Hans and Wassili Luckhardt's Concert Hall 1948 © The Unbuilt Berlin

An exhibit on display at Café Moskau in Berlin, a historic building from the early 1960s, is currently showing hundreds of unbuilt past visions for the city.  Collected by architect Carsten Krohn, the unbuilt Berlin projects showcase architects’ relentless fascination with the city that has such a rich history.  The projects, which were designed between 1907 and 1997, exemplify different theories and design approaches of the era.  The proposals, although all different, share the common desire to re-conceptualize and challenge the accepted architectural ways of the time.  The projects were a way for the architects to create a new identity for the city with dramatically cutting edge ideas – such as Mies van der Rohe’s plans for a skyscraper on Friedrich Strasse in 1921.

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Photo by Benjamin Pritzkuleit © Carsten Nicolai, Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin

In the center of Berlin, an amazing institution known as the Temporäre Kunsthalle is a great venue for contemporary art as exhibits are housed not only within Adolf  Krischanitz’s free plan interior, but also on the exterior.   As each new artist brings his own personality to the building’s exterior, the 11 meter high building, which covers a ground surface of 20 by 56.25 meters, becomes the artist’s blank canvas, patiently waiting for its new treatment.  The most recent exterior exhibition, autoR by Carsten Nicolai, is the third project to be realized on the façade.

More images and more about the exhibit after the break. read more »

© Flickr uploader kimberlyfaye

Growing up, LEGO were a staple of most children’s playtime activities to create anything from a house to an entire city for hours at a time.  The blocks were so captivating that it seems that even as we outgrow our childhood years, we can never outgrow the toys.  Previously, we’ve featured projects that have shown James May’s LEGO addiction…his actual house is built from LEGOs!  Yet, May isn’t the only one to still show an interest in the children toys – architect Adam Reed Tucker has created 15 large scale buildings from around the world just using the blocks.   The buildings are the focal point of the exhibition LEGO® Architecture: Towering Ambition at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.

More about Tucker after the break. read more »

© NBBJ

The first phase of the Qingdao Water City development at Aoshan Bay, designed by the Los Angeles office of NBBJ, will include a new exposition center of 1,940,000 sf. As the ocean sits to one side of the site, and a wetland on the other, a strong emphasis has been placed on how the exposition is shaped by its interaction and proximity to the water.

More images and more about the exhibition hall after the break. read more »

© Ignacio Hernando

‘Towards Another Architecture: 24 Sustainable Projects’ is an ambitious exhibition showcasing projects by some of Europe’s leading sustainability architects. Now in its final fortnight, this is the last opportunity to see the exhibition being held at the Fundación Canal in Madrid, Spain.

The exhibition offers a detailed analysis of 24 architectural projects – two from each of the 12 participants – to inform and explain what sustainable architecture is, the problems that need to be overcome and the solutions that can be provided.

The exhibition includes projects by Architype, Foster + Partners, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Ken Yeang, Kirkland Fraser Moor, Emilio Ambasz, Rafael de la Hoz, Mario Cucinella, Antonio Lamela, Iñigo Ortiz and Enrique Leon, and MVRDV. The exhibition will be on display until July 25 and the entry is free.

The work of Los Angeles-based artist Megan Geckler lies somewhere between art and design, with architectural installations that are assembled from thousands of strands of multicolored flagging tape, a plastic ribbon typically utilized by surveyors to demarcate space on construction sites.

The end result resembles an updated three-dimensional version of string art that shares the seemingly kinetic territory of the Op Art and Light+Space movements. These site-specific projects are also strongly influenced by minimalism, but retain a sense of play and delight.

The exhibition will be on display at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union Street, Pasadena CA , from July 17 till October 31. More information can be found here.

WORKshop will present its second exhibition from July 9th through October 2nd. Designed by the Toronto architecture firm Khoury Levit Fong, Scentscapes: Immersive Environments Inspired by Xi’an, will feature drawings of a public garden currently under construction in one of China’s ancient capitals, Xi’an, along with a site-specific installation titled Scent Squadron.

The team of Khoury Levit Fong, with students Drew Adams, James Dixon, Lindsay Hochman, Fadi Masoud, Khalid al-Nasser, and Farhana Sharmin will install a ‘vaulted pine forest,’ an array of suspended scent-dispensing vials. The title ’Scent Squadron’ obliquely invokes the famous 210-209 BC Terracotta Army near Xi’an, one of the world’s great works of funerary art. WORKshop’s Scentscapes is being presented simultaneously with the Royal Ontario Museum’s nearby exhibition, The Warrior Emperor and China’s Terracotta Army, which runs from June 26, 2010 to January 02, 2011.

Thousands of buildings in the Netherlands lie vacant. Some of them for a week or a few months, many even for years. During the twelfth Venice Architecture Biennale, the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) and Rietveld Landscape will highlight the huge potential of all that temporarily unoccupied space in making the Netherlands one of the top-five knowledge economies in the world. The exhibition Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas is a call for the intelligent reuse of temporarily vacant buildings around the world in promoting creative enterprise. The Venice Architecture Biennale takes place from 29 August 29 to 21 November 2010.

Built in 1954, the Dutch Pavilion on the biennale grounds in Venice has been empty for over 39 years. After all, it is in use for just three months each year. That makes it one of the thousands of unoccupied government buildings on Dutch soil.

Rietveld Landscape, the office appointed by the NAI to curate the Dutch presentation in Venice, decided to emphasize the vacancy of the pavilion during the architecture biennale. The experience of the empty space will sink into visitors, and only then will they discover the hidden installation.

Fore information go to: www.nai.nl, www.architectureofconsequence.nl, www.rietveldlandscape.com, www.labiennale.org.

New Practices New York 2010 is the third biennial juried competition and exhibition sponsored by the AIA New York Chapter. It serves as a platform to recognize and promote new, innovative  and emerging architecture firms within New York City that have utilized unique and commendable strategies – both in the projects they undertake and the practices they have established.

The exhibition opens today at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, NYC. The exhibition will extend through October 23, 2010 and will travel to Sao Paulo in the fall of 2010 and the AIA National Convention in New Orleans in the spring of 2011. For more information, click here.

© Superblue Design

This year’s theme for the London Festival of Architecture, “The Welcoming City”, inspired Superblue Design to create an installation where all could sit together to enjoy the space, but also take an active role in making that place.  Entitled Giant Knitting Nancy, the project is a metaphor for the “interwoven cultures, spaces and places that help make the London a distinctive place.”  By collaborating with sculptor Dan Preston and jewelry designer Holly Packer, the team created a large-scale knitted structure which doubles as an “interactive architectural seating unit.”

More about the installation after the break. read more »

Len-tic-u-lar-is, a new exhibition by Los Angeles and Sendai-based architecture firm Atelier Hitoshi Abe (AHA), will be on view from July 30 to September 12, 2010, in the SCI-Arc Gallery at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

The first architectural subject that AHA will tackle in Los Angeles is the design of a new large-scale roof over the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC) Plaza, designed by Isamu Noguchi. For this plaza, Noguchi created a singular landscape inspired by a Zen garden that isolates itself from the surrounding townscape. Although a very important place for the community, the JACCC Plaza is too exposed to the climate of Los Angeles to host various activities, and the walls that enclose the plaza conceal it from the neighborhood and make it invisible to the city.

Exhibition discussion with Hitoshi Abe and Eric Owen Moss, followed by the opening reception will take place July 30 at 7pm. Admission is free. More information can be found here.

Proposal for Rio de Janiero's Central do Brasil Station © CAMPO + Fábrica

Our Cities Ourselves: The Future of Transportation in Urban Life has just kicked off its worldwide tour starting in New York at the Center for Architecture.   The exhibit shows the visions of ten of the world’s developing cities from ten of the world’s leading architects.  Over the next 20 years, these places will experience urban growth on a grand scale and the urban planning efforts will create successful cities through better transportation.

More about the exhibit after the break. read more »

Photo: Pasi Aalto / pasiaalto.com

Architectural photographer Pasi Aalto sent us this photos of the 1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The V&A invited nineteen architects to submit proposals for structures that examine notions of refuge and retreat. From these nineteen concept submissions, seven were selected for construction at full-scale.

This photos belong to the project designed by Rintala Eggertsson Architects. The exhibition started on Tuesday and will be on display till August 30. You can see more photos by Pasi Aalto after the break. read more »

Steven Holl Architects is pleased to present ‘Su Pietra’, an exhibition of recent projects in China and Europe, which will be held at the Castle of Acaya in Lecce, Italy, from July 10, 2010 to January 15, 2011.

While the Chinese projects – the Horizontal Skyscraper in Shenzhen, Linked Hybrid in Beijing, and the Nanjing Museum of Art and Architecture – explore the macro scale of cities through the lens of architecture, the European projects show a vision of the preservation of natural landscape, as with the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Knut Hamsun Center, Loisium Alsace, and the Cité de l’Ocean et du Surf in Biarritz. In addition, a series of stone sculptures has been created by Steven Holl specifically for Su Pietra.

In a new exhibit, The Page, curated by Karin Lanzoni and Rachelle W. Chuang, one page from each of the 33 participating artists’ books is mounted on the wall.   The pages are all different as some are “terse and conceptual”, some “comment on formal issues”, some “are either mass-produced; self-published via different printing techniques; or made by hand through traditional bookbinding practices.”  Visitors to the exhibit are encouraged to study each page in a reading area that includes different chairs. Although the focus is on the main page, the pages are contained within some form of a bound book so visitors can spend time studying the artists’ complete thoughts.  Every chair makes for a varied experience and each chair is designed by a different designer — just as each page has been created by a different artist.

Check out Tim Durfee’s 20′ long chair after the break. read more »

As part of the Triennial program at the Cooper Hewitt, the showing exhibit Why Design Now? presents some of the most innovative designs of contemporary culture.  The exhibition, which addresses human and environmental concerns, includes designers dappling in all areas of the design field – from architecture, to fashion, and graphics  to materials.

More about the exhibit after the break.

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Beijing Linked Hybrid

On Saturday, May 15, 2010, Steven Holl Architects opens the exhibition Urbanisms: Steven Holl + Li Hu, 4 Projects in China by Steven Holl Architects in the Linked Hybrid, in Beijing, China.

The exhibition tracks the process of designing four projects in China from 2003-2009: Nanjing Museum of Art and Architecture, Beijing Linked Hybrid, Shenzhen Horizontal Skyscraper, and Chengdu Sliced Porosity Block.

More information after the break. read more »

INABA, with Darien Williams, has developed a hypothetical proposal for the migratory distribution of the Hollywood sign across Los Angeles, titled “HLYWD”. The project will be on display as part of SUPERFRONT LA‘s upcoming show, UNPLANNED: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale.

The proposal will be on display until July 2. More images and architect’s description after the break. read more »

Sublime Flesh brings together, for the first time, new designs for contemporary spiritual spaces developed by students at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. A collection of research projects located in international cities including Istanbul, Rome, Turin, Lisbon, Havana and Miami, each explores a unique sense of sacredness and the Sublime.

The complex nature of these themes is articulated in a series of exquisite models that express a new ornamental, spatial and technological approach and also a reconsidered religious and cultural dimension for contemporary architecture design.

The exhibition will continue in London Christ Church till April 11. Also, there will be various events through the exhibition. Among those there will be a symposium on Tuesday April 6 14:30-18:30. Speakers are Sir Peter Cook, Marjan Colletti, Rev Rod Green, Robert Harbison, Ali Mangera, Natasha Sandmeier, Yael Reisner, and Marcos Cruz (chair).

For more information, click here.

© Josh Merideth

The 4 Salvaged Boxes document the design approach and process wHY Architectureapplied toward quality design and creative environmental sustainability, with focus on the Grand Rapids Art Museum, the first new art museum building in the world to receive the LEED Gold certification, and other current projects from wHY Architecture and Design.

The boxes are made with salvaged materials from the Museum. When closed, the boxes function as their own traveling crates, protecting their inner contents. When opened, the boxes unfold to present information about the sustainable design features of the Grand Rapids Art Museum and other innovative green projects, through the use of diagrams, models, material samples and videos. Being made from recycled materials and designed to produce minimal waste in its installation and transportation, the boxes are like a traveling “cabinet of curiosities,” moving from one place to another to interact with their audience.

Previous locations include Grand Rapids, Bangkok, Mumbai, Louisville and Tyler, Texas. The University of Oregon in Portland is proud to host this exciting exhibition and invites you to come explore the “4 Boxes: wHY at Work.” The exhibition will take place until April 15. Additionally, Yo-ichiro Hakomori, AIA and Kulapat Yantrasast, AIA will discuss recent work and design approach in a lecture March 30 at the White Stag Block Commons in UO. For more information, visit www.4salvagedboxes.com.