We reported over the summer about the unveiling of the East River Waterfront Esplanade and mentioned plans to further extend it in coming years. Only six months later, Pier 15 just south of South Street Seaport, is now open. Designed by SHoP Architects, with help from Ken Smith Landscape Architect, the new two-story section features sharp angles, a colorful red roof, native flora, and a design that expands upon the existing esplanade. — InhabitatNYC
In the last decade, much has been written about architecture for the greater good, and it would seem that the field, as a whole, is invested in bringing design to underserved communities. Yet all of this talk — at conferences, in the press, at universities — has focused hardly at all on how to put together a career in social design. — Places Journal
On Places, Virginia Tech graduate Will Holman gives an honest report of his experiences volunteering, studying and working at Arcosanti, Rural Studio, and Youth Build. Does the architecture profession need to do more to support young architects who take this path? View full entry
BOARD's Europan 11 entry for the Dutch city of Deventer suggests abandoning the idea of agriculture in cities. — http://www.b-o-a-r-d.nl/projects.htm
The Europan 11 entry of the Rotterdam based Bureau of Architecture, Research, and Design (BOARD) entitled "Cell Division", suggests giving the spatially magnificent cells in Deventer's famous silo over to apartments containing all the service and facility rooms, such as toilets, bathrooms... View full entry
Works like the infinity room...are not designed with the end purpose of creating illusion or destabilizing perception. The works...use those things as tools to enable an experience of light and space in a much more direct way than is normally possible, “without...the diminishing effect of a learned associative response to explain away” the essence of what is being seen. — New York Times
A Michigan native who as a boy played with Legos and wrote a fifth-grade essay titled "Why I Want to Be an Architect," Ronan wears the black-on-black palette that is a modernist uniform and goes well with his fluffy gray hair. The recognition for the Poetry Foundation headquarters is his second national Honor Award from the AIA. The first, given in 2009, was for the brightly colored Gary Comer Youth Center in the South Side's Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. — Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune
The American Institute of Architects Long Beach/South Bay Chapter, celebrates outstanding architecture through its Biennial Design Awards Program and last month, Peter DeMaria of DeMaria Design Assoc., picked up an AIA Excellence in Design Award. Recognized for his shipping container based... View full entry
Reviving the Maida Vale model is often talked about but rarely done, and although the athletes' village version hasn't quite captured the lushness and generosity of the originals, it is at least there. It is also welcome that there is a degree of calm to the buildings, compared to the frenzied gesticulations, the visual shouts of "buy me, buy me" that typify most works of regeneration. — Guardian
Rowan Moore visits the 2012 Olympic Village in London. The now athlete and later, mix of affordable and for profit, mass housing estate, is a massive go at post-Olympic regeneration. The village features design and planning work by the likes of Fletcher Priest, Arup and West 8 and he acknowledges... View full entry
Salon2 has shared with us their completed 400m2 architectural installation on the façade of Yapı Kredi Bank Culture Building at Galatasaray Square in İstanbul. The first stage in the Augmented Structures project with the Augmented Structures v1.1: Acoustic Formations... View full entry
Y Design Office has proposed Unit Fusion, a modular, plug-in high-rise residential typology for Hong Kong. However, as of yet, the 75-story tower project is still in its conceptual design phase. Liebchen quipped "Who wants to bet it won't leave the conceptual design phase?"
As we enter another new year (Archinect's 15th!), it is an opportunity to reflect back on the previous year and share the most trafficked pages in Archinect's diverse online ecosystem, with a list of 11 top 11 lists for '11, based exclusively on visits by unique page-views. The most popular news... View full entry
Architects Fumiaki Nagashima and Mami Nagashima Maruoka, of small Japanese practice MoNo, have shared with us their art installation Shining Tree in a Sacred Place. The piece was dedicated to the people who had perished in Japan's major earthquake and tsunami last March. Erected inside the... View full entry
Pallets are omnipresent. (We) have found pallets not only in the small architectures of informal settlements in Buenos Aires, Istanbul, and Panama City, but in the blogs of self-builders throughout North America and Europe...Urban pioneers in Detroit, Camden and other failing Rust Belt cities reclaim pallets...But none of these builders have negotiated the gap between informal and formal economies with a permanent pallet building authorized by a building permit. - Wes Janz, Cabin(s) in the Woods — The Speakeasy: A Curatorial Research Blog
Eva Zeisel, a ceramic artist whose elegant, eccentric designs for dinnerware in the 1940s and ’50s helped to revolutionize the way Americans set their tables, died on Friday in New City, N.Y. She was 105. — nytimes.com
Anthony Stephens offered up his euology for Ricardo Legorreta. "Ricardo Legorreta is the reason I began to study architecture...The spaces he designed had something long gone from most architects, soul. Unlike so many of the steel, glass and white wall designs that seem so clever and popular nowadays, his buildings could convey a feeling to those that laid eyes on the spaces he designed."
In Top 10 Design Initiatives to Watch in 2012—for the public good, John Cary, offered up a "a simple meditation on initiatives poised to advance the field, and how they can be scaled up, refined, tweaked, borrowed, and leveraged." While in the latest edition of the Contours... View full entry
People are searching for something more authentic, says Kenneth Frampton, a British architect and critic and professor of architecture at Columbia University, who helped define this movement as "critical regionalism." Mr. Frampton says these houses are a reaction to the past couple decades of "compulsive uniformity," whether it's McMansions or the proliferation of "white box" modern houses. — Nancy Keates
British journalist and author (then) and now Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic's awesome London loft, designed by Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. It actually itself looks like a small Design Museum itself, or a spaceship that's been travelling around galaxies, curating. — warymeyers.blogspot.com