Perkins+Will and Pringle Brandon Merge
Big news: two architectural heavyweights have joined forces.
Pringle Brandon and Pringle Brandon Drew (their more commercial branch) have merged with top-ranking international design firm Perkins+Will. Their joint London and Dubai Offices will know be known as (take a deep breath): Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will.
Pringle Brandon (PB) stands to expand its international presence with the merger; Perkins+Will will be able to tap into PB’s strengths in interior design, workplace consultancy, & sustainable practice – as well as their presence in Europe and the UAE, where it has experienced two consecutive years of double-digit growth.
Story via Architects Choice and Pringle Brandon‘s Press Release.
Bourbon Lane / Cartwright Pickard Architects
Architects: Cartwright Pickard Architects
Location: London, England
Completion: 2007
Area: 6,861 sqm
Client: Octavia Housing
Photographs: Courtesy of Cartwright Pickard Architects
York Minster Abbey Goes Green – Literally
While many buildings try to go Green these days, few attempt to do so literally.
Last week, York Minster Abbey, one of the largest Gothic Cathedrals in Europe, was decked out with 1,500 square meters of – what else - grass.
The occasion for the makeover, the York Minster Rose Dinner to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee (which we marked with a post on Britain’s Built Legacy), hosted about 900 people to raise funds for the York Minster Fund. And with £150-a-head tickets, sold months in advance, perhaps we’ll start seeing other Gothic Cathedrals turn green too (and not just with envy).
Story via The Huffington Post UK. More photos after the break…
Video: London Design Festival 2011
Presenting a fresh palette of both established and emerging product designers and architects, London Design Festival 2011 has commissioned a sideshow of ‘Landmark Projects’ curated in the city’s most notorious public spaces. Crane.tv visits the V&A to chat to curator Vicky Broackes before checking out the Bouroullec’s ‘Textile Field’ in the Raphael Gallery and heading to St Paul’s Cathedral to see John Pawson’s geometric staircase. The whirlwind tour of LDF also includes David Chipperfield’s ‘Two Lines’ at the Southbank Centre.
Photographers Gallery / O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects
Architects: O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects
Location: London, England
Completion: 2012
Area: 225 sqm
Photographs: Dennis Gilbert
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012 / Photos by Julien Lanoo
Last week we presented the first images of the recently open Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Ai Weiwei & Herzog & de Meuron in London, showing the half sunk and water-covered structure and its beautiful blending into the landscape. Today, Julien Lanoo shared with us these great images giving a better understanding of the spaces and its surroundings.
You can check some more images after the break.
Architect’s Eye Photography Exhibition and Discussion Panel at the 2012 London Festival of Architecture
Last December, ArchDaily revealed the winners of the Architect’s Eye Photography Competition. Now, in celebration of the 2012 London Festival of Architecture, the winners of the the competition will be exhibited at the Roca London Gallery beginning June 23rd in Chelsea, London as part of a Launch Event, Exhibition and Discussion Panel. International Art Consultants (IAC) hosts the competition in recognition of architects’ passion for photography. Last year’s 19 finalists and winners will be on view to the public at the gallery until July 8th.
More after the break.
2012 London Festival of Architecture
The London Festival of Architecture is a city-wide celebration of architecture and architectural talent in the UK capital. It brings architects and communities together to examine how we make London a better place. The theme of the 2012 Festival – ‘The Playful City’ – responds to the presence in London of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Everyone is invited to join the Festival; both Londoners and visitors are encouraged to be active participants in the city. From reinterpreting familiar places through new installations and animations, redesigning public spaces to encourage physical fitness in the spirit of the Olympic Games, to testing interactive forms of consultation and planning for future urban development, festival participants will be encouraged to play in, and play with, the city around them.
Curated by RIBA London, the Architecture Foundation, New London Architecture and the British Council, LFA2012 takes place over three weekends across three London hubs:
- City of London, Southwark and London Pleasure Gardens (23rd /24th June)
- Fitzrovia and Victoria (30th June / 1 July)
- King’s Cross and Hoxton (7th/8th July)
You won’t want to miss it! Find more information on the festival’s official website.
Video: Serpentine Gallery Pavilion
Ahead of the opening of this summer’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, Crane.tv gets an exclusive look at the specially commissioned structure designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. The dream design team responsible for the Beijing National Stadium come together again to create the team’s first collaborative edifice in the UK. Here, Pierre de Meuron talks about the joys of working with Ai Weiwei, while the infamous artist makes a special cameo to share his interest in combining art, design and architecture to introduce new possibilities and social change.
First images of Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012
Starting tomorrow, the 12th version of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion will be open at the Hyde Park in London. As we announced some months ago, the design was commissioned to Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. The final proposal was published just at the beginning of this month, showing an interesting ground work. This year’s pavilion is half sunk into the landscape, as if it were carved in the terrain and covered with a liquid layer, reflecting the the surrounding light and landscape.
More info and images after the break
Designing the Extraordinary / Heatherwick Studio
Today we had the chance of attending the opening of this impressive exhibition. As we mentioned previously some weeks ago, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London prepared this event focused on the work of the British firm Heatherwick Studio, responsable for the last Shanghai 2010 British Pavilion, as well as the Rolling Bridge, or the New Bus for London that was just released in the 38 route. The exhibition comprises a large range of different scales of design, going from specific objects or furniture, to large infrastructural and urban projects. It will be open for the public from next Thursday 31st.
Sound Portal / BE OPEN
While the excitement builds for the Olympic Games this summer, London is also preparing for their Design Festival of mid-September. In a joint effort between Arup and Sound and Music, the installation at Trafalgar Square will focus on the idea of design you cannot see by creating a black rubberized portal that will transport visitors to inaccessible places and remote environments through a series of three-dimensional soundscapes created by leading musicians and sound designers. By isolating the sense of sound, visitors will be submerged in a completely new environment as they stand in one of the busiest squares in the world.
More about BE OPEN after the break.
‘SHIFTS: The Economic Crisis and its Consequences for Architecture’ Exhibition
‘SHIFTS: The Economic Crisis and its Consequences for Architecture’ is an exhibition currently on display until June 9 at The Architecture Foundation in London. Presented by Rotterdam/Copenhagen-based Powerhouse Company and critic and architectural historian Hans Ibelings (the Architecture Observer), the exhibit illustrates the far-reaching impacts of new economic circumstances on architecture’s recent past, troubled present and unknown future acknowledging the onset of an imminent housing crisis in London, and the continuing shrinkage of the architectural profession in the UK. More information on the exhibition after the break.
Cutty Sark / Grimshaw
Architects: Grimshaw
Location: London, England
Client: The Cutty Sark Trust
Partner: Chris Nash
Associate Director: Diane Metcalfe
Project Architects:
Jorrin Ten-Have, Den Farnworth
Architect: Joe Laslett
Principal: Steve Brown
Photographs: Jim Stephenson
Infographic: The Serpentine Pavilion 2012 Update
With the recent release of the design for the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion by Herzog & de Meuron and collaborator Ai Weiwei, we’re bringing you the 2012 updated infographic, a cheat sheet for the 12 years of the Serpentine Pavilion. Read more about the new design here
Google Campus / Jump Studios
Architect: Jump Studios – Shaun Fernandes, Markus Nonn
Location: 4-5 Bonhill Street, London, England
Total Floor Area: 2,300 sqm
Project Cost: £ 2.2 M
Client: Google UK Ltd.
Furniture / Lighting: Hay, Modus, Very Good & Proper, Branch Studios, Moroso, Bene, MagisMuuto, Luxo, Erco Jump Studios
Photographs: Courtesy of Jump Studios
Photography, Landscape, Image / Bas Princen
The exhibition dedicated to Bas Princen‘s work will be open at the Architectural Association in London until May 26. The photographer based in Rotterdam, who was previously trained as an architect, is particularly focused on the dialogues between architecture and the landscape, from dramatic contrasts to blurred merging typologies.
“The award-winning Dutch photographer’s work has become increasingly familiar: images that blur the artificial and natural, where the real and imagined are hard to separate. Less known – and never previously exhibited – are the A5 booklets Princen makes, consisting of a series of reference images. The booklets are between 24 and 32 pages long and contain images downloaded by Princen from the internet of famous or completely unknown or already long-forgotten scenes and objects involving landscape and architecture, their low resolution disallowing reproduction any larger than 6 x 9 cm.
AD Round Up: Serpentine Gallery Pavilion
We now know Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei’s design for the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012. While we waited for it, we decided to prepare a small Round Up with our previous coverage on the famous London’s Hyde Park pavilion. This includes the designs of Peter Zumthor, Jean Nouvel, and SANAA. To complete the Round Up, we have our post announcing the upcoming pavilion, and the special infographic we prepared earlier this year.
The Next Silicon Valley(s)
HP, Apple, Google – they all found their success amongst the peach groves and Suburban houses of California. But why? What is it about Silicon Valley that makes it the site of technological innovation the world over?
It’s tempting to assume that the Valley’s success must be, at least in part, due to its design. But how does innovation prosper? What kind of environment does it require? In a recent interview with The Atlantic Cities, Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, suggests that creativity is sparked from casual exchanges, the mingling of diversity, the constant interaction with the strange and new. In short, and as a recent study corroborates, innovation flourishes in dense metropolises.
Seemingly then, Silicon Valley, a sprawl of highways and office parks, has become a hotspot of creativity in spite of its design. But let’s not write off design just yet.
As technology makes location more and more irrelevant, many are looking to distill the magic of Silicon Valley and transplant it elsewhere. The key will be to design environments that can recreate the Valley’s culture of collaboration. The future Valleys of the world will be microsystems of creativity that imitate and utilize the structure of the city.
‘Translate the Intangible’ Symposium
Taking place at the Architectural Association (AA) on May 11, the ‘Translate the Intangible’ symposium addresses the challenges of communicating dynamic aspects of contemporary design methodologies through static mediums such as text and images. As current design-oriented fields have amplified the implementation of computational and generative tools for various motives, the process of documentation and representation of the design process has become more difficult to express.
As such, Translate the Intangible will bring together a multi-disciplinary group of leading practitioners from different fields to discuss the challenges involved in expressing the process involved in their work and propose new perspectives addressing this issue. Organized by the AA PhD in Architectural Design students as part of the AA Public Programme, the event will serve as a platform for the PhD in Architectural Design students to present and discuss their individual research. For more information on the event, please visit here.
‘Towards a New Re-Construction after 311 Tsunami in North-East Japan’ Symposium
Hosted by RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), the ‘Towards a new re-construction after 311 tsunami in North-East Japan’ Symposium will take place in London on May 8, where they will present a culmination of over a year’s work by dedicated Japanese architects working closely with local communities in areas worst affected by the disaster. Ideas and proposals will be shared for building a safe and sustainable future for those whose lives and communities were devastated on 11th March 2011. For more detailed information on the event, please visit here.
