As Seagram’s director of planning, Lambert visited the site daily. “I had intended to go back to Paris, but I stayed in New York, convinced that if the one person who really cared about the building was not there, Mies would not build Seagram,” she says. With Lambert as his protector and Johnson as his assistant, Mies went on to create in 1958 the Seagram building, a landmark of 20th-century architecture. — wmagazine.com
Choosing your dream home has become as simple as picking furniture from the Ikea catalogue for residents of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where a neighbourhood of affordable architect-designed kit houses has just been launched.
Aimed at first-time buyers, the city's "I build affordable in Nijmegen" initiative has paired 20 architects with building companies to produce about 30 designs – from detached timber cabins to redbrick terraced houses – with a construction cost of as little as €115,000.
— guardian.co.uk
From 8A Architecten, the archtiects, "8A designed houses for first time buyers for the IbbN-program in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. ‘IbbN’ stands for ‘Ik bouw betaalbaar in Nijmegen’, translated in English as ‘I build affordable in Nijmegen’. This is a special program for first time... View full entry
It was built for stockbrokers and bankers in their thousand dollar suits to make million dollar deals, but for nearly two decades it has held the less impressive title of the world’s tallest squat. Welcome to the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, more commonly known as the Torre David (the Tower of David) in Caracas, Venezuela, an unfinished skyscraper which has now been colonised by an ad hoc community of over 700 families. — messynessychic.com
Slowly it dawned on me that this was not a photograph of a real building but a total digital fabrication. I was shocked, not in a moralistic way but, rather, with amazement at the masterful deception and amused pique at being fooled. — Places Journal
The technologies of representing architecture have advanced steadily over the years, from drawing to photography to digital rendering — and have lately taken a new leap. On Places, Belmont Freeman argues, "the crafts of architectural rendering and photography have now merged into a common... View full entry
As alumni living abroad in Berlin, we stand In solidarity with the students occupying the presidents office. We are moved by the actions of the occupying students, enraged by the actions of the Board of Trustees, President Bharucha, and former President Campbell. We are demonstrating outside of John Hejduk's Kreuzberg Tower to symbolize the legacy of Cooper Union and the global reach of free education. Long live Cooper Union, demand free education! — Free Cooper Union Facebook Page
On May 12th Cooper Union alumni in Berlin gathered in front of the Kreuzberg Tower, designed by John Hejduk to show solidarity with Free Cooper Union. This action is in correlation with a student occupation of 50+ students who have currently been occupying the president of Cooper Union, Jamshed... View full entry
AFTER impassioned protests from prominent architects, preservationists and design critics, the Museum of Modern Art said on Thursday that it would reconsider its decision to demolish its next-door neighbor, the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, to make room for an expansion. — nytimes.com
In a board meeting on Thursday morning, the directors were told that a board committee had selected the design firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro to handle the expansion and to help determine whether to keep any of the existing structure. View full entry
“Part of the research I did for that game is I went around to Alcatraz in San Francisco because I wanted to have a level where you break into a prison,” Chris Delay, one of Introversion’s co-founders said in an interview.
“I started working on how to simulate a prison and how it was going to work. It was then that it occurred to me that building a prison was quite good fun, and that it shouldn’t be, but it is.”
— business.financialpost.com
The specially appointed Holocaust Memorial Artist Selection Committee overwhelmingly favored Daniel Libeskind’s design for an 18-foot tall brushed stainless-steel memorial accompanied by a 40-foot walkway and memorial words etched in limestone. — dispatch.com
After a daylong meeting in which the panel heard extensive presentations from all three artists, Richard H. Finan, chairman of the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, which will make the final decision on the design, strongly opposed Libeskind’s proposal. He said a memorial with a Jewish... View full entry
This film was shot in October last year when the Internet Archive celebrated a landmark --10 petabytes of stored media. Tour the space, which still looks more like a church than a library and see where millions of books are digitized and stored in a facility in Richmond, CA. — theatlantic.com
A "snob zone" is a place that uses restrictive zoning in a residential area to keep certain types of housing -- and therefore people -- out, says Lisa Prevost. Prevost’s book, Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate, comes out today and focuses on several towns in the Northeast [...].
For instance, one zoning law considered by the town would require people to have a minimum lot size of four acres in the town.
— marketplace.org
I’m very happy to see all the works on display, and we’re busier now than we were then. We’re looking at things that we’re doing in the future. I think it’s good to be able to share so much of the work we have done that people wouldn’t otherwise come in contact with it. The exhibitions are good in that respect. We have all this stuff. Why keep it in the office? Send it out. — Artinfo
"OpenStreetMap is not about crowdsourcing, OpenStreetMap is about community collaboration. This is not you being a mindless crowd adding data to some big company’s map. This is about you putting in data in your own neighborhood, working with your neighbors, working with a larger community to refine and make a really cohesive map. That's the kind of experience that was so successful with Wikipedia." — Atlantic Cities
Get to know your world and not just the restaurants. Somewhat related: Constellations of Los Angeles View full entry
Architecture and journalism, like politics, sometimes make strange bedfellows. — Los Angeles Times
"Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, the great Mexican builder who died April 16 at age 94, was responsible for many of the monumental public works that defined the Modernist look and aspirations of his country in the post-World War II era. Among his projects were the stunning Museum of Anthropology in... View full entry
The Modernism worth pursuing — worth protecting — is the one where Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into a large insect, and ends up with an apple embedded in his carapace, which is exactly what the Folk Art Museum is to the Museum of Modern Art, right now, right where it is. — Places Journal
On Places, David Heymann presents an incisive critique of MoMA's decision to raze the Folk Art Museum building, by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. From a quiet beginning — "Here is why I think the American Folk Art Museum is a great Modernist building" — Heymann works his way to... View full entry
The shape of the new headquarters of the People's Daily, the Communist Party's main propaganda machine, has sparked heated discussion online for looking a bit too phallic.
Most photos posted on Sina Weibo, the mainland's most popular microblogging site, were removed by censors, and attempts to search for " People's Daily building" in Chinese were met with a message that read: "According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results cannot be displayed."
— scmp.com