The redevelopment of the Richardson Olmsted Complex will...transform the former Buffalo State Hospital from a place of healing to one of hospitality.
The design builds upon Olmsted's original intent while conserving existing resources, preserving the fabric of the space, and creating connections and purpose.
— Buffalo Rising
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has faced censorship and imprisonment by China's government. Rita Braver reports on a U.S. exhibit of the dissident's creations. — youtube.com
Built in 1989, the five-bedroom, five-bathroom residence has been described as "a village that looks inward." There is a main house, an office, a guesthouse and a garage-and-gym structure with a breezeway. The half-acre of grounds include a reflecting pond, a swimming pool and an olive orchard. — latimes.com
Making a mess of the built environment and the politics of space, one issue at a time. — SOILED
With the arrival of a new year, SOILED has big plans. Building on our first three issues, Groundscrapers, Skinscrapers, and Platescrapers, we aspire to elevate our forthcoming issue No. 4 Windowscrapers: more dynamic, more tactilely pleasurable, and filled with more ephemera for you to soil... View full entry
In New York City, an elevated freight rail lane in west Manhattan became the High Line, a celebrated linear park running through a busy part of the borough. Design firm Workshop Architecture hopes that one of Toronto’s hydro corridors can be similarly transformed into a continuous recreation area for Toronto’s pedestrians and cyclists, and that an international contest soliciting ideas for the space will help hasten the process. — torontoist.com
In 2009, Dennis Maher... bought an abandoned property from D’Youville College for $10,000...After he sorted through the junk he found inside, he began to build, reconfiguring the pieces of things like a home entertainment center...and dollhouse furniture... He attached the structures he created to the floors, walls and ceilings, like Joseph Cornell sculptures run amok...You can sense dust bunnies everywhere swelling with importance. — New York Times
It all leads one to ponder the what-if Los Angeles, to imagine the city that would exist today if the best proposals for remedying its ailments had been realized. Los Angeles would now include a ring of thousands of acres of urban and regional parks, a bold, space-age airport, a winged nature center for Griffith Park and hillside housing developments sculpted to the contours of the landscape rather than sitting on graded and terraced scars. We would be living in a very different city. — latimes.com
Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell talk about their co-curated show, Never Built: Los Angeles, which is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. View full entry
Joshua DeMonte, who is based in Philadelphia, said he looked to 'ancient' structures to develop the unisex range, which costs between $700 and $5,000.
Talking about his designs he told Modern Luxury magazine: 'I enjoy playing with scale and connecting architecture to the body.’
— dailymail.co.uk
We seem to have lost the political capacity to grapple with the big picture, the long range, the global scale. To a degree we've even lost the vocabulary. In design circles it's as if the perceived failures of mid 20th-century planning — exemplified by top-down urban renewal and personified by the power-brokering Robert Moses — have induced a kind of conceptual paralysis, an inability to formulate the public sector, or public works, in terms not beholden to a discredited history. — Places Journal
On Places, editor Nancy Levinson argues for an intensified political agenda for designers. As Barack Obama takes the oath of office for his second term, the longstanding tension between the pressing need for public action and the tenacious culture of privatization remains the critical dilemma of... View full entry
Hoffman-Madison Waterfront, the master developer of the 3.2 million square foot Southwest Waterfront project (“The Wharf”), announced today the approval of its Phase 1 Planned Unit Development (PUD) by the District of Columbia Zoning Commission. The Zoning Commission’s action... View full entry
"I'm going to be intolerant of bad architecture," he says, describing how the former head of planning was a highways engineer who "let anything and everything through – including office blocks stacked on top of multistorey car parks.
"My idea of good architecture is about creating place. It's not about providing glitzy iconic buildings, competing one against the other, but how we use the best of what we've got."
— guardian.co.uk
The University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture, The Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture, University of Kentucky College of Design, and University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, are hosting the Possible Mediums conference in Columbus... View full entry
The staging was called the Ideal House, and it was a fully furnished modern home, but one with an audience, a runway wrapped around it, and “windows” projected on the walls with scenes of the outside world. It was the latest in many intricate and avant-garde pairings between Prada and OMA...
The 12-piece furniture collection, designed by OMA for Knoll, will debut at the Salon Internazionale del Mobile in Milan in April.
— blogs.artinfo.com
The main purpose of this community would be to isolate its residents from the propaganda that Beck believes Americans are exposed to in their current society, as well as provide them with freedom and a place to live that doesn’t discriminate based on income.
“Before you send your kids to college, you spend a week with us. We’re gonna tell them exactly, we will show them the truth, we will tell them what they’re going to try to do, and we will deprogram them every summer, if you care.”
— rt.com
When I first heard of Paju Bookcity, I imagined a bibliophilic paradise of human-scaled buildings with legible facades nestled side-by-side like volumes on a shelf. When I traveled to the real Paju Bookcity, I found an industrial estate created by companies related to all aspects of book manufacturing, sited north of Seoul in the marshes near the Demilitarized Zone. But if Bookcity is not the fairy tale I envisioned, it is a kind of Cinderella story: this is the industrial park remade. — Places Journal
On Places, Shannon Mattern explores the ongoing remaking of Bookcity — which seeks to reinvent invent Korean publishing, architecture and urban planning — in the digital era. View full entry