New York-based HWKN has been selected for this year’s MoMA/PS 1 Young Architects Program. Their proposal, called “Wendy,” uses standard scaffolding to create a visually arresting object that straddles the three outdoor rooms of the PS 1 courtyard. Tensioned fabric coated in smog-eating paint provides shelter and programming areas including a stage, shower, and misters. — blog.archpaper.com
Some 600,000 commuters, riding Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, now suffer Penn Station every day. That makes it probably the busiest transit hub in the Western world, busier than Heathrow Airport in London, busier than Newark, La Guardia and Kennedy airports combined.
To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation.
— Michael Kimmelman, nytimes.com
The design shows Eisenhower as a youth gazing out at images of his adult accomplishments against a backdrop of the Kansas plains. But the Eisenhower family objects to the design and is attempting to delay approval of the project in a dispute that has pitted a leading American family against one of the country’s most recognized architects. The family says Mr. Gehry should portray Eisenhower as a man in the fullness of his achievements, not as a callow rustic who made good. — nytimes.com
[Beijing] started expanding the system in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, and has kept pushing forward ever since. In 2001 it had 33 miles of track. Today it has 231.
Meanwhile, when you hear the completion dates for big U.S. transit projects you often have to calculate your age to figure out if you’ll still be alive.
— salon.com
Baker is an architect who has just purchased one of [Richard] Meier’s raw space apartments with his wife and is supposed to be using his design skills to turn it into a home. But he is suffering through an artistic slump, a malaise his wife hopes to remedy by forcing him into a competition with a younger, up-and-coming architect, whose wife was once her best friend. Through constantly shifting perspectives, the private design competition provides a funny, insightful look at love and ambition... — phillyburbs.com
A Raw Space is a play by Jon Marans, currently running at the Bristol Riverside theater in Philadelphia. The play is set inside of one of Richard Meier's Perry Street luxury apartments, while the tenants, two high powered architecture couples, tangle during a design competition. View full entry
Liang Sicheng (1901-1972) is known as China’s “Father of Modern Architecture,” but he expressed strong sentiments throughout his career when it came to preserving the country’s heritage and identity. In the 1950s, when Beijing was selected as the nation's capital, he lobbied to keep its ancient buildings intact and urged the government to build an entirely new city instead. The ruling party disagreed, and ancient Beijing has become a distant memory. — artinfo.com
The Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei collaboration – the 12th pavilion – breaks the mould of the sequence so far as the criterion for the commission had been for an architect not to have built in England. But Herzog & de Meuron are also deeply engaged in the art world, having built the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. They are currently working on art museums in New York, Miami and Kolkata. — ft.com
It sparked a thousand childhood nightmares – now the original workhouse from Oliver Twist has been discovered. But a row has erupted over what to do with the building. — telegraph.co.uk
Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus, Ohio, arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park. — nytimes.com
We’ve received emails from people just starting out or thinking of going into architecture asking for advice. It gets heavy sometimes. People who have been laid off in the recession have also written to share their stories. One architect I know told me without irony that he wishes he had read it before starting out on this path. — metropolismag.com
Metropolis Magazine's Susan Szenasy interviews Archinect's own Guy Horton about his recently published book The Real Architect’s Handbook: Things I Didn’t Learn in Architecture School. View full entry
In pre-industrial days, copying used to be a positive act. It was seen as a skill. Artists were looked upon as handworkers. Copying became a negative notion with the cult of the individual artist and the arrival of mass production, which made replication extremely cheap and easy. Copyright and intellectual property laws were created to protect the original. In those days, the amount of new products reaching the market was relatively small. — rennyramakers.com
Scott Timberg wrote a piece for Salon examining how "One of the coolest creative-class careers has cratered with the economy". spaceman was surprised by some of the architects quoted and wrote "One successful architect feels ‘Very much like an immigrant worker,’ and another says, ‘We are making less than a cleaning lady.’ This seems a little over the top.”
Guy Horton, presented the first installment in a new reoccurring feature The CRIT, which will focus on architectural criticism, Thoughts on MoMA's Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. Therein Guy offered this critique of the architects featured in MoMA’s upcoming exhibition "They were... View full entry
About three-quarters of the people who spoke favored renovating the existing pier or picking a "Mediterranean-style" design for a replacement. The ultra-modern design of "The Lens" did not draw support from most of the people who spoke.
"We are paying for $50 million for a sidewalk over the water," one commenter said.
"I wanted Mediterranean style. (I) feel we are being locked into (a design) that doesn't have any local flavor."
— oldnortheast.patch.com
In a way, my influences are eclectic. Music doesn’t make me want to go and design a house, in a way it’s a more physical pleasure. It’s maybe a break for me or a tunnel to something else. I’ve never had a lot of music in the office. To me music is to be listened to and art is to be looked at. I never understood that thing of using art as decoration. It has to mean something to me otherwise I wouldn’t have it. And I can’t work with music. I find it too stimulating in a way. — John Pawson, phaidon.com
Within the parameters of the building art there cannot be artists like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth or like Sidney Lumet and Woody Allen, who in books and movies probe the excruciating details of the Jewish encounter with American capitalism and lifestyle. Architecture cannot tell stories about one’s Jewish mother or one’s Jewish nose. Especially in the era of high modernism, architecture possessed limited expressive resources for detailed cultural critique. — Places Journal
Is there a type of Jewish architecture that unifies the work of Louis Kahn, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and Daniel Libeskind? Architectural historian Mitchell Schwarzer reviews Gaven Rosenfeld's ambitious book, Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust, and... View full entry