This year's Biennale has tried to raise fundamental issues around the role of the architect through social and economic issues. Challenges of social inequality, housing, urbanisation, are found across the world but perhaps they are nowhere more apparent than in the cities of Brazil.The Curator of... View full entry
It is not the first time, though, that a design like this has been pitched for the university. However inadvertently, the DS+R design resembles another proposal for the campus—a draft project that was eventually revised. While the resemblance between two draft renderings is hardly consequential, this one comes as a surprise, given the nature of the projects and the history between the firms. — City Lab
Raking only the choicest aesthetic muck, in this piece Kriston Capps wonders at the passing similarities between Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects' initial proposed design for the University of Chicago's David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts and Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro's... View full entry
This biennale was not perfect. None are. And frankly I wonder whether Venice can ever be a fit venue for a serious interrogation of issues more profound than the Campari or Aperol conundrum. The vernissage is, at heart, a schmoozey, boozey networking knees-up in which the architectural great and good cheek-kiss their way down Via Garibaldi occasionally glancing in a pavilion. Arevena knew this all too well when he set out to give the festival some bite. — Architecture Foundation
Architecture Foundation Deputy Director/Turncoats founder Phineas Harper gives his two cents on critics' self-righteous reactions to the Venice Biennale.Find more Archinect coverage on the 2016 Venice Biennale in News and Features. View full entry
Girls Inc. was looking for ways to get their girls interested in fast-paced, high-paying jobs where women traditionally have been left out. Architecture and engineering certainly fit the bill. [...]
the girls will travel to various construction sites and talk to professionals in the field. Girls Inc. also is looking to build a new, bigger facility, and the summer camp girls will play a large part in the initial design, even being given a chance to pitch their project
— newsherald.com
More on the gender gap in architecture:How sexist is architecture? Female architects share their experiencesWhy Zaha Hadid's gender and ethnicity mattered so muchResults from The Architectural Review's 2016 Women in Architecture Survey are... not hearteningWhere are the women? Measuring progress... View full entry
The original plan [for a new park in Brooklyn] would tear down the graveyard of rusting oil refineries that sit on the site, which stretches from Greenpoint to Williamsburg along the East River, and return the reedy riverbank to something closer to nature. The new idea, called Maker Park, would keep the refineries and turn them into a sort of industrial theme park — “a beautiful and otherworldly industrial topography,” according to the website of its advocates. — the New York Times
The plot of land in question is along the Bushwick Inlet in Brooklyn.The times keep a-changin' in Brooklyn. In related news:LPC Approves Brooklyn’s First 1,000+ Foot Tower; New Renderings and DetailsAn apartment boom grows in BrooklynExplore the history of Brooklyn in "One... View full entry
Arquitectura Viva's 2016 Spain Yearbook is a visual throwback of the last 12 months in Spanish architecture, revisiting 24 top-notch buildings that were all completed in the country over the last year. Recently released by Arquitectura Viva — who previously published monographs on Rem... View full entry
Alejandro Aravena’s brief for the Fifteenth International Architecture Exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale calls for projects that “are scrutinizing the horizon looking for new fields of action, facing issues like segregation, inequalities, peripheries, access to sanitation, natural... View full entry
A Labour MP has formally asked the government’s independent spending watchdog to investigate how the trust behind London’s proposed garden bridge has spent almost two-thirds of the government funding for the project before construction has begun.
“We’ve had millions of pounds of public money spent and we have no idea what it’s actually been spent on, and it was spent before it even got full planning permission,” Hoey said.
— theguardian.com
Although Khan originally showed reservations, it was revealed last week that he would back the project pertaining to certain conditions. Read more on the controversial project here:Why are Heatherwick's proposals succeeding in New York but tanking in London?Sadiq Khan investigates troublesome... View full entry
The lady on the ladder chosen as the image for the 2016 Biennale Architettura sees, amidst “great disappointments[,] creativity and hope,” states Paolo Baratta, president of the Venice Biennale. “[S]he sees them in the here-and-now, not in some uncertain aspirational, ideological future.”... View full entry
‘Reporting from the Front’, the theme of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, provokes and stimulates, and with the extensive intensity of the exhibition a useful approach to review and reflect is to move from the periphery, to the heart of the Biennale and back again; in this case stumbling... View full entry
The general atmosphere at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, Reporting from the Front, is one of excitement, of subversion. The Fifteenth edition of the Biennale explicitly calls for instances where architecture is an “instrument of self-government, of humanist civilization, and a... View full entry
[...] the stalagmite rings were older than any known cave painting. It also meant that they couldn’t have been the work of Homo sapiens. Their builders must have been the only early humans in the south of France at the time: Neanderthals.
The discovery suggested that Neanderthals were more sophisticated than anyone had given them credit for. They wielded fire, ventured deep underground, and shaped the subterranean rock into complex constructions.
— theatlantic.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:The Age of the Anthropocene: a change as big as "the end of the last ice age"A Man Renovating His Home Discovered A Tunnel... To A Massive Underground CityMassive tomb complex unearthed in Beijing suburb View full entry
London-based manufacturer Sto has collaborated with architecture and design practice Sam Jacob Studio to create a oversized replica of an ordinary garden shed by 3D scanning its facade and reproducing it using a product called Verolith. The oversized shed is covered in Verolith panels, a chalky... View full entry
Poland-based studio Zupagrafika has a thing for modernist and Brutalist architecture. And to share that passion, it has created playful illustrated paper cutout models of Brutalist buildings in London; modernist buildings in Warsaw; and a new series, Paris Brut, featuring Brutalist architecture from the 1950s–70s located in the city center and outlying banlieues. — Slate
Cheaper than a train set, more visceral than a video game: Zupagrafika's sets of the Les Choux de Creteil, the Cite des 4000, and the Orgues de Flandre (among others) will keep your fingers busy in assembly and your mind deeply engaged in the thorny issues surrounding the relative success and... View full entry
May 25, 2016:At La Biennale Architettura di Venezia, architecture packages itself for a global forum. It is a distinct occasion through which the world’s constructs and place-makings converge in a single microcosm. Against the backdrop of a sinking city, designers and works tapped to represent... View full entry