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
The historic feud between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses is hitting the silver screen in “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City”, a fairly new feature-length documentary directed by Matt Tyrnauer and produced by Robert Hammond (co-founder and executive director of NYC's Friends of the High... View full entry
Incorporating both physical and intangible elements of Canada's musical history, the National Music Center by Allied Works is a nine-towered, terra-cotta tile clad complex that not only ropes a 112-year old hotel/blues club into the mix, but creates the kind of spaces suited for gazing dreamily... View full entry
Roughly one thousand years ago, a civilization in what is now known as the Brailizan Amazon constructed what appears to be an astronomical observation structure that, thanks to its inadvertent discovery by a tree-razing cattle ranch foreman in the 1990s, has been dubbed the area's "Stonehenge."... View full entry
At nearly 350 square miles, [Berlin is] a difficult city to tour without some guidance. Its vastness is doubly inconvenient for architecture buffs...The [Modern Berlin Map] documents 50 buildings, selected by Berlin-based journalist Matthew Tempest. Unfolded, the front of the guide displays the landmarks on a map of Berlin, while the reverse catalogues the buildings in chronological order. This provides a unique lens through which to track the city’s political shifts. — Wired
Want more travel tips for Berlin? Check out Archinect's Berlin Travel Guide, which features recommendations from Jürgen Mayer H:Let Jürgen Mayer H. help plan your next trip to Berlin with his own travel tips View full entry
Pierre Chareau was a French architect and designer best known for the groundbreaking Maison de Verre in Paris that he designed with Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoet. However, Chareau's diverse body of work has received hardly any exposure in the U.S. Thanks to a collaboration between Diller... View full entry
[Rosa Parks' home] on South Deacon Street had become blighted and faced demolition in recent years, but its fortunes have since changed. The home’s facade has been removed and will be refashioned into a replica-style artwork that will be shown in museums across Europe...“She loved the city, but I don't think the city loved her very much back,” [Parks' niece Rhea] McCauley said. “This house should have been preserved here. But we live in a world where every other project takes precedence.” — Detroit Free Press
You would think that the Detroit home of Rosa Parks would have more easily garnered local support for its preservation in the present day. But as Parks' niece Rhea McCauley described, her aunt was still treated with hostility when she moved into the city in 1957, two years after she refused to... View full entry
With its colorful facade, arched windows, spires and rotunda, the A&I (as it's often called) is a festive relief...But despite the perky building's popularity, its reopening was hardly grand. Why so little fanfare? Lack of funding seems to be one explanation
...the building's "unfinished character is one of its charms...It hasn't always been as gently used as we would like. But that's an important part of our history — Smithsonian history and American history."
— NPR
More on Archinect:The Seagram Building after the Four Seasons: maintaining a costly landmarkRIP: Bruce Goff's Bavinger House demolishedPreserving Central Asia's ancient architecture through codeThe race to complete the Capitol dome restoration in time for the inauguration of the 45th U.S. President View full entry
It may be a part of the Olympics the world forgot, but from 1912 to 1948, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) handed out medals across five creative arts categories including architecture...Following the 1948 games, the IOC abandoned the Olympic art competition due to the significantly high number of professionals entering, which went against the spirit of the games being an amateur competition. — architectureau.com
More on Archinect:Climate change will make finding a host city for the 2088 Olympics incredibly difficultNow that the Olympics have ended, what's in store for Rio's stadiums?How are London's Olympic grounds being used 4 years later?On decentralizing the Olympics View full entry
I think it was a wonderful moment in American history. I thought what Michelle Obama was attempting to do was to draw that link to show that it isn't just what's going on in the White House now and isn't it great that there's a black family there, but there's a much longer history that needs to be appreciated...
[It was] just grueling, grueling kind of work. And nobody was really willing ... to do it. So slave labor played a massive role in getting this city built.
— Clarence Lusane
During her speech at the DNC on Monday, First Lady Michelle Obama alluded to the White House's history of slave labor during the 1790s. NPR interviews Clarence Lusane, chairperson of Howard University's political science department and author of “The Black History of the White House”, who... View full entry
