Six trustees, among them the prominent designer David Rockwell, have resigned from the board of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum to protest the removal of the museum’s director, Caroline Baumann, following an investigation into issues including her 2018 wedding.
Ms. Baumann was forced to resign on Feb. 7 after an investigation by the Smithsonian’s inspector general into how Ms. Baumann procured her dress and the venue for the ceremony.
— The New York Times
In a resignation letter protesting the ouster of former Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum director Caroline Baumann for suspected improprieties involving her purchase of a bargain designer wedding dress, architect David Rockwell of Rockwell Group writes, "We all serve on the board because... View full entry
The Alexis Dornier-designed Bali-based Treetop Boutique Hotel is located in a suburb of Ubud on the Indonesian island of Bali. Alexis Dornier is a local architecture studio and used this project as a means to experiment with ways to lift structures off of the ground in an effort to have a less... View full entry
In 1977, the movie house, Novorossiysk, was constructed. During the 80's cinema clubs, lectures, and film festivals used the site to meet and showcase film. Here Muscovites (Moscow residents) had the opportunity to watch the films of Takeshi Kitano, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, and other... View full entry
In an effort to expand cultural competency, Murphy Burnham & Buttrick (MBB) Architects has instituted its own private travel grant. Established in 2016, the Harold Buttrick Travel Grant offers one employee five days of paid leave and paid travel-related expenses to "[broaden] his or her... View full entry
The Office of Metropolitan Architecture's (OMA) much-anticipated exhibition, Countryside, The Future, is set to open next week at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The exhibition, according to the museum website, explores "radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild... View full entry
Perhaps the biggest risk is that the appeal of natural-sounding solutions can delude us into thinking we’re taking more meaningful action than we really are. It “invites people to view tree planting as a substitute” for the sweeping changes required to prevent greenhouse-gas emissions from reaching the atmosphere in the first place, says Jane Flegal, a member of the adjunct faculty at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society. — MIT Technology Review
James Temple, writing in the MIT Technology Review outlines the argument against viewing tree-planting as a climate crisis silver bullet. While planting trees might seem like a quick and easy way of helping to abate the climate crisis, Temple explains, increasingly, researchers are finding that... View full entry
The latest installment of The New York Times' 1619 Project takes a look at the largely erased built legacy of slavery in America. The article visits a collection of sites that had to be uncovered more or less through original research, as little documentation and few historical markers... View full entry
Just look at the American Hotel (sold in 2001 and then again in 2013). It is still "preserved," but entirely gentrified. What happens when the suitcase full of money and sleek renderings by a famous architect show up, when demolition is someone's foregone conclusion? This is Los Angeles after all.
Starting with a scene of a fictional computer game called Demolition, Anthony Carfello's investigative article for "Georgia" goes behind the scenes of much touted and celebrated developments taking a place in downtown LA's artsy parts. It is like a guide book to gentrification, demolishment and... View full entry
The new Inuit Art Centre (IAC) at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Winnipeg, Canada designed by Los Angeles-based architects Michael Maltzan Architecture is set to open its doors later this year. A statement published on the Winnipeg Art Gallery website states that the space is "constructed to house... View full entry
On this episode of Archinect Sessions, we’re sharing a conversation I had with Alysa Nahmias, the director and producer of the documentary film “The New Bauhaus.” We recorded this conversation last month, poolside, a few hours before the film premiered to a packed house in the Annenberg... View full entry
A proposal such as “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” potentially reduces an entire architectural philosophy to a caricature. Arbitrarily pasting columns and arches on a building so it looks like a Parthenon-Colosseum hybrid is pretentious — and doesn’t make the building classical. Designing classical buildings for the modern age is a complex process, requiring knowledge of construction, world architectural history and urbanism, as well as aesthetic judgment. — Washington Post
Writing in The Washington Post, Michael Lykoudis, Dean of the classical architecture-focused School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, writes that the planned "Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" executive order fills him with "great dismay." Evoking the... View full entry
Virgil Abloh, the artistic director for Louis Vuitton's menswear collection who has positioned himself as quite the polymath, has been announced as the keynote speaker for the 2020 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Conference on Architecture. On May 14th, Abloh will sit for an interview with... View full entry
The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Upstate New York has named Dennis Shelden as the new director for the school's Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE). According to a press release announcing the selection, Shelden will head "a boundary-pushing organization at a critical... View full entry
The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) has named arts curator and landscape educator John Beardsley as the inaugural curator for the forthcoming Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. The prize, which is set to be awarded for the first time in 2021 and will... View full entry
Last week, the Danish Architecture Center opened it's anticipated exhibition Kids' City, a child-centric exhibition exploring architecture and construction. The exhibition investigates 6 typologies of urban architecture including bicycle infrastructure, playful daycare buildings, nature areas, and... View full entry
