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Much will be published over the coming days about the Biennale's national pavilion winners—Spain’s “Unfinished” (with the Golden Lion) and Japan’s “en: Art of Nexus” and Peru’s “Our Amazon Frontline” (with special mentions). It is a phenomenon that conceals the terrain... View full entry
The people of Geneva have narrowly rejected a controversial plan to extend and renovate the city’s Musée d’Art et d’Histoire by the French architect Jean Nouvel. The “non” camp won the public vote on 28 February with 54%.
Ateliers Jean Nouvel in Paris designed the planned extension, which was approved by Geneva’s municipal council last May, in collaboration with the local firms Architectures Jucker and DVK Architectes.[...]
The council must now launch a new competition for the museum.
— theartnewspaper.com
Related Nouvel stories in the Archinect news: Jean Nouvel in NYMag profile: "I create a film in my head."Jean Nouvel's super-tall 53W53 MoMA tower is "still an art"Jean Nouvel loses court case over 'sabotaged' Philharmonie de Paris View full entry
Swiss architect Christian Kerez, born 1962 in Maracaibo (Venezuela), will be responsible for creating the exhibition at the Swiss Pavilion for the 15th edition of the Architecture Biennale in Venice.
Kerez studied at ETH Zürich and has been teaching there as Professor of Architecture and Design since 2009.
— Pro Helvetia
Pro Helvetia, the Swiss arts council that has been responsible for the country's contributions to the Venice Biennale since 2012, announced the other day that Christian Kerez will create the exhibition for next year's Biennale. Kerez is best known for a commercial tower project in Zhengzhou... View full entry
Herzog and de Meuron no doubt has a wealth of archival material attached to each of their projects - all valuable pieces of information that are often rarely seen outside the architects' main HQ...The Kabinett is a charitable foundation set up in Basel to make the celebrated architects' estate accessible to the public. Establishing this initiative in their home town...has been a 'lifelong aspiration' for the duo. — Wallpaper
Herzog and de Meuron recently issued a press statement through the Kunstmuseum Basel announcing their Kabinett project, which features categorized cabinets consisting 'all the items and materials that were produced, collected, and archived' by the firm since its founding in 1978. The estate will... View full entry
It’s been a strange week, especially in Indiana. On this episode, before getting to the RFRA-ff, we hit on a neat architectural inversion: LA-heavyweight Morphosis designs a "middle-finger" luxury tower in the quaint mountain town of Vals, Switzerland, while the subtly grand Swiss museum-master... View full entry
Release a rendering of a very tall, very shiny glass tower looming over an idyllic mountain village and the Internet goes bananas. That's what happened earlier this week when Morphosis Architects of Los Angeles released its design renderings for a new luxury hotel in Vals, a low-key spa town in the Swiss Alps. The design, conceived by Morphosis founder Thom Mayne, would check in at a whopping 1,250 feet, making it the tallest building in the European Union. — LA Times
Plans for a 381m high luxury hotel tower in a sleepy Alpine village have just been unveiled – and the designer is convinced it will fit right in. But is it any more than a castle in the air? [...]
The new hotel tower, designed by Pritzker prizewinner Thom Mayne’s practice, Morphosis, will shoot up 381m into the clouds (almost a third taller than the Shard), a looming spectre visible for miles around the tiny alpine village. It is a gigantic mirror-clad middle finger aimed at the region [...].
— theguardian.com
Archinect's Architecture School Lecture Guide for Winter-Spring 2015Archinect's Get Lectured is back in session! Get Lectured is an ongoing series where we feature a school's lecture series—and their snazzy posters—for the current term. Check back frequently to keep track of any upcoming... View full entry
Up in the slopes of the Swiss village Verbier in the Alps, BUREAU A's "Antoine" is a little wooden cabin hidden inside a concrete rock that camouflages with its environment. Inspired by Swiss cultural elements like the literature of iconic writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, hidden bunkers, and the... View full entry
Haven’t we all a huge pile of very handy but hardly used things in our house that fill our closets and make us need even more space than we already occupy? Swiss initiative Pumpipumpe wants to encourage urbanites to share all these occasionally used items with a handy set of stickers. The Pumpipume stickers, that can be stuck to front doors or mailboxes, allow urbanites to easily indicate which items they are willing to loan to neighbors. — popupcity.net
Switzerland’s two largest art museums are building extensions, although Basel is moving faster than its neighbour and sometimes rival, Zürich. In Basel, construction is proceeding apace on the Kunstmuseum’s project, across the street from the original museum. [...]
Meanwhile Zürich’s Kunsthaus has become embroiled in a dispute which has halted work this month. The Swiss environmental group Archicultura is objecting, and permission to build is being withheld by a canton court.
— theartnewspaper.com
Family-owned Swiss luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet have chosen BIG, HG Merz, Luchinger & Meyer, and Muller Illien as having the winning design for a new expansion of their headquarters in La Vallée de Joux, La Brassus, Switzerland. Adding quite the literal twist to the timeline concept, BIG's proposal -- titled Maison des Fondateurs -- dons a 25,000 ft. spiral-shaped museum that tells the centuries-long history of Audemars Piguet. — bustler.net
Dig into the details on Bustler. View full entry
The Swiss architect Gion A Caminada is something of a cult figure. Now in his 50s, he's spent much of his working life since the late 1970s practising out of a small village called Vrin in the canton of Graubünden. [...]
Caminada's idea was to boost the place with a collection of well-designed and functional private and communal buildings, among them the Aussichtsturm Reussdelta, an ornithologists' observation tower, and Waldhuette, a woodland cabin containing a school classroom.
— Phaidon
3xn was chosen by the International Olympic Committee as the architectural partner to design the new IOC Headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. The IOC selected the Danish firm after a collective decision by the IOC Architecture College during a March 25 meeting...
The design for the new headquarters will be revealed at a later date arranged by the IOC.
— bustler.net
The winning concept for the IOC Headquarters will be located on a 24,000 square meter site on the banks of Lake Geneva providing an ‘Olympic campus’ of administrative buildings for 500 employees. 3xn has worked continuously on their proposal since last July when they were shortlisted with... View full entry
In city after city, U.S. transit advocates face a similar problem: What to do with bad, or at least less-than-perfect, public transportation proposals? Big transit projects don’t come around every day, and rejecting a proposal, perhaps one with support in high places, in the hopes that something better will come along can leave you with nothing. — nextcity.org