Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
With The Frick Collection’s garden saved, the museum is moving forward with a new preservationist-friendly plan for expansion...The Frick Collection, looking to realize a revised expansion for the institution, has put forward a request for qualifications to a chosen group of architectural firms.
The Frick plans to announce its selected finalist later this year, and plans to reveal designs in 2017.
— Observer
Museum director Ian Wardropper tells The New York Times that 20 firms have been invited to submit RFQs.Previously on Archinect:Frick Collection drops controversial expansion planLeading artists call to action against the Frick expansion plans View full entry
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump dominated another round of primaries last night...further securing his position as the party’s frontrunner. His polemical campaign continues to provoke criticism from both his own party and from Democrats, as concern over his inflammatory, xenophobic and sexist rhetoric transforms into panic. The debate breached into architecture after a competition was announced last week for design responses to Trump’s call for a wall along the US/Mexico border. — Bustler
Bustler, Archinect's sister site, declined the opportunity to post a competition calling for design responses to Donald Trump's calls for a border wall, which has since generated a good deal of controversy. Read about why – then join the debate on Bustler.For related content, check out these... View full entry
“In the design, I would like to say there are no similarities at all,” Kuma told reporters when asked about Hadid’s claims. [...]
“The conditions set for the competition mean that automatically some similarities emerge ... the concept is completely different, so it is absolutely a different building, despite the similarities”. [...]
Hadid’s office is reportedly consulting lawyers, and said it would “take legal action if our concerns are not promptly addressed to our satisfaction”.
— theguardian.com
For more on the contentious issue of architectural copyright and intellectual property, make sure to check out:"Never the Same River Twice" – Experimental preservation and architectural authorship with Jorge Otero-Pailos, on Archinect Sessions #47Should architecture strive for originality? Can... View full entry
Whatever you think of the initial "Tall Emblematic Structure in Dubai" prompt, there's no doubt that some fairly significant changes were made to Fernando Donis' winning design for the Dubai Frame and the actual monument as it is being constructed. As Archinect commenter Donna Sink noted, "The... View full entry
“The project is being transformed from being non-figurative architecture to an overscale figurative photo-frame. That is, from being a modern, public monument to a postmodern pastiche,” [competition-winning architect Fernando] Donis wrote in an open letter. — Design Mena
Described by an internet commenter as "the St. Louis Arch minus the beauty or finesse," the Dubai Frame project is scheduled to open this month to the public. The somewhat controversial monument, which has not only attracted a scathing load of public commentary but an objecting open letter from... View full entry
The controversial and seemingly doomed plan for a garden bridge over the Thames in London could be resurrected after the group behind the project reached an agreement with council officials over the level of public funding. On Monday...a joint announcement by Lambeth...and the Garden Bridge Trust said negotiations would resume after a deal to limit the money Transport for London (TfL) would have to pay towards construction to £10m, from an original £30m. — The Guardian
Previously on Archinect:London's Garden Bridge endangered by public funding shortfallAs Garden Bridge procurement process is headed for review, London group claims that 30 new parks could be funded insteadSatirical “Folly for London” competition mocks Garden Bridge projectZaha Hadid, Piers... View full entry
According to a statement issued on Zaha Hadid's website, the project-ending cost of the New National Stadium is not the fault of the design, but rather the "inflated costs of construction in Tokyo, a restricted and uncompetitive approach to appointing construction contractors, and a restriction on... View full entry
Clemson University plans to lease space in downtown Charleston to house all of its locally based architecture and historic preservation programs until it decides on a permanent location.
The decision comes about eight months after the university scrubbed plans for a contemporary architecture center at George and Meeting streets. The proposed building’s sleek design sparked a lawsuit by neighborhoods and preservation groups.
— postandcourier.com
Previously: Clemson scraps its modern building plan View full entry
The price tag for 2020 Tokyo Olympic stadium is now a whopping $2.1 billion. That’s more than the stadiums for the past three summer Olympic stadiums combined. That’s pretty silly! So is the stadium’s new Photoshop meme. — kotaku.com
With the current estimated cost for Zaha Hadid 's stadium design clocking in at more than $2 billion (that's $700 million more than the initial estimate), a recent poll by Japanese news network NHK found that "81 percent of respondents say they disapprove of the plan to build the stadium without... View full entry
These are strange days in San Francisco, where the clamor to build needed housing — especially at affordable levels — is matched only by the self-righteous vigor with which actual proposals for that housing tend to be opposed...But if we want a well-planned city with distinctive new buildings for all its citizens, projects like this show that good design and good policy can go hand in hand. — San Francisco Chronicle
Developer Tishman Speyer's nearly one-year-old proposal for a 400-foot-tall residential tower, which Jeanne Gang designed, at 160 Folsom St. is suddenly facing opposition from local groups. With former mayor Art Agnos at the forefront of the opposition, the groups argue that the building promotes... View full entry
In Orange, Texas, the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans just built a large Confederate memorial park, complete with a classical-ish monument featuring 13 columns—one for each of the states in the short-lived, and utterly defeated, Confederate States of America. [...]
And this being Confederate sympathizers, they did not hesitate to build the memorial where the highway meets Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
— citylab.com
Related:Building the First Slavery Museum in AmericaHow America is failing to preserve its historic slave markets View full entry
As controversy carries on over the notorious Garden Bridge by Heatherwick Studio proposed for London's South Bank, some opposers of the project are expressing their discontent with good ol' British satire in the soon-to-be-launched "Folly for London" competition. If you have a cheeky sense of humor, you'll have fun in this one. — bustler.net
Previously on ArchinectUPDATE, June 15, 2015: Will Jennings, artist and initiator of the "Folly for London" competition, sent us this statement to further explain the cause until the design ideas contest officially opens for entries.Details of the competition will be announced in due course and we... View full entry
It was a matter of hours from when the resignations of five Cooper Union trustees rolled in until their names were erased from the college’s website.
And it was a day later that the President Jamshed Bharucha announced he too would resign, more than a year before his employment contract expires.
Yet the upheaval that led to the acrimonious departures has been years in the making.
— Inside Higher Ed
Events are unfolding very quickly in Cooper Union's leadership right now: Just hours after five members of the 23-member Board of Trustees resigned yesterday, Jamshed Bharucha, the school's embattled President, publicly announced his resignation in an email to the Cooper Union community.Following... View full entry
Last night five members of the Cooper Union’s board of trustees resigned: real estate mogul Mark Epstein (the board’s former chairman), Vassar College president Catharine Bond Hill, architects Daniel Libeskind and Francois de Menil (the board’s vice chairman), and investment banker Monica Vachher. Three of the departing trustees — Epstein, Libeskind, and Vachher — have written public resignation letters [...]. — hyperallergic.com
Following are the three resignation letters by Epstein, Vachher, and Libeskind — all widely claimed as strong tuition supporters and loyal to hotly contested Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha — in full length as published on the Committee to Save Cooper Union from the Committee to Save... View full entry
Can the field’s top minds change the way we think about a doomed housing project in Naples or the most abhorred skyscraper in Paris? Allow them to try. — The New York Times
Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Annabelle Selldorf, and (everyone's favorite) Daniel Libeskind are among the architects who sum up their thoughts on some of the most controversial buildings around the world. What's your take on these projects?More:Zaha Hadid, Piers Gough, other leading cultural figures... View full entry
