At least once in their professional life, every architect is likely to ask themselves, "Should I start my own practice?" From there, there are countless aspects to weigh against one another, but it begins as a very personal question – what do I want to create, and where?Longtime Archinector (and... View full entry
Thanks to Big Data, it is now next to impossible to reside anonymously in a modern city.
Why?
Because data anonymization itself is almost impossible without using advanced cryptography. Our every transaction leaves a digital marker that can be mined by anyone with the right tools or enough determination.
— Cities of the Future
“In the last 20 years, maybe 25 years, there’s a huge cultural shift in people that ultimately affects gyms,” said Bryan Dunkelberger, a founding principal of S3 Design, which has worked for clients like Equinox and the Sports Club/ LA. [...]
And the millennials, these are the special children. They expect all the amenities... Privacy, they expect.” [...]
“It’s funny, they’re more socially open with everything — Facebook, social media — yet more private in their personal space”
— nytimes.com
Along with her husband and partner-in-design Robert Venturi, it was announced on Twitter that 84-year-old Denise Scott Brown has been awarded the 2016 AIA Gold Medal. Denise Scott Brown, who spoke to Archinect earlier this year, did not win the Pritzker when it was awarded to Robert Venturi back... View full entry
Joining an eye-popping list of previous entrants and winners, the five finalists for the 2016 PS1/MoMA Young Architects Program (YAP) have been announced, and they are: • Ultramoderne (the Providence, Rhode Island-based firm whose 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial Lakefront Kiosk winning wood... View full entry
Look closely and you might find that the two operations are connected: Bureaucracy turns out the statistical slurry, and architecture reconstitutes it into built form. And since the actual process of making architecture occupies the lower half, as it were, of this digestive cycle, it is generally held to be an ancillary thing, tedious and occult. — Ian Volner | Art Forum
"Given the popularity of this perception, it’s understandable that the field of design is seized by a sneaking inferiority complex—which is why, from time to time, architects must meet up to remind the world, and one another, that what they do is Important Shit."After some linguistic judo... View full entry
The hour-long performance uses Holl and Lang’s year-and-a-half-long joint research project, Explorations In, as a point of departure. Lang’s dancers bend and glide swiftly, under vivid projections of light, around the structures Holl crafted for Tesseracts of Time.
The four sections of the performance—“under,” “in,” “on,” and “over”—evoke the architectural form of the body as the dancers “engage in deep spatial constructions in inspiring ways,” notes Holl
— thecreatorsproject.vice.com
For more thoughts from Holl on Tesseracts of Time (his dance performance collaboration with Jessica Lang Dance for the Chicago Architecture Biennial) and other recent projects, check out our Feature interview with him. View full entry
We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes...
Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer.
There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.
— Istanbul Design Biennial
Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, the curators of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, announced the conceptual framework for next year's biennial in a press release held today in a library of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums.Its overlong title, ARE WE HUMAN?: The Design of the Species: 2 seconds... View full entry
Rem Koolhaas/OMA will design The Factory, the proposed £110 million (approx. US$166.3 million) Manchester Arts Centre in England. Koolhaas won the commission ... over fellow starchitects including Zaha Hadid, Mecanoo, Grimshaw Architects, Rafael Viñoly, DS+R, and Haworth Tompkins. [...]
Named after the Manchester-based record label, The Factory is described as a cutting-edge, flexible cultural institution that ... will also be a major component in the cultural redevelopment of the city.
— bustler.net
‘El mejor anuncio de la historia’, or ‘the best ad in history’ is a picture taken in February 2008, which neatly encapsulates several aspects of the city’s urban landscape: the formal, the informal and the promotional.
'[...]Around and in between the super bloques a carpet of slums has grown, an organism that now seems to bind the blocks together in some symbiotic relationship. These are the kind of hybrid forms that are developing in Latin American cities [...]’
— failedarchitecture.com
Related in the Archinect news:Venezuelan Government Evicts Residents From World's Tallest SlumWithout Housing Reform, is a "Tower of David" Coming to Your City?Housing mobility vs. America's growing slum problem View full entry
Many in the west too often think of Beirut as a city scarred by war and terror. But the capital of Lebanon is a beautiful, modern city, one utterly remade after the country’s civil war ended in 1990. Gleaming skyscrapers tower over historic and pre-war modernist architecture, drenched in color and bathed in sunlight. It provides no end of inspiration for Serge Najjar, whose gorgeous photos of the city fill his Instagram. — Wired
Candy Chan, an architect living in New York City, has what she describes as a "love-hate relationship" with her subway system. Fascinated in particular by the mechanisms of the MTA's stations – their navigation and placemaking methods, their circulation patterns – Chan was surprised to learn... View full entry
The systematic destruction of Saudi Arabia is under way—in silence. Historic mosques, tombs, mausoleums, monuments and houses: more than 90% of the old quarters of the holiest cities of Islam has been razed to make room for a new urban landscape of hotels, shopping centres and apartment blocks. [...]
Construction works have already transformed Mecca and Medina into cities without a past, dominated by skyscrapers.
— theartnewspaper.com
Built in 1780 and leveled in 2002 for the construction of the Makkah Royal Clock Tower hotel complex, the Ottoman Ajyad Fortress is just one of many historic sites that are being destroyed and replaced by hotel towers, condo skyscrapers and parking lots. Related news on Archinect:More than... View full entry
From farmland to stately brownstones to battleground for million-dollar bidding wars, Brooklyn’s transformation has fundamentally altered the city’s geography—and the way New York now thinks of itself. It has also altered the lives of the residents who call the borough home. To understand those changes, we dispatched a team of reporters to find a place where Brooklyn’s past and future are next-door neighbors. — nymag.com
New York Magazine has a fascinating and highly addictive piece looking at how Brooklyn came to be Brooklyn, combining personal stories, shoe-leather reporting, and data studies to craft a compelling, interactive story of "One Block" in the borough's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.For more news... View full entry
Brazilian police investigating corruption around the state-run oil firm Petrobras also plan to investigate more than $10bn of construction contracts for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, according to a lead investigator on the case.
Some of the big engineering companies caught up in the Petrobras inquiry “very probably” broke laws against price-fixing and bribery on contracts to build Olympic venues, said Igor Romario, a federal police chief and key figure in the investigation.
— The Guardian
Related coverage:Another Olympics, another story of displacementWill Rio's Olympic venues be ready in time for the 2016 Games?Olympic Infrastructure Displaces Brazilian FamiliesRacing to Get Ready: Rio 2016 OlympicsOlympics Set To Transform Rio — But For Better Or Worse? View full entry