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The name change, however, also reflects two facts that have long bedeviled the arch and its role within the National Park Service. Saarinen’s soaring arc of steel is an icon of the automobile age, an attraction that has always been more about playing to the passing audience of the interstates than any particular relevance to the idea of national expansion. It also honors historical events that are now understood as deeply problematic within the larger trajectory of American history. — The Washington Post
It's a big day for the city of St. Louis, which is celebrating the grand reopening of the Gateway Arch. The monumental renovation project includes a new name — the Gateway Arch National Park, a new museum, and a major redesign of the park's urban landscape. The exhibitions inside the museum... View full entry
During a time of heated debates on national borders, “Unbuilding Walls” — the German Pavilion now open at the 2018 Venice Biennale — revisits the era of the Berlin Wall, 28 years after it was dismantled. “Since February 5, 2018, the Wall that divided Germany for 28 years has been... View full entry
The State of Illinois is celebrating its 200th birthday this year, and architects from all corners of the Windy State have contributed noteworthy examples of the built environment in honor of the Bicentennial. An AIA Illinois selection committee picked the final list of 200 Great Places, all of... View full entry
In response to the 2018 Venice Biennale's “Freespace” theme, the Korean Pavilion exhibition, “Spectres of the State Avant-garde”, sheds light on a hidden narrative of Korea's paradoxical pursuit of a utopian society through oppressive government policy. Choon Choi, Paradise Lost... View full entry
Cinema heightens the ambivalent but powerful pleasure we take in looking at property. The private property of the house is already a spectacle, of course, as the house is a medium for making visible the wealth of its owners and inhabitants. In a movie theater, this spectacular function is multiplied. — Places Journal
A history of the house in American cinema might well begin with Gone with the Wind, a film that is fascinated with the loss, acquisition, and consolidation of private property; and To Kill a Mockingbird, a putatively antiracist film whose production history is actually an archive of racist urban... View full entry
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently awarded several grants in support of preservation of collections at small institutions, innovative digital projects for the public, and advanced humanities research. Among the many awarded projects was a new tool which uses digital analysis... View full entry
The museum showcases failures to provide visitors a learning experience about the important role of failure for innovation and to encourage organizations to become better at learning from failure. — Museum of Failure
This December, corporate flops will be showcased when the Museum of Failure comes to Los Angeles. Don’t let the name fool you. The Museum of Failure is a celebration of history’s failed products and services and the lessons learned from them. Exhibited at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum... View full entry
In other ways — in almost every other way — Wong’s career was a study in complexity. Political and ethnic complexity, mostly. And the complicated question of credit in architecture: Who gets it, who doesn’t and who has the authority to hand it out. [...] If not for the persistence of that narrative, Gin Wong’s contribution to postwar L.A. would be far better understood. It’s that simple. — Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times
In a recent column, Christopher Hawthorne highlights the quiet legacy of architect Gin Wong, who passed away September 1 at the age of 94. Wong worked as director of design for William Pereira in the 1960s before opening his own firm in 1973. Some of his projects include LAX's original design in... View full entry
Last month, Cavalry 360°, a vast site-specific musical instrument designed by NEON opened on the banks of the North Tyne, UK. The structure uses the force of 32 wind turbines to create an ever-changing sound of the cavalry moving across the landscape—horse’s hooves hitting the ground... View full entry
It would be the decisive moment in Wilcots’ life. By saying yes, he ended up devoting more than 20 years to helping Kahn build the new capital...The meetings would cause him to move to Philadelphia, a place that at the time seemed to him far less welcoming to African Americans than Dhaka. When Kahn suffered a fatal heart attack in 1974...Wilcots would assume the awesome task of finishing a Louis Kahn masterpiece. — Inga Saffron for the Philadelphia Inquirer
This article sheds light on the story of Henry Wilcots (now 89 years old), the much overlooked architect who was responsible for completing Louis Kahn's Dhaka National Assembly masterpiece. Dubbed as the “Kahn whisperer” by fellow colleagues, the calm-and-collected Wilcots was able to have a... View full entry
“Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture” is the first scholarly book on the architecture of Frederick Kiesler, who was once dubbed as the “the greatest non-building architect of our time” by Philip Johnson back in 1960. Authored by... View full entry
The BIG-designed Tirpitz Museum in the Danish coastal town of Blåvand recently had its grand opening and already appears to be attracting plenty of visitors to the historic site. Unlike its heftier neighbor, the German WWII Tirpitz bunker, the museum finely cuts into the dune landscape and... View full entry
The elegant new museum [...] is the antithesis of its hefty, imposing neighbour [the Tirpitz, part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall]. A series of incisions appear in the sand dunes, leading to a hidden, airy square from which the exhibition spaces radiate [...] Visitors embark on a “daylight” journey and a “darkened experience” that tell the story of how the tides brought wealth and stability to the area on the one hand, and took lives on the other. — The Guardian
Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, the new Blåvand bunker hill museum in Denmark's West Jutland region will be opening to the public on June 30. Integrated into a historic sand dune next to the Nazi-era Tirpitz bunker, the elegant museum is a “light antithesis to bunker architecture”, BIG... View full entry
Featuring a talk by Dr. Ann Rubbo on the artist and architect Marion Mahony Griffin, this screening of "A Girl is a Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright" at the Center for Architecture in New York on June 28th at 6 p.m. investigates Wright's history of working... View full entry
Uptown and underground is the home of a dense community of New York architects, their colleagues, clients, and friends, their skyscrapers and townhouses. They are the denizens of the boxes and the file folders of the Avery Drawings and Archives, one of the richest collections of American architectural drawings and records. For the last 36 years, Janet Parks, curator [...], has been mayor of this town, located in the lower level of Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. — urbanomnibus.net
"The trove of drawings, which took a good 18 months to sort through, contained the physical traces of a long-gone city — and not just how it looked. Parks remembers opening a tightly sealed tube of drawings: “This wafting smell of cologne and pipe tobacco came out. It had been trapped inside... View full entry
