Works like the infinity room...are not designed with the end purpose of creating illusion or destabilizing perception. The works...use those things as tools to enable an experience of light and space in a much more direct way than is normally possible, “without...the diminishing effect of a learned associative response to explain away” the essence of what is being seen. — New York Times
In order to celebrate its third anniversary, WAI Architecture Think Tank has released “Le Poème de WAI”, a peepshow of the visual combustible that fuels WAI’s intellectual project. A trait d'union between brainwash and brainstorm, Le Poème de WAI shows an abstract... View full entry
A Michigan native who as a boy played with Legos and wrote a fifth-grade essay titled "Why I Want to Be an Architect," Ronan wears the black-on-black palette that is a modernist uniform and goes well with his fluffy gray hair. The recognition for the Poetry Foundation headquarters is his second national Honor Award from the AIA. The first, given in 2009, was for the brightly colored Gary Comer Youth Center in the South Side's Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. — Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune
A simple, yet brilliant, new concept is providing free solar-powered light for thousands of families in poverty-stricken Philippines. View full entry
Data from the AJ’s first Women in Architecture survey show that 47 per cent of women claim that men get paid more for the same work, and almost two-thirds believe the building industry has yet to accept the authority of the female architect — architectsjournal.co.uk
The truth I’m trying to present is one about site-specific forgetting. If our history is a history of forgetting how to remember the past, as I am arguing, then the city of Detroit is the engine of our conflicted deliverance. It’s the machinery we’ve used for particular acts of forgetting, each connected to the place and time where the forgetting got done. — Places Journal
This week on Places, two features by Detroit residents contextualize the city's ruins. In "The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit," Jerry Herron reflects on the decline of Hudson's and the improbable hopefulness of the retrofitted car park in the Michigan theater. He critiques... View full entry
In response to the demolition of several famous buildings, the City Council approves rules for tearing down or altering structures older than 45 years and designed by important architects. It also establishes a Cultural Heritage Commission. — latimes.com
Pedro Gadanho, a 43-year-old Portuguese architect, may represent the future of the profession, in that he doesn’t do much actual building. Instead, he has fashioned a gadfly-like career as a curator, writer, blogger and teacher, while finding time to squeeze in an architecture project or two each year, like Baltasar House, a boldly colored residence he designed in 2007 in Porto, Portugal, and the Torres Vedras house, which he designed in 2010 outside Lisbon. — nytimes.com
The recovery of a mysterious wooden pole at the bottom of Lake Huron is fuelling excitement among U.S. and Canadian researchers that they have found more evidence of a "lost world" of North American caribou hunters from nearly 10,000 years ago. — montrealgazette.com
Salon2 has shared with us their completed 400m2 architectural installation on the façade of Yapı Kredi Bank Culture Building at Galatasaray Square in İstanbul. The first stage in the Augmented Structures project with the Augmented Structures v1.1: Acoustic Formations... View full entry
The results are in from a yearlong feasibility study commissioned by the City of Helsinki and undertaken by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to examine the possibility of building a new Guggenheim Museum in Finland.
The study concluded that yes, such a project would significantly boost Helsinki’s efforts to become a cultural capital.
— artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com
A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.
This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know.
— nytimes.com
Architecture critic, Sarah Williams Goldhagen wrote a brief piece exploring the use of embodied metaphors in contemporary architecture. Looking at recent works by Junya Ishigami, Jürgen Mayer H., Zaha Hadid and Sanaa for instance, Goldhagen notes that the use of metaphors that allude... View full entry
Overstocked with a large supply of men’s spring and winter coats, a clothier in Copenhagen, Denmark, adopted a unique sales scheme. He erected a scaffolding around his store building and completely covered it from roof to sidewalk with more than a thousand overcoats. The novel display attracted prospective customers in such droves that police were summoned. Although the police ordered the proprietor to remove the display, he succeeded in selling all the overcoats. — Popular Science, July 1936
Restoration of the monument, which attracts up to two million visitors a year, is due to go ahead in March and will involve cleaning of the travertine exterior, the restoration of underground chambers, new gating, the moving of visitor service stations to an area outside of the building itself and increased video security. — edition.cnn.com
One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country. Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.” — nytimes.com
