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The march of London's skyscrapers looks set to continue unchecked after the UN watchdog charged with protecting sites of international importance delayed a move to place parliament – which is being obscured by a rash of new towers – on its endangered heritage list.
Unesco was due to put Westminster on its List of World Heritage in Danger when it met recently in Doha, Qatar.
— theguardian.com
Witold Rybczynski, the architect and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, complained recently about “starchitects” who often work in cities they are unfamiliar with, creating buildings that are out of sync with their surroundings. In an interview, he argued in favor of local architectural talent, or “locatecture.”
Are superstar architects ruining city skylines?
— NY Times
In this "Room for Debate" at the New York Times, Allison Arieff, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Beverly Willis, and Angel Borrego Cubero all provide their opinions on the much-used and controversial portmanteau. View full entry
Last month, the Board of Architectural Review voted 4-2 to give preliminary approval to the Spaulding Paolozzi Center design by Portland, Ore., architect Brad Cloepfil. The vote marked the second level of approval in the city's three-step review. [...]
This week, the Historic Charleston Foundation, the Preservation Society and the Charlestowne and Historic Ansonborough neighborhood associations took their fight to another venue: Charleston County's Court of Common Pleas.
— postandcourier.com
Previously: Clemson architecture center gets city approval; residents pan design View full entry
Homeowners who "pretend" to care about architecture are "nimbies in disguise" who in reality want to block any development in their local area, Boris Johnson has said.
In a scathing assessment, the Mayor of London said homeowners are dishonestly claiming they care about new homes being affordable or well-designed, in fact they simply oppose new developments entirely.
Mr Johnson has promised to increase house-building in the capital, and wants to see 45,000 new homes by 2018.
— telegraph.co.uk
Related: Boris Johnson's abuse of planning power is an assault on democracy View full entry
[...] tech guru and multimillionaire Tim Draper has put forth a plan which will solve the ills of the state by – wait for it – splitting it into six smaller states! This “Six Californias” plan [...], as you might expect, divides the state into six smaller chunks, maintaining county lines. [...]
But there’s another reason to oppose the plan that few people are talking about: it would do damage to the state’s transportation systems, especially mass transit.
— thisbigcity.net
City boosters in this Nordic capital dream of a Guggenheim museum of Finnish wood rising near the Baltic Sea and one day drawing millions of tourists and cruise passengers. But the huge costs of the proposed development are stirring a backlash here against an institution that is ordinarily accustomed to eager suitors. — nytimes.com
Previously: Helsinki city council reserves plot for Guggenheim View full entry
Zaha Hadid Architects has admitted it has made changes to its design for the stadium that will be the centrepiece of the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
The firm has faced hostility in Japan with critics complaining that the proposed 80,000-seat stadium is too big, too costly and clashes with Tokyo’s urban planning.
At the weekend, 500 protestors marched around the existing National Stadium to demonstrate over plans to replace it with Hadid’s proposal [...].
— bdonline.co.uk
On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin.
“Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement.
— politics.suntimes.com
Trump responds in his typical classy style... Before I bought the site, the Sun Times had the biggest, ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen. Mine is magnificent and popular. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2014 View full entry
Late last week, Chilean police arrived at Santiago’s Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral and removed a white bin of gray ash — allegedly all that remained of $500 million worth of student debt notes.
In the video, which went viral last week in Chile, Papas Fritas confessed he had recently stolen the documents from the for-profit Universidad del Mar. Then he set them ablaze in a defiant, brazen act of art.
— washingtonpost.com
[...] MoMA has said it would detach and preserve the facade’s 63 textured copper-bronze panels.
One might suppose that salvage is preferable to annihilation, but before we get too comfortable with such piecemeal preservation, it is worth noting that the panel-by-panel disassembly and storage of an architectural treasure’s metal facade has been tried before in New York City, with comically disastrous results.
Who around here remembers the Laing Stores?
— nytimes.com
Related: As demolition of Folk Art Museum begins, Archinect reflects on historical implications View full entry
The axe is set to fall on the American Folk Art Museum -- after months of controversy and protest, MoMA initiated its expansion and began preparing the FAM for demolition this past Monday. As per prior concessions by MoMA, the museum's distinctive façade will be preserved, but it's unlikely to... View full entry
[Cooper Union], which announced last April that it would charge undergraduate students tuition for the first time, released figures on Friday that showed overall applications were down this year by just over 20 percent. [...]
The new figures indicate that the admission rate nearly doubled, from 7.7 percent last year to 14.4 percent this year, which still places Cooper Union among the most selective schools in the country.
— The New York Times
The freshmen class of Fall 2014 will be the first in Cooper Union's history to pay tuition. It remains to be seen whether Cooper Union's reputation overtime will falter, as quality considerations are matched against tuition rates and student debt, and students are given fewer options to pursue... View full entry
Grigory Revzin, a respected architecture critic, has been fired as the commissioner of the Russian pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale (7 June-23 November). Writing on Facebook on Monday, Revzin speculated that the cause was his vocal criticism of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In a statement posted on its website, the culture ministry said on Tuesday that he was fired due to his “extremely active” public positions. — theartnewspaper.com
A federal commission that oversees plans for monuments in the nation's capital voted Thursday to reject the current design for a memorial honoring President Eisenhower, sending the concept back to its architects for revisions.
The National Capital Planning Commission voted 7-3 to endorse its staff's report opposing the current design. The objections focus primarily on the scale and placement of columns that would hold large stainless steel tapestries framing a memorial park honoring Eisenhower.
— bigstory.ap.org
Saadiyat Island, off the coast of Abu Dhabi, has seen $27 billion in investments pour in as the island hopes to become a new beacon of culture in the region
developers behind the island have received international attention for the poor conditions in which migrant laborers work and live. Reports have found that in some cases, the control employers hold over the island's workers, such as withholding their passports to prevent them from returning to their home countries, amounts to forced labor.
— Al Jazeera America
Saadiyat Island includes a half-billion-dollar branch of the Louvre Museum designed by Jean Nouvel, a national museum designed by Norman Foster and a variety of luxury resorts, golf clubs, marinas and private villas. Where does an architect's responsibility begin and where does it end? View full entry