Peter Marino, the leather-clad architect best known for his collaborations with fashion labels, was sued last year for racial discrimination by a former employee. Now, he's accusing the employee of making homophobic slurs, according to a report by the New York Post.Deirdre O'Brien worked for... View full entry
Now through August 25, take an immersive, tongue-in-cheeky video tour through Los Angeles at WUHO Gallery, with David Hartwell and Bill Ferehawk's "MEDIAN".Enter the narrow, deep gallery space and be at the center of MEDIAN–an "experimental moving image installation" projected onto the length... View full entry
Magid agrees with those who argue that the Barragán archive should be open to the public and returned to Mexico, but she insists that this is not her focus. “If that’s what my intentions were, I don’t think I’d make art,” she told me. “I’ve always called the archive her lover. To marry one man, she negotiated owning another man, whom she’s devoted her life to. It’s a weird love triangle, and I’m the other woman.” — The New Yorker
“‘It intrigued me as a gothic love story,’ [Magid] said, ‘with a copyright-and-intellectual-property-rights subplot.’” A fascinating story about “architectural preservation” that focuses on an artist's elaborate negotiation to open Luis Barragán's tightly controlled archive to... View full entry
[James] Leadbitter called it “a playful and exciting space for redesigning madness, a utopian attempt at what a mental health hospital could be like.”
Each structure...is an abstract interpretation of the feedback from the workshops, designed to offer varying levels “of privacy and intimacy ranging from total isolation to complete togetherness.”
“This is only a small glimpse of a project that has huge potential to influence the way we think about the design of mental health care environments,”
— Slate
More than 300 patients, architects, and psychiatrists pitched their ideas on how they would redesign the psychiatric ward for “Madlove: A Designer Asylum”, a collaborative project conceived by artist and activist James Leadbitter, who has suffered from mental illness and has stayed at several... View full entry
Sunday was supposed to be move-in day for many athletes, but the leader of the Australian Olympic delegation said its athletes would not be checking in because of problems with the gas, electricity and plumbing. [...]
delegations from Britain, New Zealand and other countries were experiencing similar problems in the village, which is in an area of western Rio called Barra da Tijuca.
— nytimes.com
The official start to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro will go ahead on August 5, despite ongoing concerns over the spread of the Zika virus, political upheaval, economic distress, polluted competition waters, and now, questionable athlete facilities.More from the New York Times:Olympic... View full entry
Moscow City Hall has announced the launch of its own version of online game “Pokemon Go.” Russians will be asked to find and "catch" historical figures in the streets of the capital via an app called “Know Moscow.Photo.”
[...] people will be able to catch and take a selfie with [...] Yury Gagarin, Alexander Pushkin, Pyotr Chaikovsky, [founder of the first Russian university] Mikhail Lomonosov, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and the tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich,” [...]
— The Moscow Times
Related stories in the Archinect news:No, Pokémon Go is not an urban fantasy for the new flaneurMoscow's metro expansion moves ahead of scheduleMoscow's iconic Shukhov Tower added to World Monuments Fund Watch List View full entry
As far as the art world was concerned, his leap into architecture — designs for things like public parks, airport rest areas and a man-made island — was almost as if Mr. Acconci decided to enter the witness protection program. But he disappeared right in the art world’s midst, continuing to teach generations of art students — NYT
On the occasion of Vito Acconci's first retrospective in the United States, in more than three decades, Randy Kennedy held a series of interviews over three months with the artist. See also; in the News: (via The Architect's Newspaper, the J. Crew catalog and a Vice/VBS.TV six part... View full entry
Whatever the outcome, we will learn from their actions. I am confident that those who committed wrongdoing will be held accountable, and that any malfeasance will come to light. I am also confident that the final story will adequately celebrate all the good that AFH did. — medium.com
Garrett Jacobs, executive director of the Open Architecture Collaborative, responded to the $3M lawsuit against AFH via a statement on medium, taking care to make clear as crystal the fact that while OAC grew out of AFH, it is "unequivocally an independent organization, a California LLC and Public... View full entry
More broadly, this reconfiguration would make the games, for the first time, a truly global event. Dozens of countries that could never afford to host the Olympics in their current form – Kenya, Thailand, Chile, to name a few – might easily host a single Olympic sport. Rather than being an occasion for nationalistic displays by a single, powerful host country, the Olympics would become a celebration of human diversity. — Paul Christesen
With overwhelming evidence that hosting the Olympics is a huge burden for several cities, Paul Christesen, a Professor of Classics at Dartmouth, makes a case for the possible advantages of having Olympic sports competitions take place in different cities throughout the globe. He also makes... View full entry
the set is a shotgun marriage of Star Trek and Macbook modern, with perhaps a touch — in the rounded stairs, lighted from below — of Art Deco. [...]
The goal seems to be a series of smooth surfaces to which none of the more direct ad hominem verbal attacks or accusations of plagiarism might stick — a slate that can be wiped clean whenever a change in tone or direction is wanted. Call it Teflon minimalism.
— latimes.com
Hawthorne's Teflon comparison is particularly evocative, given one of the latest incidents last night at the RNC, when Ted Cruz didn't endorse Trump during his primetime address. He was booed off the stage.The Republican National Convention's last day in Cleveland is today, themed "Make America... View full entry
When Melania Trump’s much-anticipated address at the Republican National Convention on Monday provoked outrage for plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the typically demure member of Trump’s campaign suddenly became the center of a lot of negative... View full entry
The link between psychosis and city living was first noticed by American psychiatrists in the early 1900s who found that asylum patients were more likely to come from built-up areas. This association was sporadically rediscovered throughout the following century until researchers verified the association from the 1990s onwards with systematic and statistically controlled studies that tested people in the community as well as in clinics. — The Atlantic
While the data shows a clear link between city living and schizophrenia, the correlation doesn't hold for other mental health afflictions like depression. This signifies that the city doesn't necessarily have a general detrimental effect on well-being. And there's no conclusive proof... View full entry
How can anyone forget Snarkitecture's giant monochromatic ball pit that took over the National Building Museum's Great Hall last summer? Following a wildly successful run that attracted a record-breaking 160,000 visitors, The BEACH is making a comeback at the Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida... View full entry
the spheres will be packed with a plant collection worthy of top-notch conservatories, allowing Amazon employees to amble through tree canopies three stories off the ground, meet with colleagues in rooms with walls made from vines and eat kale Caesar salads next to an indoor creek. [...]
“The whole idea was to get people to think more creatively, maybe come up with a new idea they wouldn’t have if they were just in their office,” said Dale Alberda, the lead architect on the project at NBBJ
— nytimes.com
While the benefits of greenery for employee productivity is well established, and any good tech company needs to play up the "serendipity machine" game, Amazon is taking this to an architectural level:The spheres will have meeting areas called treehouses, and suspension bridges high off the ground... View full entry
What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question might have been almost exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque government to recoup the construction costs within three years, moved the debate on to issues of branding and statement architecture.
Now the discussion has moved on again.
— theartnewspaper.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Archinect's critical round-up of Snøhetta's SFMOMA additionOMA's Pierre Lassonde Pavilion in Quebec will finally open tomorrowFirst look inside Tate Modern's new Extension View full entry