What if a suburban downtown became a place where pedestrians ruled and cars were actively discouraged? As it turns out, what looks like normal urban gentrification actually marks the success of one of the most revolutionary suburbs in America. And its approach to development is fast becoming a model across the region—a model even embraced by [Evanston's] urban neighbor to the south, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. — politico.com
good architecture can survive budgetary rigors — at Hunters Point South, for instance, where a pair of hulking towers designed by SHoP and Ismael Levya Architects expresses de Blasio’s urgency even though it’s a holdover from the era of the allegedly Nero-like Michael Bloomberg. [...]
SHoP’s new towers are not world-beating architecture, but they’re more than good enough to plug into an evolving network of ferries, parks, schools, shops, all of which foster more investment.
— nymag.com
More on affordable housing in New York:New York's "poor doors" are no moreNYC's public-housing woesThe Chinese government is building affordable housing in BrooklynArchitecture vs. Housing: The Case of Sugar Hill View full entry
In keeping with the Chicago Architecture Biennial theme “The State of the Art of Architecture”, Richard Meier’s architectural projects, exhibited at the MANA Contemporary, underscore the consistency of a language pursued over many years of intense architectural activity. — DOMUS
The British Council announced today the winning proposal for the British Pavilion at the 15th Venice Biennial of Architecture: Home Economics, a project authored by the architecture writers Shumi Bose and Jack Self alongside the architect and planner Finn Williams.According to the curatorial... View full entry
Vicino's company built Vivos Indiana, an "impervious underground complex" built in a Cold-War-era nuclear shelter and kitted out with luxury amenities. The idea is that you sign up in advance and plunk down $35,000 per person ($25,000 for kids) to secure one of the 80 spots available within the shelter...you can survive for a year amidst leather couches, 600-thread-count sheets and gourmet chow. — Core77
"Once through security, the aesthetic makes a drastic shift," notes the narrator of the Travel Channel's video profile of the Vivos Group's underground luxury shelter. Vivo, a company which specializes in creating luxurious accommodations for that rough, between-civilizations feeling, also has a... View full entry
... transparent photovoltaic cells are fundamentally inconceivable, considering that solar panels can develop energy power through a transformation of absorbed protons into electrons [...] light would have to flow unrestrained to the eye, meaning that those protons would have to go wholly through the substance. Therefore what the Michigan State team developed [...] a device that utilize organic salts to take in wavelengths of light that are imperceptible to the human eye. — Next Nature
Join us for an uninvited Chicago Biennial installation consisting of scenarios depicting the absurdities of architectural practice/labor/work. We seek to expand the current conversation about architecture to include an actionable critique of the real, often tragic circumstances that precarious creative workers face on a daily basis. — - The Architecture Lobby
Alongside the official installations and programmed events, a host of uninvited and unofficial events have coalesced around the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the first major architecture biennial in the United States. One of the most promising comes from the Architecture Lobby, "an organization... View full entry
In the Bay Area, SFMOMA is now the largest art museum, surpassing the Oakland Museum of California at 110,000 feet. In the city, the de Young Museum is second at 84,000 square feet. Statewide, its exhibition space is 50 percent larger than the Getty Center in Los Angeles and is second only to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian of the West, which boasts 230,000 feet. — San Francisco Chronicle
While the museum won't open to the public until May 14, 2016, the SFMOMA has allowed a photographer from The San Francisco Chronicle inside and out to survey its newsworthily-expansive Snøhetta-designed spaces: View full entry
[Cards Against Urbanity] works like this: One person plays a card that poses a question or fill-in-the-blank, like “The Mayor got in trouble for crowdsourcing ________”. Each other player plays a card that they think represents the “best” answer, like “The poor door,” “NIMBYs,” or “A stress ball shaped like Richard Florida.”
The first player chooses their favorite answer, many laughs are had, and at some point, if at least one player is sober enough to keep score, one is crowned the winner.
— nextcity.org
The tower, owned by Rudin Management, currently has 260,000 square feet of floorspace that counts towards zoning, and of that, 133,000 square feet will become residential, resulting in 205 new apartments. The remaining 127,000 square feet will stay commercial. [...]
110 Wall Street will be WeWork’s first foray into residential development [...]
The inclusion of Class B dwelling units, which denote transient housing, likely signals living options will range from communal to private.
— newyorkyimby.com
According to CurbedNY, ARExA will head design on the renovation of WeWork's first residential project under its co-living offshoot, WeLive. Completion date is currently slated for March 2017. WeWork is also hiring multiple positions in New York at this very moment. Check out their listings here... View full entry
"One of the problems with house museums is you keep kind of circling back to the same people who come….Eventually they are going to die and there's going to be no one coming to your parties," [says Franklin] Vagnone [the executive director of New York City's Historic House Trust].
He wants nothing less than to revive interest in the house museum.
Museums don't need to think about "changing the color of their garment…what they need to do is completely change their outfit..."
— Curbed
this San Diego County jail, which houses everyone from petty criminals to accused murderers and was once known for its sickening decrepitude, is at the forefront of a new and, of course, controversial movement in prison design, one that manifests a counterintuitive idea: You could build a lockup so pleasant and thoughtfully devised that inmates would never come back. [...]
Welcome to Las Colinas Women’s Detention and Re-entry Facility.
— ozy.com
More on prison design from Archinect:Architecture of correction: Rikers IslandThe NYT on prison architecture and ethicsHow Prison Architecture Can Transform Inmates' LivesADPSP and the Architecture of IncarcerationPrison design faces judgment View full entry
Housing – its affordability, accessibility, and form – is a key preoccupation of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. While not necessarily the core concern for most of the Biennial's participants, housing gets a significant share of the exhibition's floorspace.Several participants'... View full entry
'None of the buildings seemed built to impose and in all of them one had the sense that what mattered about a room was the spirit and determination with which it was filled, and the uses to which ingenuity could put it. When I want to remember what a first-class education felt like, that is the architecture I remember, and it mattered solely because of what people did with it.' — The Guardian
It seems that no matter how many years have passed, those schoolyard memories — whether cheerful or hellish — will always be buried in the back of our minds. In light of the 2015 Stirling Prize recently awarded to the Burntwood School in Wandsworth, London, some of The Guardian's writers share... View full entry
In order to avoid participation in architecture and urban design becoming merely a politically required token of democratic involvement - a kind of fake participation that does not actually engage the participants in any meaningful way - architects, planners, and designers need to commit themselves and relinquish control, as Jeremy Till claims in an interview with us entitled "Distributing Power".
(Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, October 2015)
— http://www.monu-magazine.com/news.htm
In order to avoid participation in architecture and urban design becoming merely a politically required token of democratic involvement - a kind of fake participation that does not actually engage the participants in any meaningful way - architects, planners, and designers need to commit... View full entry