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Tel Aviv has the largest concentration of buildings in the Bauhaus/International Style of any city in the world. With a collection of over 4,000 buildings covering almost one and a half square miles, the White City, as it is called, was largely created in the 1930s by a group of 200 German Jewish... View full entry
The Palestinian Museum opens its inaugural exhibition this weekend focusing on the holy city of Jerusalem, a city that both Israel and Palestine claim as their capital. The wide-ranging, overtly political show focuses on the realities of living in Jerusalem as well as the idea that despite being seen as the original global city, it also serves an example of how globalization has failed worldwide. — The Arts Newspaper
The Palestinian Museum, located in Birzeit, Palestine’s West Bank, opened last May. Back then, however, the $24 million structure designed by Heneghan Peng Architects had no exhibits to show due to a sudden resignation of the museum's former director. Its first show, Jerusalem Lives (Tahya Al... View full entry
Eyal Weizman is a London-based Israeli architect and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work focuses on architecture as a form of political intervention and the discipline's role in modern urban warfare. For the past couple of years, Weizman's... View full entry
The one and only Phyllis Lambert continues to rake in architecture honors from around the globe. She received the American Academy's Brunner Memorial Prize this past April and was bestowed the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement during the 2014 Venice Biennale. Most recently, the former Canadian Centre for Architecture Director has been honored with the 2016 Wolf Prize in Israel. Past laureates include Eduardo Souto de Moura, David Chipperfield, and Peter Eisenman. — Bustler
More on Archinect:Phyllis Lambert recognized with 2016 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial PrizePhyllis Lambert named as 2014 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement recipientPhyllis Lambert steps down from Canadian Centre for Architecture View full entry
Besides the thing itself, architecture concerns itself with two kinds of sign about it: iconic signs and symbols. Iconic signs resemble the thing itself. They are the plans and elevations and isometrics. The more symbolic architecture is that of language, the word, the logo and so forth. The postmodern turn shifted the emphasis from the iconic to the symbolic.
I think [Eyal] Weizman has created an architecture about a whole other kind of sign – the index.
— Public Seminar
"Indexical signs are traces of events: where there is smoke there is fire. The smoke does not resemble the fire. It is not an icon. Nor does it have a code like a symbolic sign system. Forensics is a matter of working backwards from the index to the event of which it is the sign, like in a... View full entry
A new high-rise building called the Freedom Pyramid will change the face of Jerusalem’s downtown area. The project, conceived by architects Daniel Libeskind and Yigal Levi, will see a multi-purpose tower comprising commercial shopping and residential units atop the old Eden theater.
The idea for a high-rise at this location, adjacent to Mahaneh Yehuda market, first hit headlines in 2011. But a Jerusalem municipal committee only now approved the construction.
— israel21c.org
Correction: Studio Daniel Libeskind has informed us that the correct project title is "The Pyramid." The incorrect title "Freedom Pyramid" has been the result of an unauthorized press leak.Studio Daniel Libeskind also provided us with new renderings of the project as well as some more information... View full entry
Thousands of Bauhaus buildings are concentrated in a central district of Tel Aviv, called the "White City." It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003.
These houses were built by Jewish architects who fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to what was the British Mandate of Palestine at the time. They designed their houses according to the principles developed by Walter Gropius [...]
Germany plans to invest 2.8 million euros ($3.2 million) to help preserve the cultural heritage.
— dw.de
I had doubts about accepting this project. I didn’t want to become a pawn for politicians, but the residents gave me a mandate. The public understood that it could act collectively in order to improve its situation - Architect — Haaretz
Project's architect Senan Abdelkader is well known to NY Times a few years back via Nicolai Ouroussoff. A distinct aesthetic language from Senan Abdelkader: an apartment building in an Arab neighborhood near Bethlehem.An apartment building, designed by Senan Abdelkader, in an Arab neighborhood... View full entry
Driverless pods, gliding above city streets using a network of elevated guideways. This is SkyTran -- but is it the future? SkyTran wants to do away with train schedules and central stations to develop a grid system above the ground with multiple "off ramps" acting as stations where users can board pre-booked pods – a cab service for the skies. Call for SkyTran on your smart phone and a computer-controlled, magnetically levitating pod arrives. It will whisk you across the city... — CNN
SkyTran claims the pods, weighing just 300 lbs, would consume about a third of the electricity used by today's hybrid cars. And the infrastructure can be built for $10 million per mile, at least according to the CEO Jerry Sanders.Later this year, the company plans to complete its first pilot... View full entry
Sometimes it's easy to pretend that architecture exists outside of this world, erupting instead in the blank of a 3D space governed only by the laissez-fair laws of software. But sometimes a news headline will penetrate through this fog of imagination, appearing as a blazing light shining forth... View full entry
Thursday, November 13: Smithsonian hires BIG architecture group for $2 billion South Mall renovation plan: While approval is still pending, the large-scale renovation will include "two underground levels of visitor amenities" and could take up to twenty years to complete. Lucas museum faces... View full entry
The National Library is pleased to share the concept designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron for the new home of the Library in Jerusalem. As set out in the brief for the new building, the design, which will evolve during subsequent design stages, communicates the ‘values of openness and accessibility to the general public of all classes, nationalities and denominations’. — National Library of Israel
The 34,000 square meter building will house climate-controlled archives as well as digital facilities and both indoor and outdoor venues for cultural programming. In a statement, Herzog & de Meuron claim, “Our project reflects the open and transparent ambitions of the National Library of... View full entry
Weizman has also made a name for himself as the chief proponent of “forensic architecture”, by which he analyses the impacts of urban warfare for clues about the crimes that were perpetrated there. To Weizman, buildings are weapons. When he looks out across the landscape of the occupied Palestinian West Bank [...] he sees a battlefield. “The weapons and ammunitions are very simple elements: they are trees, they are terraces, they are houses. They are barriers.” — theguardian.com
it is clear that the scale of damage is unprecedented, with approximately 13 percent of the housing stock affected, five percent of the housing stock is uninhabitable – an estimated 18,000 housing units have been either destroyed or severely damaged.
This on top of a shortage of 71,000 housing units before the Israeli attack.
— THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
This is a real challenge for architecture. I urge Architecture for Humanity to directly involve and bring this crisis into their working platform, producing ideas of reconstruction. View full entry
The Palestinian Authority government has estimated that it could cost $6 billion to rebuild the territory: 50,000 homes have been totally or partially destroyed, roughly 250 factories have reportedly been rendered inoperable, and Gaza's sewage treatment facility and power plant have been damaged, shrinking the available supply of drinkable water and creating a potential health crisis for residents. — Foreign Policy
The recent (and ongoing) Israeli invasion of the Gaza strip has taken a massive toll on the densely-populated urban area's infrastructure. While the need to begin reconstruction is urgent and unquestionable, the mechanics are much trickier. In order to get cement into Gaza, Palestinians must... View full entry
