From Kiev to Los Angeles, from mind-bending artist Dan Graham to stately architect Kevin Roche, the Graham Foundation has announced the 49 international winners of its 2015 Grants to Organizations. Each year, the Foundation gives out two sets of grants: one for individuals including architects... View full entry
No two people, let alone architects, perceive even the most frequented cities in the same way. How do designers experience their cities as locals? Plus, with summertime in full swing, planning a vacation is on everyone's mind. Archinect got in touch with J. MAYER H. founder Jürgen Mayer H., who... View full entry
The truth is that Los Angeles, once a pioneer in defining the freeway’s place in urban life, has fallen behind other cities. From Dallas to Paris to Seoul, the most innovative ideas about freeways and how they can be redesigned are coming from places far from Southern California. It’s time for L.A. to catch up... — Los Angeles Times
Following his recent review of the 405 Freeway expansion through the Sepulveda Pass, Christopher Hawthorne sums up why the time is ripe for Angelenos to refresh their perspectives on the city's freeways.More on Archinect:Archinect's critical round-up: the week's best architectural critiques so... View full entry
Comedy troupe Cultivated Wit takes a humorous jab at megaprojects, outlandish crowdsourcing, and how much San Franciscans loathe Burning Man in a cheeky mock campaign that would support the construction of a 300-mile wall around the Bay Area to keep Burners out, forever. And all at a reasonable... View full entry
For a serious architect who has designed public housing in Dallas and a bridge in Slovenia, it may come as a surprise that Oana Stanescu’s best-known work is a 50-foot-high volcano that Kanye West ascended onstage during his grandiose Yeezus tour...Along with Dong-Ping Wong, her partner in the West Village architectural firm Family, Ms. Stanescu is making a name for herself in design circles for her ability to merge pop culture with utilitarian design. — The New York Times
For more Family on Archinect, you can check out Oana's archived Archinect School Blog, the +POOL, and the firm's other cool projects. View full entry
Over at the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Hawthorne eloquently pans the new addition to the 405 freeway, noting that "The expanded 405 might be the first L.A. freeway project to look haggard and disjointed the day it opened." His review comes at a time when infrastructure, especially in... View full entry
Zaha Hadid is the most famous woman architect in the world. Would women or, indeed, architecture, be better off without her pushily hard-won, global celebrity? [...]
Hadid began a global strut in billowing drapery by Prada or Issey Miyake. She became the champion of an architecture that was more about personal ‘vision’ than public utility. [...]
From the air, Hadid’s 2022 World Cup stadium with its almond-shaped opening and labial folds looks bogglingly like giant pudenda.
— spectator.co.uk
Sure, roasting starchitects is fun, and – at its best – can volley constructive criticism towards those architects most visible in the public eye as "Architects", ideally improving the profession at large. And then there's a piece like The Heckler's, which discredits any otherwise pointed... View full entry
Museum displays are typically meant to be seen and not touched, but a recent wave of exhibitions is upending those rules. Take DELQA, an interactive music and light installation opening in the New Museum's NEW INC space on August 6. Showcasing the music of Matthew Dear combined with Microsoft's Kinect technology, the project allows participants to touch, push and poke suspended mesh walls to manipulate a musical composition, creating their own unique experience of the space. — core77
If you're on the hunt for weekend plans in NYC, DELQA will be at the New Museum only from August 6-9!More on Archinect:How architecture helped music evolve - David Byrne Frank Gehry: Is Music Liquid Architecture?How an "egalitarian incubator" music venue hopes to revive Brooklyn's art... View full entry
The recent real-life sale of the character Jesse's house from the TV series "Breaking Bad" is a reminder of how many single-family properties have become cinematic icons (and how it's tricky for private residents to live in such public locales). Although the new owners of Jesse's house will... View full entry
What makes a city habitable for centuries, even millennia? This list of the twelve longest-inhabited cities compiled by the Mother Nature Network, which includes several in ISIS-plagued Syria, one in China, and one in India, unsurprisingly points toward temperate climate, relatively stable water... View full entry
Many school buildings that used to house children now just primarily house debris thanks to a precipitous drop in public school enrollment over several decades. One independent website puts the figure at over 1,000 abandoned schools in states stretching from West Virginia to Indiana. Some... View full entry
Laundromats have recently been closing down in San Francisco, which prompted a Google employee to tweet in response "cost of disruption: washio and others have removed need for laundromat on every block." Who needs laundromats when there's an app for that? Well, people who can't afford to spend... View full entry
The architect behind the new Jack the Ripper museum in east London has said he was duped over the purpose of the project, after what was billed as a museum of women’s history became an attraction about Britain’s most notorious murderer of women. [...]
"We really ran with it. We did it at a bargain-basement fee, at cost price because we thought it was a great thing to do."
"You do rely on the moral fibre of your client but you should also be able to rely on the planning system"
— theguardian.com
“Musings about a Brutalist building’s friendliness quotient are a distraction” - Anthony Carfello, artist — LA Forum Architecture / Urban Design
Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design Summer 2015 Newsletter surveys and critiques LA's own collection of high-quality brutalist buildings in a 'must be collected" issue that grew out of its own google map “Brutalism Los Angeles” and other resources. The Newsletter features a... View full entry
So beginning today and running throughout the August recess, we're turning our Instagram account over to you. Just snap a photo – please do it safely! – of the worn-out infrastructure in your neck of the woods and share it with @USDOT using #ShowUsYourInfraWear. — transportation.gov
Public shaming has long been a tactic of the U.S. criminal justice system – there were the stocks of yore, the scarlet letters, and more recently, the tactics of felony court judge Ted Poe. Nowadays though, we tend to skip all the messiness of the public square and go straight to the internet to... View full entry