Courtesy of S+PBA

The Bangkok-based Architecture firm S+PBA has been invited to attend the exhibition Water-Curse or Blessing!? organized by Aedes East – International Forum for Contemporary Architecture n.p.o. as part of the Asia Pacific Weeks 2011. The event will take place at Aedes Gallery in Berlin from the 9th to 21st September 2011. More images and event description after the break. read more »

Courtesy of GGAF and Salvatore Spataro

NEEDS-Architecture in Developing Countries, edited by Salvatore Spataro with GGAF (Young Architects of Florence).  The book points out the real NEEDS of users, particularly the necessity to make structures which could satisfy them, facing up to lack of economic and technological resources. The sixteen works collected in this volume express a clear idea about the developing project of that belongs within the community within which it is situated. Each project is a reflection of architecture that does not impose organizing models extraneous to the local culture and does not flatten itself on the existent reality.

Scroll through images from the exhibition after the break!
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© Fran Parente

What turns a residential space into a home? Its decoration? Its objects? The people sharing that space? All the memories stored in it? Estudio Guto Requena asks the participants to answer this question until July 17th by twitter @umacasaumlar and help them to construct their interactive wallpaper at Hyundai Mostra Black Exhibition in Sao Paulo. The interactive ambient “What turns a house into a home?” seeks to instigate the visitors to thinking about the significances and subjectivities associated with our houses.

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This June A+D Museum presents the second installation of COME IN! …A Spatial Intervention where they invite the hottest of Los Angeles’ young design talent to take over their galleries, offices, storage closets, bathrooms; there is no “Off Limits.” COME IN! fuses this year with the LA themes of Surf, Skate and Bike. The design enthusiast who wants ownership in the coolest and top of the line design product and community.

On July 7, from 6-9PM, A+D will host THE PARTY! – to celebrate the COME IN! artists with an A+D skate park, live band, good music and art in action with murals and screen printing. CI! 2:Surf.Skate.Bike will remain on view through July 24. In addition to the installations, a pop-up shop will offer limited edition works and items for sale from COME IN! participants AND additional museum programming including film and music.

© Praveen Mohandas

Lijo Jos and Reny Lijo recently displayed their exhibition of “Space Specific Installations” in the Kerla Lalithakala Akademi Art Gallery of Kerala, India. The architects filled the gallery with figures that intruded upon the space occupied by visitors and forced interactions between the work and the users of the space using a wide range of materials.  The exhibition ran from May4th-10th so if you missed it be sure to look through the gallery for images of Lijo Jos and Reny Lijo’s work after the break! Photographs by Praveen Mohandas. read more »

Apartment building in Tallinn. Architects Ott Kadarik, Villem Tomiste, Mihkel Tüür. Completed 2009. Photo Paco Ulman

Exhibition “BOOM/ROOM: New Estonian Architecture” opened on June 21 at MUAR – Russian State Museum of Architecture, Moscow. BOOM/ROOM, produced by the Estonian Centre of Architecture in collaboration with the Estonian Embassy in Moscow, presents a distinct selection of Estonian architecture from the last decade. The opening will be accompanied by a seminar, where Estonian architects and institutional representatives discuss the latest tendencies in Estonian architecture.

The program of the opening seminar includes presentations by Ülar Mark, Chairman of the Estonian Centre of Architecture, Peeter Pere, Chairman of the Union of Estonian Architects, Martin Aunin, laureate of the Young Architect’s Award 2009, Karli Luik, partner architect of the award-winning Salto AB, and architecture historian Carl-Dag Lige.

BOOM/ROOM: New Estonian Architecture has recently been exhibited at DAZ (Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, Berlin), London Architecture Festival, Sofia Architecture Week and architecture events in Glasgow as well as Helsinki. BOOM/ROOM at MUAR will be open from 21 June until 21 August 2011.

Pond Press proudly announces the publication of MonoVisioN, noted photographer Scott Frances’s first monograph. The book includes an introduction by renowned architect Richard Meier.

Renowned for his architecture and lifestyle photography, Scott is a frequent contributor to such illustrious magazines as Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine, and Departures. Scott has worked with many of the world’s most famous architects and designers after beginning his career shooting for Richard Meier. He has photographed the homes of such celebrities as Jennifer Aniston, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Jim Belushi, Claire Danes, Clive Davis, Steve Jobs, Elton John, Cindy Crawford, Ted Turner and Jessica Lange.

Coinciding with the release of the book is an exhibition of MonoVisioN at the D & D Building in New York on June 21st, 2011.

© Shai Epstein

Architects: SO Architecture / Shachar Lulv & Oded Rozenkier
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Project Year: 2011
Project Area: 70 sqm
Photographs: Shai Epstein

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Image courtesy OMA

OMA‘s exhibition (IM)PURE, (IN)FORMAL, (UN)BUILT opened today at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Made in collaboration with students at the Paris Malaquais School of Architecture, the exhibition focuses on three French libraries designed by OMA, two of them unrealized but crucially important in the development of the typology of libraries, and one about to go under construction.

The featured libraries, explored in a range of archival and new materials, are the Très Grande Bibliothèque in Paris (1989), with its “strategy of the void”; Jussieu (1992), with its continuous, ramped floors; and the Bibliothèque Multimédia à Vocation Régionale in Caen, scheduled for groundbreaking in 2012. (IM)PURE, (IN)FORMAL, (UN)BUILT opens today in the Amphithéâtre d’Honneur at the École des Beaux-Arts, with a discussion between OMA Associate-in-charge Clément Blanchet and co-curators Nasrine Seraji and Thierry Mandoul from the Paris Malaquais School of Architecture. The exhibition runs until 22 July.

© Librado Romero / The New York Times

Just 800 yards from the tip of Lower Manhattan, Governors Island is hosting Mark di Suvero’s monumental sculptures, organized by Storm King Art Center. The sculpture garden is open to all visitors to Governors Island, which will be accessible this season until September 27, 2011. More images and information after the break. read more »

Glass Farmhouse

The Museum of Art at Washington State University is organizing “Architecture for Art”, the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to the career of Jim Olson, one of the Northwest’s most significant architects and founder of the internationally recognized Seattle-based firm, Olson Kundig Architects.

The exhibit will serve as retrospective for Olson’s 45-year career, highlighting his residential legacy, including his own homes -an apartment in downtown Seattle and his cabin on Puget Sound- as well as his public design work, which encompasses the Lightcatcher Museum in Bellingham, Washington, St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Pike & Virginia Building in Seattle, and the Noah’s Ark Exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Along with the projects themselves, the exhibition will explore the artistic, cultural, natural and personal influences that have made the architect’s career so highly regarded by his peers and sought after by clients. “Architecture for Art” will include a range of materials that showcase Olson’s process, including notebooks and ephemera, original sketches and drawings, stunning large-scale photo displays, and models. Original art work from selected residences will be on display, as well as a custom-designed art installation that will provide visitors with a first-hand experience with Olson’s use of space and collaboration with art.

For more information, please click here.

Jewel Box / 1936 / William C.E. Becker

The Missouri Botanical Garden presents a photographic exhibition documenting many of St. Louis’s most architecturally impressive structures. View “American City: St. Louis Architecture” on display Friday, June 10 through Sunday, Aug. 21 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily in the Garden’s Ridgway Visitor Center. The exhibit is included with Garden admission.

“American City: St. Louis Architecture” features over 70 large-scale color images by award-winner architectural photographer William Zbaren, including the iconic Linnean House conservatory and Museum Building at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

The images are from the new architectural monograph, “American City: St. Louis Architecture: Three Centuries of Classic Design,” by Zbaren and architectural writer Robert Sharoff. The book – the first new monograph on the city since the 1920s – depicts 50 of the city’s most architecturally significant structures and is available at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Garden Gate Shop.

For more information on the exhibition please click here. And check “Seven Amazing Structures You Kidn’t Know Were In St. Louis” images after the break. read more »

Ide@s invites architects and designers to submit work to participate in this year’s exhibit “unMADE IN CHINA: Architecture Undone in the P.R.C.”. Any unrealized or undone commissioned projects in China of all program types and scales are welcome. A public opening of the exhibit will be held at ide@s Gallery in Shanghai from September 2nd to October 1st, 2011. The exhibit will travel to Beijing and Los Angeles thereafter.

All eligible entries will be incorporated into exhibit, virtual exhibit, and catalogue. The jury will then select 12 finalists to display in greater detail. This will include large-scale printed panels, 3D animations, and physical models. All exhibition material will be produced by the gallery, at no cost to participants. For more information, please visit the exhibition’s official website.

© OMA

Coinciding with the start of the Venice Biennale, OMA and Prada open an exhibition surveying recent collaborative works. The exhibition appears at Ca’ Corner della Regina, a former palazzo, alongside highlights from the Prada Fondazione collection. More images and information after the break. read more »

Meissen | SO – IL Exhibition / © Iwan Baan

In the Netherlands, Meissen porcelain is often regarded as ‘high-class kitsch’. Its sumptuous, often narrative style of decoration puts it at odds with the minimalistic and conceptual traditions of Modernism. Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO – IL) was commissioned by Kunsthal KAdE to design an ideal contemporary three-dimensional setting in which to present the porcelain such that it would challenge this prejudice and focus attention on the great sculptural, artistic and technical strengths of Meissen. In response, SO – IL has designed 32 modern, geometrically shaped showcases in bright colors and with ‘pointed tops’. These showcases not only serve the Meissen objects also autonomous in character.

More images by Iwan Baan and information after the break. read more »

Concept render courtesy Speirs + Major

The annual Wallpaper* Architects Directory, now in its twelfth year, provides the ultimate little black book to the world’s most promising young practices. For this year’s Directory, Wallpaper* selected twenty studios from around the world. Each was given an open brief to design the ultimate rural retreat. These twenty houses were designed to be flexible and functional, but also formally and technically innovative, sitting on an isolated countryside site. The only sanction was the need for the homes to touch the ground lightly, with minimum disruption to the landscape.

This exhibition, in The Architecture Foundation’s Project Space, unites the featured architects, showcasing all twenty bespoke homes in a single show; a swirling, imaginary topography, designed by emerging UK-based practice Naja de Ostos, who conceived the installation as a blossoming abstracted landscape. Selected highlights of the Wallpaper* Architects Directory and the full list of twenty practices will be revealed in the magazine’s July 2011 issue, and featured in full on wallpaper.com from the exhibition’s opening day.

As part of the exhibition programme, Wallpaper* and The Architecture Foundation have invited a selection of the practices from the 2011 Directory to take part in a series of talks, using the theme of built/unbuilt to explore the relationship between real world commissions and the ideas and approaches that arose out of the open brief for the Directory commission.

The exhibition will run from June 9 to July 14. The talk dates are June 14 and July 5. For more information, including ticket, please click here.

Courtesy of Gernot Riether

Every year, the AIA stages a competition for an intervention that brings to life the historic city of New Orleans. This year the institute selected a scheme by Gernot Riether that proposed a series of glowing spherical enclosures sited within the hidden courtyards of the city’s distinctive French Quarter. They would be illuminated in the evening, dramatically modulating the host environment and bringing attention to these romantic, mysterious and usually private spaces, typically located deep in the block, away from the street.

Architect: Gernot Riether
Location: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Project Team: Gernot Riether, Valerie Bolen, Rachel Dickey, Emily Finau, Tasnouva Habib, Knox Jolly, Pei-Lin Liao, Keith Smith, April Tann
Photographs: Courtesy of Gernot Riether

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© Hwang Hyochel

The ‘Box Mobile Gallery’ is a gallery responsive to various exhibition intentions and art media. The gallery consists of 12 panels soft-hinged side by side. Each of these panels features an art work fixed to its inside. The flexibility of the soft hinge system allows the spatial reconfiguration of the gallery, transforming one space to another according to site conditions, exhibition intention, and art media; from independent cells for an individual exhibition, to a common exhibition space for a group exhibition, often times with an introductory area or a court yard, and to a special exhibition space for various art media.

Architect: WISE Architecture
Location: Jongno-gu Tongin-dong, Seoul, South Korea
Project Year: 2011
Photographs: Hwang Hyochel

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GLOBAL Design New York University: Elsewhere Envisioned is an exhibit and lecture series comprised to showcase potent innovation processes in relation to visionary architecture, urbanism, and ecological planning. GDNYU seeks to reformat the discourse on ecological design by bringing together designers, scholars, and innovators whose work is far-reaching in outlook. By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

For more information, please visit the event’s official website.

Why Berlin? Once an industrial center and later a city divided, Berlin’s walls fell years ago, and its gates have since remained open for experimentation. The city attracts artists and designers from around the world to its former factory buildings, transformed into studios and galleries. Berlin’s streets foster potential for what is new, perhaps more than any other place today. It has become an avant-garde capital for design in an unlikely locale, inviting international talent in the overlapping disciplines of art, architecture, industrial and product design.

The exhibition $H!T HAPPENS In Berlin explores the aesthetic and technical innovations of creatives in the city, showcasing both emerging and established designers. The unexpected is the norm; trials and errors, miscalculations and failures, experimentation and surprise–all result in ingenious design strategies.

The outcome of those experiments will be on view at special press and AD events starting May 14, 2011 in the New York City showroom and June 17, 2011 in the Toronto showroom of Relative Space & Floorworks. A custom video Clarity Matrix wall by Planar will be installed in the storefront of the Relative Space showroom, with all creative content streamed 24/7 to showcase the upcoming exhibit of over 10 Berlin based designers. More information may be found about individual participating designers at berlinhappens.com.