Modern architecture, and the fight for its value in the world, is brought into sharp focus in this documentary examining the battle over the preservation of former Prentice Women’s Hospital in downtown Chicago, designed by master modern architect Betrand Goldberg.
The owner of the building is Chicago institution Northwestern University, which intends to demolish the unique brutalist building, composed of a nine-story concrete cloverleaf tower cantilevered over a rectangular five-story podium. The stage is set for what some preservationists believe will be... View full entry
The communities and neighborhoods along the LA River in the Northeast of Los Angeles have traditionally had poor access to parks and open space. The Riverside Bridge is an opportunity to immediately transform the bridge span into a park to enjoy recreationally and to connect the Glassell Park and Cypress Park communities to the Greater Los Angeles area. It is also an opportunity for extending the LA River Greenway Trail to Downtown Los Angeles and to Pasadena for bicyclists and pedestrians. — change.org
Six months after the Japanese government approved Hadid’s proposals, the country’s parliament has signalled a reverse in its support.
Hakubun Shimomura, the minister in charge of education, sports and science, said that the New National Stadium would cost 300 billion yen (£1.8 billion) to build and that was “too massive a budget”.
The design of the 80,000-seat stadium will be preserved but Mr Shimomura said: “We need to rethink this and scale it down.”
— standard.co.uk
the nastier the comments, the more polarized readers became about the contents of the article, a phenomenon they dubbed the “nasty effect.” But the nasty effect isn’t new, or unique to the Internet. Psychologists have long worried about the difference between face-to-face communication and more removed ways of talking—the letter, the telegraph, the phone. Without the traditional trappings of personal communication, like non-verbal cues, context, and tone, comments can become overly impersonal... — newyorker.com
Architecture is stuck between past and future -- years of anticipatory planning designs a structure that, once constructed, is stuck referring to all that came before. A building can't actually predict the future, although it seems like the best ones always run the risk of trying. Jonathan... View full entry
The KAPLINSKI project is a collaborative work by filmmaker Benjamin Seroussi and architect David Tajchman. The film shows several different structures, made from the same repetitive wooden element, gathered around bodies, aimed at being mobile, articulated or demolished. View full entry
Superpedestrian, a start-up in Boston, announced on Monday that it has received $2.1 million in financing to help build a wheel that transforms some standard bicycles into hybrid e-bikes.
The product, the Copenhagen Wheel, is a design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEable City Laboratory. The original goal of the wheel was to entice more people to more bicycles in large cities in lieu of cars by giving them help from a motor.
— New York Times
Initially presented at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change in 2009, SENSEeable City Lab's Copenhagen Wheel will soon be produced through Boston start-up Superpedestrian. Rather than buying a whole new bike or installing a cumbersome motor, the Copenhagen Wheel can be... View full entry
"My Thread - New Dutch Design on Films" is a film exhibition curated by Eizo Okada and designed by architect Hideyuki Nakayama, who also built Okada's Kyoto "O" House and was on the design team for Toyo Ito's Tama Art University Library. As part of one of Japan's biggest design events this past... View full entry
A jovial group of Red Guards bask in the golden glow of cornfields, waving their flags at the magnificent harvest, while a rustic farming couple look on, carrying an overflowing basket of perfectly plump red apples. In the centre of this vision of optimism, where once might have beamed the cheerful face of Mao, stands the twisted loop of the China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters, radiating a lilac sheen. — theguardian.com
The Beautiful Future sees icons of Beijing's skyline reimagined by a team of propaganda painters in Pyongyang View full entry
Choosing the areas to monitor within a building can be “an art,” said Paul Gottsegen, the president of the Halstead Management Company. “You want information that is important to the security of the building"... — NYT
Joanne Kaufman digs into the growth of New York residences with surveillance cameras. Whether it be the newest luxury condominium looking to attract celebrity clients, a building beginning renovations (with subsequent rise in nonresidents coming into the building) or because of changes in the... View full entry
The intent is to save energy by controlling the temperature of an individual person, rather than an entire building, a goal that anyone who's ever turned on a personal space heater in a frigid office building in July can get behind. The team just won $10,000 from MIT's Making And Designing Materials Engineering Competition, which the inventors will use to improve the prototype and the algorithms that automate the pulses. — popsci.com
The round tables at Starbucks were the result of asking the question how do we want people to feel before considering what do we want them to do...Form follows feeling. — Medium
Christine Outram (currently the Senior Inventionist at Deutsch LA.) penned an essay regarding what architects can learn from Starbucks, when it comes to human centered design. Specifically, in terms of user research, ethnography etc. View full entry
Our combined team has taken huge steps forward in “imagineering” Pandora as a real place for our guests to see, hear and touch. At the first-ever D23 Expo in Japan, we shared an early glimpse of the plans for AVATAR at Disney’s Animal Kingdom park and I wanted to share some of these breathtaking images and a short preview of what’s to come with all of you. — disneyparks.disney.go.com
The historic Targ Węglowy Square in Gdańsk, Poland was merely an empty lot before the Gdyby Group (whose name translates to "What if?") in collaboration with City Culture Institute proposed a new public space to revive it.
Back in early September, the group installed the numerous cubic box furnishings throughout the lot, where visitors of any age can play, socialize, and relax. Gdyby then gathered public feedback on the project and held an open public discussion about the Square's future.
— bustler.net
Modern architecture, despite breaking with the past stylistically, nonetheless maintains this image of the gifted architect as a lone autonomous genius who overcomes gravity and prevails over his client [...]
Rather than an inner activity done in solitude, it has been found that people often discover their thoughts and ideas through interactions with others [...]
The centrality of collaboration in architecture is often overlooked in a culture celebrating and branding “starchitects.”
— Lilith
Referring to recent statistics concerning women in architectural practice and the Denise Scott Brown Pritzker controversy, architect Esther Sperber calls for an overhaul of how we think about creativity and authorship in architecture. Her piece for Lilith, "Revising Our Ideas about... View full entry