation’s emerging notion of environmental stewardship. — PLACES JOURNAL
Greg Castillo pens a great article about one of the most overlooked and often dismissed role of hippies in what we have today greedily claimed by the millenials and known as "environmental movement."“Hippie Modernism” is published in coordination with the Walker Art Center... View full entry
"Steelhenge," BUREAU A's design for the inaugural BIG biennale for independent art spaces, isn't just 50 blue shipping containers arrayed to mimic Stonehenge's layout in the center of Geneva: it was also the site of a four-day party in June to celebrate the open-spirited biennale, which... View full entry
James Corner Field Operations (JCFO) has been selected to design the National Building Museum's Summer Block Party 2016 installation. The National Building Museum selected JCFO after the success of 2015's "The BEACH," an installation designed by Snarkitecture that allowed 180,000 Washington... View full entry
We believe that renderings reflect our aspirations as architects, and that our decisions about representation matter. Renderings should reflect the people in and around the site, and should project a future that values diversity and acceptance of all people. The goal of NONSCANDINAVIA is to give young architects and students access to a database of free, high-res, PNG images that reflect diversity in all its forms. — Nonscandinavia
The world of architectural renders is a strange place. Here, the air is hazy yet skies are blue. Trees grow translucent and lawns are always green. Buildings are illuminated by perhaps two or three suns. Little girls roam cultural centers alone, clutching red balloons.And just about everyone is a... View full entry
Le Corbusier, who died 50 years ago, is widely recognised as one of the founding fathers of modern architecture. Renault tells us this long, chamfered concept was “inspired by the architect’s modernist principles and theories”, and references the “golden era of the automobile of the 1930s”. Top Gear is no historical expert, but does not remember seeing anything like the Corbusier concept in photos from the Thirties. — topgear.com
Would Le Corbusier have chosen "suicide doors"? Renault whipped up the design for part of an exhibition put on by Centre des Monuments Nationaux in France, “Cars for living: the automobile and modernism in the 20th and 21st centuries,” which focuses on the history and legacy of the heyday of... View full entry
In keeping with the Chicago Architecture Biennial theme “The State of the Art of Architecture”, Richard Meier’s architectural projects, exhibited at the MANA Contemporary, underscore the consistency of a language pursued over many years of intense architectural activity. — DOMUS
... transparent photovoltaic cells are fundamentally inconceivable, considering that solar panels can develop energy power through a transformation of absorbed protons into electrons [...] light would have to flow unrestrained to the eye, meaning that those protons would have to go wholly through the substance. Therefore what the Michigan State team developed [...] a device that utilize organic salts to take in wavelengths of light that are imperceptible to the human eye. — Next Nature
Zurich-based architects and roboticists have created the In-situ Fabricator, an autonomous construction robot capable of laying bricks into pre-programmed structures. Designers at the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication laboratory believe a future generation of the robot could be used widely on building sites. — Reuters
According to Mathias Kohler of ETH Zurich, "The benefit from an architectural point of view is that you can really design the construction directly, so you can plan for how it is built instead of designing your plan and then that plan afterwards being converted on the construction site. So it... View full entry
Sustainable, fast, and cheap housing: just what you need when you're escaping oppressive regimes, natural disasters, and other refugee-creating events. Christoph Chorherr, Vienna's Green Party planning spokesperson, has blogged that the mobile Passive House dormitories designed by Günter Lang... View full entry
this San Diego County jail, which houses everyone from petty criminals to accused murderers and was once known for its sickening decrepitude, is at the forefront of a new and, of course, controversial movement in prison design, one that manifests a counterintuitive idea: You could build a lockup so pleasant and thoughtfully devised that inmates would never come back. [...]
Welcome to Las Colinas Women’s Detention and Re-entry Facility.
— ozy.com
More on prison design from Archinect:Architecture of correction: Rikers IslandThe NYT on prison architecture and ethicsHow Prison Architecture Can Transform Inmates' LivesADPSP and the Architecture of IncarcerationPrison design faces judgment View full entry
The corporate shift toward iPads has occurred rapidly over the past year, thanks in part to Apple's high profile global partnership with IBM. Major design firms that already use Graphisoft ArchiCAD have also been quick to adopt iPads to make use of BIMx Docs, a mobile companion app.
Apple has specifically profiled Daiwa House Industry, Japan's largest homebuilder, as a major enterprise iPad adopter, detailing how the company uses iPads and custom iOS apps for everything...
— appleinsider.com
More news from Apple:Apple's next, HOK-designed Silicon Valley spaceship revealedApple announces new iPad Pro aimed at creative professionalsConstruction update: More (unofficial) drone footage of Apple's spaceship campusWhy Steve Jobs Obsessed About Office Design (And, Yes, Bathroom Locations) View full entry
The $1.1 billion Essex Crossing project will be a 1.65 million-square-foot, mixed-use mega-development anchored by 1,000 residential units and a mix of cultural, community, and retail facilities. Though the city will lose the 75-year-old Essex Street Market, the new market will be transformed into one of the five biggest markets in the country. — 6sqft.com
