Berlin voters on Sunday decided leisure comes first and blocked plans to develop a big part of the former Tempelhof airport, the hub of the historic 1948-49 Berlin Airlift. [...]
Official results based on more than four-fifths of ballots cast showed that over half of voters backed a referendum to preserve the airport as a leisure space. City officials had wanted to use about a third of the land for housing because of Berlin's growing population.
— therepublic.com
Our next featured pavilion for the fast-approaching 2014 Venice Biennale hails from Down Under in New Zealand, who will be participating in the keystone event for the first time. Curated by award-winning Auckland architect David Mitchell, the New Zealand exhibition is titled "Last, Loneliest, Loveliest" from Rudyard Kipling's The Song of the Cities poem. — bustler.net
As a response to Biennale Director Rem Koolhaas’s theme, "Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014" that addresses the homogeneity of modernism, the New Zealand exhibition puts the country's distinct architectural scene in the spotlight -- from its traditional yet overlooked Pacific roots to dominant... View full entry
The Philadelphia Museum of Art will soon debut Making a Classic Modern: Frank Gehry’s Master Plan for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an exhibition showcasing the first images of Frank Gehry's master plan to renovate the museum. The exhibition will also feature large-scale models, site plans, sections, and renderings. The exhibition opens July 1 through September 1 at the Dorrance Galleries. — bustler.net
After PMA selected Gehry Partners -- who is working with OLIN -- in 2006 to design the multi-phased plan for the landmark, the core phase focuses on reorganizing and expanding the building's interior, adding more than 169,000 square feet of space. The additional space will allow the Museum to... View full entry
"An eyewitness said the fire appeared to have started in the basement of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh building in Renfrew Street just before 12:30.
Smoke is billowing from the main windows, which are cracking, and through the attic studios.
Smoke is also drifting across the M8. Police have cordoned off Renfrew Street.
Four fire appliances are at the scene.
Firefighters were seen pouring water on the building from a high ladder as flames blew windows out."
— BBC UK
breaking story - hoping it's not as bad as it looks... View full entry
A major insurance company is suing Chicago-area municipal governments saying they knew of the risks posed by climate change and should have been better prepared. The class-action lawsuits raise the question of who is liable for the costs of global warming. [...]
“What the insurers are saying is: ‘We’re in the business of covering unforeseen risks... But we’re now at a point with the science where climate change is now a foreseeable risk.’”
— washingtonpost.com
The Korea pavilion has been a part of the Venice Architecture Biennale since 1993, when the optimism of the post-Berlin Wall era made reunification between North and South Korea seem plausible. But getting equal representation from both Northern and Southern architects in 2014 has proved nearly... View full entry
After being selected in a juried national competition back in March, the Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15 exhibition will represent the Canadian Pavilion in the upcoming 2014 Venice Biennale. The timely exhibition will also mark the 15th anniversary of Nunavut, Canada's youngest territory. — bustler.net
Curated by Lateral Office of Toronto, "Arctic Adaptations" will examine the complex relationship that modernism has had with Nunavut's indigenous communities throughout the last century, and the innovative ways they have responded to those changes.The exhibition will also showcase five themed... View full entry
It's all in the details with BIG + KILO's newly launched "BIG Cities" tableware collection. The longtime Danish collaborators worked with major porcelain manufacturer Rosenthal to craft the table set for the company's TAC collection. The collection was first developed in the 1960s and includes... View full entry
Well before American women could vote, these college-educated few rose to the pinnacle of their fields as garden designers, writers and photographers. Declaring American gardens to be distinct from those in Europe, they took as their mission the beautification of America, whose cities were polluted and whose residents were suffering from decades of grinding income disparity and rampant industrialism. [...]
“It really was landscape gardening as social activism.”
— washingtonpost.com
After success in Oslo and Tokyo, the Norwegian Icons: Important Norwegian Design exhibition is ready to make its U.S. debut in New York's Openhouse Gallery starting May 23.
Highlighting Norway's contribution to mid-century Scandinavian design, the selling exhibition will showcase over 500 high-end designer objects created by 44 Norwegian designers between 1940-1975.
— bustler.net
The objects will be arranged with iconic Norwegian artworks, including those by renowned artist Edvard Munch. Works will be presented so as to showcase the artists' various roles in shaping the traditions of Norwegian design and architecture during the 20th century.Find more event details on... View full entry
A fully automated mobile platform for 3D printing capable of producing objects of limitless scale does not currently exist.
In the hope of remedying this situation, Gensler’s Los Angeles office initiated Mobile 3D Printing, a Gensler research project born from an observation of present-day 3D printing technology and its limitations.
— gensleron.com
Spirit of Space are known for their emotive, precisely choreographed short films exploring buildings and urban spaces. Their most recent film reports on Studio Gang's renovation of the Shoreland Hotel, a historic Chicago high-rise on the border of Lake Michigan. SOS's film looks into the guts of... View full entry
Luxury hotel chain Starwood Hotels unveiled the upcoming opening of The Castle Hotel in Dalian, a major seaport city in China’s northeastern Liaoning province. This makes it one of the various examples of European-inspired architecture sprouting across China in recent years.
Starwood Hotels announced in a press release of the opening of The Castle Hotel later this year, when it is done with its final stages of interior renovation.
— jingdaily.com
Previously: Chinese secretly copy Austrian town View full entry
After being chosen to have the winning design in the competition, KSR Architects got to realize their proposal for the Camden Town Pavilion at the iconic Britannia junction during the town's first Camden Create Festival that recently occurred in Camden, London.
KSR Architects' colorful pop-up pavilion must've been quite the statement piece to celebrate the town's unique creative culture.
— bustler.net
Check out some photos of the pavilion:More details on Bustler. View full entry
Late last week, Chilean police arrived at Santiago’s Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral and removed a white bin of gray ash — allegedly all that remained of $500 million worth of student debt notes.
In the video, which went viral last week in Chile, Papas Fritas confessed he had recently stolen the documents from the for-profit Universidad del Mar. Then he set them ablaze in a defiant, brazen act of art.
— washingtonpost.com
