The State Hermitage Museum signed a protocol of intent on Wednesday, 11 March, with the St Petersburg-based LSR development group to open a satellite branch of the museum in Moscow, on the grounds of the landmark former Soviet ZIL automobile plant. [...]
Also present was the Canadian architect Hani Rashid who will design the satellite with his New York-based firm Asymptote Architecture. Russian media report that construction is due to be completed by 2018.
— theartnewspaper.com
As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002... Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one... — LA Times
According to the article, written by Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at NASA JPL, despite historic low temperatures this winter, California's "wet season" did little to alleviate the drought. In fact, this recent January was the driest in the state's recorded history, which goes back all... View full entry
For many longtime readers of The Times, Thursday was tinged with sadness. One of their favorite weekly sections, Home, was no longer in the paper. The section was discontinued after the March 5 edition, almost exactly 38 years after its debut. — publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com
Places Journal has long targeted an interdisciplinary readership — practitioners, scholars, and students in architecture, landscape, and urban design.This week the journal has launched a new tool — Reading Lists — that promises to strengthen ties between the design disciplines and related... View full entry
"From the beginning, I wanted to give a sense of the variety of scale of the studio’s projects, from the more intimate objects like the Christmas cards to large-scale mockups like those for the Paternoster Square vents. [...]
Thomas is trained as a designer and not as an architect and he has always made things as a way to test his ideas. He often mentions how unusual it is that most architects have never actually made anything themselves." – Brooke Hodge
— LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design
When news broke that Heatherwick Studio would be collaborating with BIG on Google's campus expansion, many were hearing Thomas Heatherwick's name for the first time. "Provocations", the first exhibition devoted to Heatherwick Studios to be shown in North America, will make sure that Heatherwick... View full entry
My name is Abdallah AlQassab, nearly 50% of us are unemployed and we are very available to show you around — Theguardian
In response to graffiti artist Banksy's Make this the Year YOU Discover a New Destination Gaza tourist video, the territory's parkour team show us what real life is like there and their dreams beyond the border. To the sounds of Palestine's biggest female hip-hop artist, Shadia Mansour, join... View full entry
If you conceive of Los Angeles as having three distinct historical periods – as Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times and the driving force behind The Third L.A. series, does – then the first period encapsulated the 1880s to the 1940s, the second the 1940s to the new... View full entry
Google’s choice of BIG and Heatherwick Studios to design their Mountain View campus expansion is true to form: big, brash, debatably realistic, with a dash of techno-utopianism. The critical response to the proposal – a series of webbed glass shells covering reconfigurable utility spaces... View full entry
Construction is already in progress for the new Guardian Art Center, China's oldest auction house, in Beijing. Designed by Büro Ole Scheeren in collaboration with Beijing Institute of Architectural Design and local planning authorities over four years, the Guardian Art Center is an embodiment of... View full entry
...the $1.1 billion question hangs in the air: Is the 405 any more relieved of congestion than when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Congressman Brad Sherman and County Supervisor Gloria Molina demanded in 2006 that L.A.'s "fair share" of state bond money be used to add carpool lanes to the 405? The answer is no. A traffic study by Seattle-based...Inrix has shown that auto speeds during the afternoon crawl on the northbound 405 are now the same or slightly slower... — LA Weekly
Leading scholars from around the world will convene in Chicago, April 15–19, to present new research on the history of the built environment at the 68th Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians. But the conference isn’t just for academics. SAH aims to engage... View full entry
To put that number in perspective, these folks make up the upper 0.002 percent of the world’s 7 billion inhabitants and hold over $20 trillion of its money. — 6sqft
Ever wondered where the world’s richest live? Here's a map (and a list) of the top 20 nations hosting the globe's 173,000 folks that have more than $30 million in net assets. View full entry
thresholds 44: workspaceeditors: christianna bonin | nisa ariCALL FOR SUBMISSIONSWhen an employee at Google’s Mexico City office takes a post-lunch plunge into the on-site ball pit, is she working or playing? And when an employee in one of Foxconn’s factory sites in China leaps from his... View full entry
"I know this is going to be an offensive simplification of the value of a human body," she (Carpenter-Boggs) wrote in an e-mail, "but one could compare the fertilizer value to 100 pounds of cottonseed meal." She linked to a bag of "6-2-1" cottonseed-meal fertilizer on sale at Amazon.com. "Which, from this source, would be two of the 50-pound bags = $144"
Of course, the nutrient value of human beings as soil is only a small component of the Urban Death Project's overall mission.
— Brendan Kiley, The Stranger
A somewhat long-read on a proposal for turning dead human bodies into compost, and the young architect who is proposing a structure for cities to do so. Check out more renderings and information at Urban Death Project. View full entry
Excellent news for all fans of FALSE SOLUTION, the latest architecture-inspired play by Oren Safdie (yes, son of Moshe Safdie): the piece not only just came out in publication but re-orders are only $6.99 this week.Find some more detailed information we've received from Oren below, and also listen... View full entry