After weeks of negotiations with the International Olympic Committee, Los Angeles officials have reached a deal to host the 2028 Summer Games under terms they hope will generate hundreds of millions in savings and additional revenues.
The agreement will bring the Olympics back to Southern California for a third time, after Los Angeles hosted in 1984 and 1932. It also opens the door for the 2024 Games to be held in Paris.
— latimes.com
Spiraling costs and notorious budget overruns have discouraged other cities from pushing towards being a host to the 2024/28 Summer Olympics, but Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti thinks otherwise and hopes to avoid unpredictable spending by reusing existing venues and infrastructure. As the Los... View full entry
The rare decision to name the hosts of separate Games simultaneously — established with a unanimous vote of I.O.C. members on Tuesday — is an effort by the organization to counter diminished interest shown by democratic nations in hosting the Olympics amid exorbitant costs, white-elephant stadiums, widespread corruption, rampant doping and limited appeal to the youth audience. — NY Times
Delegates of International Olympic Committee will vote on future hosting cities on Sept. 13 in Lima, Peru. "Paris is favored to hold the Games in 2024, the centenary of the last time it hosted the Olympics, while Los Angeles is expected to hold the Summer Games for a third time in 2028." Paris and... View full entry
Kengo Kuma & Associates have been commissioned to design an "eco-luxury hotel" building perched above the railways of the Paris-Rive Gauche district. Part of a larger development, the building is meant to serve as a landmark for the neighborhood. Credit: Luxigon / Mir “In the context of... View full entry
Mr. Ando plans to build a circular structure with three levels of galleries inside the round building, which is bound by strict historic preservation norms. It will have 32,000 square feet of exhibition space and an underground auditorium. The museum, which will only showcase contemporary art — including pieces from Mr. Pinault’s collection of more than 3,000 works — will be renovated and run by his family’s company... — The New York Times
Photo: © Artefactory Lab; Tadao Ando Architect & Associates; NeM / Niney & Marca Architects; Agency Pierre-Antoine Gatier / Courtesy of Collection PinaultIs this the first time a former stock exchange has been transformed into a museum? Either way, the new design should be open to the... View full entry
They are known as the ghost stations: 16 stops on the Paris Métro system barred and padlocked nearly 70 years ago.
In the past seven decades, many ideas for their reinvention have been floated, including turning one into a swimming pool and others into bars and nightclubs. None have come to anything, but their allure remains.
Now, Paris city hall has put three of the phantom stations into an international competition to develop unused subterranean space.
— The Guardian
Dubbed 'Reinvent Paris', the initiative aims to transform a total of thirty-four sites owned by regional authorities into economic, cultural or social spaces. The three unused metro stations are at the Champs de Mars in the 7th arrondissement, the Croix-Rouge in the 6th and Saint-Martin, between... View full entry
Philippe Chiambaretta's architecture practice PCA-STREAM unveiled the scheme for The Link, a new office tower in Paris' La Défense business district. At 244 meters tall, The Link will be the district's tallest tower, PCA says. In 2018, a 6,500 square-meter plot will be cleared out for its... View full entry
Paris is not only the City of Lights, but also one of the great repositories of Brutalist buildings. "Brutalist Paris Map," a new architectural guide book put together by photographer Nigel Crow and edited by Robin Wilson of the Bartlett, marks the sixth in a series of publications touring various... View full entry
Following a spate of terror attacks including a machete attack last September, Parisian officials are making moves to protect the city’s many monuments. Most recently, they’ve announced that they’ll enclose the base of the Eiffel Tower with a glass wall. Currently, the area is cordoned off... View full entry
DATA Architects, a young French firm, has designed a waste sorting space in an unexpected corner of Paris—the space beneath the city’s ring-road. The ring-road demarcates the edge of the Paris you imagine when you think of the City of Lights, and the beginning of what used to be the heart of... View full entry
Even the most punk of buildings eventually gets older. The Pompidou Centre in Paris, the landmark contemporary art museum designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, turns forty this year. To mark its birthday, the museum will get a two-year long facelift estimated to cost at least €... View full entry
The Eiffel Tower is to undergo a €300m, 15-year refurbishment, Paris’s mayor Anne Hidalgo announced on Friday. [...]
The planned refurbishment is intended to bolster the French capital’s bids to host another World’s Fair in 2025 and, before that, the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic games [...].
The project will be managed by the tower’s operator, the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, a public service company wholly owned by the City Council.
— theartnewspaper.com
The 15-year refurbishment of this most-visited monument anywhere in the world (the 127-year-old wrought iron structure has been operating at its maximum capacity of about 7 million visitors since 2003, according to Wikipedia) will take more than a few buckets of paint and also comprises the... View full entry
Situated in Carrière-Sous-Poissy in France along the River Seine, "Poissy Galore" by Armengaud Armengaud Cianchetta (AAC) and Herlach Hartmann Frommenwiler (HHF) is designed primarily as an ecological public space for both Parisian residents and far-flung visitors. Consisting of an observatory... View full entry
When I.M. Pei's Grand Louvre in Paris was first completed in 1989, it was denounced as a modernist insult to its historic location, the 800-year-old Grand Palais. But 27 years later, the 71-foot-tall glass pyramid has become as treasured as the artwork it houses. In an announcement today, the... View full entry
Frank Gehry has revealed that French president Francois Hollande has given him his word that he could self-exile to France now that Donald Trump has been elected the 45th President of the United States.
[...]
With the bleak prognostic becoming a reality, the starchitect might see himself emigrating to a new country, with a big welcome from its leader.
— artnet
Gehry said this during an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, where he also railed against critics who don't consider him an artist, as well as most buildings. In fact, Gehry claims a correlation between people's ambivalence towards uninteresting architecture and support for... View full entry
The number of migrants sleeping rough on the streets of Paris has risen by at least a third since the start of the week when the "Jungle" shanty town in Calais was evacuated.
Along the bustling boulevards and a canal in a northeastern corner of Paris, hundreds of tents have been pitched by asylum seekers - mostly Africans who say they are from Sudan - with cardboard on the ground to try and insulate them from the cold.
— Al Jazeera
While their presence is not new, it has grown substantially this week, said Colombe Brossel, Paris deputy mayor in charge of security issues.According to the article, there are up to a thousand more people living on the streets of Paris—amounting to around 2,500 in total—following the closure... View full entry
