As heavy rainfall floods Paris, the Louvre isn’t taking chances with its priceless art collection and will close on Friday to prevent water damage.
The museum will move pieces from its underground stores to higher floors to keep them safe, according to a Thursday statement. The Louvre is right next to the Seine river, which has risen 16 ft. above its normal levels due to rain over the past few weeks, AFP reports.
— TIME
Abnormally heavy rains have caused flooding in northeastern France as well as parts of Germany this week. In Paris, the Seine has risen 16 feet – the highest since 1960 but still short of the standing record of 26 feet from 1910.The rains and flooding have resulted in nine deaths in Germany... View full entry
Anthropologist Susan Phillips had spent a career examining the graffiti that covers urban walls, bridges and freeway overpasses.
But when she came across an unrecognizable collection made not of spray paint but substances like grease pencil and apparently left there for a century, she was stunned.
Phillips had uncovered a peculiar, almost extinct form of American hieroglyphics known as hobo graffiti, the treasure trove discovered under a nondescript, 103-year-old bridge spanning the LA River.
— NBC Los Angeles
More on graffiti:Detroit issues arrest for "vandal" Shepard FaireyNew Renderings of What Will Replace Grafitti Art Mecca 5Pointz EmergeGiant "calligraffiti" mural unites community in Cairo slumLeading street artists weigh in on the gentrification debate View full entry
Reporting from the Front seeks to also explore which forces—political, institutional or other—drive the architecture that goes “beyond the banal and self-harming”. The 2016 Venice Biennale calls for entries that not only exist in and of themselves, but that are a part of a larger social... View full entry
In a region at once feared and exoticized, we have been witnessing for more than a generation the devastation of old centers and the rise of new ones. Today there is no better context in which to investigate the complexities of global practice in architecture than that of the rapidly changing Arab city. — Places Journal
How does the deeply traditional meet the hypermodern in the older centers of Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo, and in the emerging new cities of Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi? In Amale Andraos’ new article on Places, and in the new book, The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, she explores the... View full entry
This year's Biennale has tried to raise fundamental issues around the role of the architect through social and economic issues. Challenges of social inequality, housing, urbanisation, are found across the world but perhaps they are nowhere more apparent than in the cities of Brazil.The Curator of... View full entry
It is not the first time, though, that a design like this has been pitched for the university. However inadvertently, the DS+R design resembles another proposal for the campus—a draft project that was eventually revised. While the resemblance between two draft renderings is hardly consequential, this one comes as a surprise, given the nature of the projects and the history between the firms. — City Lab
Raking only the choicest aesthetic muck, in this piece Kriston Capps wonders at the passing similarities between Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects' initial proposed design for the University of Chicago's David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts and Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro's... View full entry
This biennale was not perfect. None are. And frankly I wonder whether Venice can ever be a fit venue for a serious interrogation of issues more profound than the Campari or Aperol conundrum. The vernissage is, at heart, a schmoozey, boozey networking knees-up in which the architectural great and good cheek-kiss their way down Via Garibaldi occasionally glancing in a pavilion. Arevena knew this all too well when he set out to give the festival some bite. — Architecture Foundation
Architecture Foundation Deputy Director/Turncoats founder Phineas Harper gives his two cents on critics' self-righteous reactions to the Venice Biennale.Find more Archinect coverage on the 2016 Venice Biennale in News and Features. View full entry
Girls Inc. was looking for ways to get their girls interested in fast-paced, high-paying jobs where women traditionally have been left out. Architecture and engineering certainly fit the bill. [...]
the girls will travel to various construction sites and talk to professionals in the field. Girls Inc. also is looking to build a new, bigger facility, and the summer camp girls will play a large part in the initial design, even being given a chance to pitch their project
— newsherald.com
More on the gender gap in architecture:How sexist is architecture? Female architects share their experiencesWhy Zaha Hadid's gender and ethnicity mattered so muchResults from The Architectural Review's 2016 Women in Architecture Survey are... not hearteningWhere are the women? Measuring progress... View full entry
The original plan [for a new park in Brooklyn] would tear down the graveyard of rusting oil refineries that sit on the site, which stretches from Greenpoint to Williamsburg along the East River, and return the reedy riverbank to something closer to nature. The new idea, called Maker Park, would keep the refineries and turn them into a sort of industrial theme park — “a beautiful and otherworldly industrial topography,” according to the website of its advocates. — the New York Times
The plot of land in question is along the Bushwick Inlet in Brooklyn.The times keep a-changin' in Brooklyn. In related news:LPC Approves Brooklyn’s First 1,000+ Foot Tower; New Renderings and DetailsAn apartment boom grows in BrooklynExplore the history of Brooklyn in "One... View full entry
Arquitectura Viva's 2016 Spain Yearbook is a visual throwback of the last 12 months in Spanish architecture, revisiting 24 top-notch buildings that were all completed in the country over the last year. Recently released by Arquitectura Viva — who previously published monographs on Rem... View full entry
Alejandro Aravena’s brief for the Fifteenth International Architecture Exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale calls for projects that “are scrutinizing the horizon looking for new fields of action, facing issues like segregation, inequalities, peripheries, access to sanitation, natural... View full entry
A Labour MP has formally asked the government’s independent spending watchdog to investigate how the trust behind London’s proposed garden bridge has spent almost two-thirds of the government funding for the project before construction has begun.
“We’ve had millions of pounds of public money spent and we have no idea what it’s actually been spent on, and it was spent before it even got full planning permission,” Hoey said.
— theguardian.com
Although Khan originally showed reservations, it was revealed last week that he would back the project pertaining to certain conditions. Read more on the controversial project here:Why are Heatherwick's proposals succeeding in New York but tanking in London?Sadiq Khan investigates troublesome... View full entry
The lady on the ladder chosen as the image for the 2016 Biennale Architettura sees, amidst “great disappointments[,] creativity and hope,” states Paolo Baratta, president of the Venice Biennale. “[S]he sees them in the here-and-now, not in some uncertain aspirational, ideological future.”... View full entry
‘Reporting from the Front’, the theme of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, provokes and stimulates, and with the extensive intensity of the exhibition a useful approach to review and reflect is to move from the periphery, to the heart of the Biennale and back again; in this case stumbling... View full entry
The general atmosphere at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, Reporting from the Front, is one of excitement, of subversion. The Fifteenth edition of the Biennale explicitly calls for instances where architecture is an “instrument of self-government, of humanist civilization, and a... View full entry
