It was a year without theme or focus, haunted by financial and political anxieties, but culturally diffuse. Which is to say, a year like most others in this age of no discernible isms or movements, no dominant ideologies, no marching to a single manifesto. — washingtonpost.com
The Recording Academy has announced its selection of world-famous architect and multitalented artist Frank Gehry to create the official artwork for the 54th Annual GRAMMY Awards. The work integrates traditional GRAMMY iconography with Gehry's unique architectural style in a piece that mirrors The Recording Academy's commitment to celebrating excellence and diversity in art and culture year-round. — grammy.com
It will be used as the official artwork for the world's premier music event and will grace the cover of the GRAMMY Awards program book, telecast tickets and promotional poster. "We are thrilled to announce our collaboration with world-renowned architect Frank Gehry on our official artwork for the... View full entry
For if there is one abiding historical certainty it is that, eventually, things change. And they can be made to change. There is no such thing, however, as a revolutionary architecture. Nor does history ever simply start from scratch. Instead, post-revolutionary questions can be posed in advance to infrastructures that already exist.... to reinvent what used to be called housing, schools, hospitals, factories, and farms in a way that asks: What else must change for these changes to be possible? — Places Journal
Reinhold Martin argues that architects must plan for post-revolutionary conditions. A follow-up to his earlier essay for Places, "Occupy: What Architecture Can Do." View full entry
In the late ’80s, before he became famous as a member of the Compton, Calif., gangsta-rap group N.W.A., Ice Cube studied architectural drafting at a trade school in Arizona. This biographical detail makes the rapper’s appearance in a new video celebrating midcentury design icons Charles and Ray Eames only slightly less incongruous. — NYT
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We already suspected the Starbucks of the future might be serving a whole lot of juice. Now, it looks like tomorrow’s Starbucks cafes might be rectangular and metal — and look suspiciously like shipping containers. — blog.seattlepi.com
A basic Cartesian building is suddenly animated by internal program event, its evidence on the facade observe a new status of synergy, almost as if natural forces become managed by human construction skills of the 21. century. It simple yet complex appearance contributes to awareness of natural causality yet becomes a playful attribute to Istanbul’s awaking suburbia. — http://robotafr.wordpress.com/
The Eames made structure and nature one. This is going green 1949 style, bitch. Believe that. — Ice Cube
Ice Cube drives Inglewood blvd. describing the Los Angeles that he knows. He talks of landmarks like The Forum, Five Torches, Cockatoo Inn, Brolly Hut, and Watts Towers. He refers to the 110 as "Gangsta Highway". Cube says coming from South Central LA teaches you how to be resourceful. The video... View full entry
The winner of the 2012 TED Prize has just been announced, and being awarded is not a single person, but - for the first time in the history of the prize - a collaborative idea: the City 2.0.
TED Prize Director Amy Novogratz: "This year, we’re challenging everyone in the TED Community to embrace radical collaboration on one of the most pressing issues we face: how to build sustainable, vibrant, working cities."
— bustler.net
Speaking at the V&A last week, the former Foreign Office Architects partner said that she was "dubious" about volunteers who see working in these places as an "easy option". — Architectural Record
Moussavi, who teaches at Harvard and runs her own practice in London, said: "It's quite telling that Harvard students, when they want to be activists, have to go to these areas of the world. It's tougher to be an activist in America. View full entry
Veteran filmmaker Bruce Beresford has signed on to develop and direct Taliesin, a film about fabled American architect Frank Lloyd Wright from writer Nicholas Meyer. — hollywoodreporter.com
Finally! I've been wondering for years why a movie about FLW hasn't yet been developed.An actor hasn't been named yet. Who is your vote? View full entry
The source of the disconnect between San Francisco's transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called "level of service," or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. — Eric Jaffe
Changing a city from being car-centric isn't just a matter of building better bike lanes and drawing up better bus routes. Sometimes, developers have to go up against restrictions which won't let them build at all if it interrupts too much car traffic. View full entry
Nona Yehia and Jefferson Ellinger established the architectural firm, Ellinger/Yehia Design LLC in 2003 to investigate links between architecture, landscape and technology. In 2004, the firm opened an office in Jackson Hole, Wyoming to further explore these inter-relationships. Architects... View full entry
Lord Norman and Lady Elena Foster of Thames Bank in Great Britain purchased the 28-acre “gentleman’s farm” in West Tisbury for a whopping $22 million last month, The Vineyard Gazette reports. According to the broker who handled the sale, the new owners do not intend to rent the property to the first family — or anyone else. — news.bostonherald.com
Technologies, such as building information modeling and integrated-product delivery, have enabled architecture firms to design better buildings and deliver them more quickly and more efficiently. Yet in today's fiercely competitive global marketplace, efficiency and speed alone are not enough to guarantee market viability. The real differentiator is design—as an engine of innovation and a productive force for creating economic value. — Michael Speaks, archrecord.construction.com
Architect, engineer, and director of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carlo Ratti will focus on (you guessed it) the Senseable City—merging the digital and the physical realms by understanding how we sense and act on our built environment, and how the latter then responds to us. — blog.bmwguggenheimlab.org