Conflict of Interests Symposia
Columbia University’s GSAPP Applied Architecture Research program will be holding their Conflict of Interests event on Friday, April 16th from 2:00pm-6:00pm, which will be organized as a series of conversations—five distinctive panels—discussing the limits of applied research in contemporary practices and academia. This event will be the first in a series of symposia investigating the role of applied research in architecture. Nestled in an intersection between practice and theory, applied architectural research can potentially work as a space for overlap and negotiation. This event will formally make explicit the opportunities for architectural research to bridge the gap between the archive and the laboratory. For more information, please visit here.
University at Buffalo’s Downtown Medical School Proposal / HOK
HOK recently unveiled their design for the state-of-the-art medical school and integrated transit station at the University at Buffalo‘s Downtown Medical School, which will anchor the vibrant mixed-use district. Designed for the new School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, the seven-story medical school will bring 2,000 UB faculty, staff and students daily to downtown Buffalo and, at more than 500,000-square-feet, will be one of the largest buildings constructed in Buffalo in decades. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Spotlight on Design: SOM
Taking place at the National Building Museum on May 14 from 6:30-8:00pm, SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Architects) design principal Gary Haney, AIA, RIBA, will present the innovative design process behind the firm’s work, including the recently completed, 1,354-foot tall, Al Hamra Tower in Kuwait City, one of the world’s tallest buildings and the tallest building in Kuwait. Since its founding in 1936, the firm has designed and engineered some of the tallest buildings in the world-notably Chicago’s Willis Tower, and New York’s One World Trade Center. To register, and for more information, please visit here.
Museum of Moving Image Wins 2013 Red Dot Design Award
LEESER Architecture’s design for the Museum of Moving Image has recently been announced as the winner of the 2013 Red Dot Design Award in its highly competitive Architecture and Urban Design category. Completed in 2011, the Museum of the Moving Image houses a comprehensive collection dedicated to educating the public about the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media.The existing structure is seamlessly integrated with the substantial new addition through a grand lobby which connects the two. More information on their award after the break.
‘Strange Utility: Architecture Toward Other Ends’ Symposium
Taking place April 26-27, the ‘Strange Utility: Architecture Toward Other Ends’ Symposium will explore the following provocative questions: How is architecture’s use value defined, and by whom? How can turning to other disciplines’ unexpected utilization of architecture expand our perception of its utility? And what are the future utilities of architecture? Today, the idea of architecture’s utility is perhaps more diverse than ever, as architecture commonly mingles with other disciplines, and as new typologies of building design emerge almost daily. Organized by Portland State University School of Architecture, three keynote speakers—Philippe Rahm, Jimenez Lai and Jill Stoner—as well as eleven notable architects, artists and academics will participate. More information after the break.
‘Stage a lot’ Flat Lot Competition Entry / Ksestudio
Designed by Ksestudio, their “Stage a lot” Flat Lot competition entry, which received an honorable mention, is a constantly transformative intervention that responds to the call for a temporary structure from the Flint Public Art Project. The project invents a ballet of ropes and pulleys animating four suspended rectangular pieces of white tyvek that in a neutral position hang vertically to form a topless cube. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Daniel Libeskind: The Art of Memory Lecture
A 1970 graduate of Cooper Union‘s architecture program, world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind will be delivering ‘The Art of Memory’ lecture, a free event, on Tuesday, April 30th, at 6:00pm. The master planner for Ground Zero and the architect of one of Europe’s most visited museums, the Jewish Museum Berlin, will discuss the role that memory played in his work on those projects and others, such as the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark; the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England; the Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany; and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. He will also talk about the acute sense of responsibility he feels, when accepting commissions for projects addressing Jewish history, to create work that honors not only the harsh realities, but also the resilience of the Jewish spirit. For more information, please visit here.
WXY’s Claire Weisz “Ecological Barriers: Holding Sea Levels at Bay” Lecture
Claire Weisz, AIA, founding principal of WXY and a frequently cited expert source on waterfront design, will be speaking on the topic “Ecological Barriers: Holding Sea Levels at Bay” with a panel at 6:00pm on April 25 in New York City. A leading advocate for post-Hurricane Sandy infrastructure design, Weisz’s firm is known for such waterfront projects as the East River Blueway, a planned reconstruction of miles of Manhattan water’s edge, as well as Transmitter Park, Rockaway Park, Sherman Creek Waterfront, and Battery Park.
Sponsored by Urban Green Council and hosted by The Mohawk Group, panelists will discuss paradigms and solutions for rising global sea levels, including barriers and heavily engineered infrastructure vs. “soft” coastal edges, such as restored wetlands. For more information, please visit here.
City Council Approves Redevelopment of NYC’s Historic Pier 57
New York’s City Council have unanimously backed a proposed plan to restore and redevelop the aging giant that is Pier 57. Built in 1952, the 300,000 square foot pier was hailed by Popular Mechanics as a ‘SuperPier’ for its vast size and unconventional construction, as most of the pier’s weight is supported by ‘floating’ air-filled concrete cassions. The pier was originally used as a bus depot by the New York City Transit Authority, however it has been lying vacant since 2003. The latest decision brings a concrete end to years of speculation as to what the fate of the pier would be.
Read more about the proposal after the break…
Juan Pablo Corvalan Hochberger, Supersudaca Lecture
Taking place tomorrow, April 11th, at 6:00pm, Woodbury University’s School of Architecture will be hosting the Juan Pablo Corvalan Hochberger, Supersudaca lecture. Supersudaca‘s main driving motto has been to connect the usually disconnected Latinamerica architectural arena with projects directly related to the public perception such as recreation spaces, public spaces, installations etc in various locations such as Caracas, Lima, Tokyo, Talca, Buenos Aires. They continuously use the workshop format with students from various universities worldwide to launch campaigns for such projects. For more information, please visit here.
‘Research as Practice’ Symposium
Taking place this Friday, April 12th, from 4:00pm-8:30pm, the Doctor of Design program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design is inviting you to ‘Research as Practice’, their annual Convergence symposium. As the traditional boundaries of design practice are increasingly questioned, broadened, and blurred, scientific research in technology development and application emerges as an essential vehicle for exploration and assessment. In this inaugural year, the symposium will seek to explore the position, relevancy, and sustainability of applied research in design practice across various disciplines with examples from contemporary practitioners. For more information, please visit here. For more information, please visit here.
2013 ‘Folly’ Competition Winner: tree wood by Toshihiro Oki
Socrates Sculpture Park and The Architectural League of New York recently announced the selection of Toshihiro Oki architect for tree wood as the winner of this year’s “Folly” competition – an extraordinary opportunity for emerging architects and designers to experiment and build large-scale projects for outdoor exhibition. tree wood will be a rigid yet airy geometrical wooden structure placed within a grove of trees – a lush and dense area at Socrates Sculpture Park. Visitors will peer into the structure through the floor beams where a formal, ornate chandelier will be suspended. The installation creates a dialogue between built structures and systems with the irregular and organic. This winning project will open at Socrates Sculpture Park on Sunday, May 12th from 2-6pm. More information after the break.
‘Up-Downtown’ DawnTown’s 2012 Competition Winning Installation
Up-Downtown, the prize-winning installation in DawnTown‘s competition for the creation of a temporary installation on the theme of the “Evolution of Miami”, is taken literally to present an interactive story of Miami’s rise. “A city is a complex machine, where everything is interconnected and any movement affects the other,” said Manuel Clavel-Rojo, co-creator of the Up-Downtown team. The installation, exhibited at HistoryMiami, features a 10’ x 10’ x 10’ box structure using steel for supports. A mirror sits at its base, with blue and pink neon lights representing the water’s edge and roadways, creating a perimeter of the downtown area. More images and information after the break.
Update: Facades+ Performance Symposium
Taking place April 11-12 in New York, the Facades+ Performance Symposium will focus on cutting through the jargon to consider the heart of high performance building envelopes. Presented by The Architect’s Newspaper and enclos, they recently announced that an additional workshop will take place on Friday, April 12. This workshop will focus on the fundamental concepts and workflows for creating performance-based design models with the parametric design tool, Grasshopper for Rhino3D. Using Grasshopper, participants will be guided through a series of exercises designed to emphasize the relevant applications of parametric design for professional practice. To sign up, and for more information on the two-day event, please visit here. A video can be viewed after the break.
2013 Burnham Prize Competition: NEXT STOP: Designing Chicago BRT Stations
The Chicago Architectural Club and Chicago Architecture Foundation, in partnership with the Chicago Department of Transportation, the Chicago Transit Authority, and the Chicago Bus Rapid Transit Steering Committee, recently launched the 2013 Burnham Prize Competition: NEXT STOP: Designing Chicago BRT Stations. Intended to catalyze iconic, sustainable, and functional design for representative corridors in Chicago’s planned Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, they are seeking entries that integrate innovative and compelling transportation design into Chicago’s urban fabric. Each design team must submit designs for three different prototype sites and demonstrate how BRT station design can be adapted to each context. Submissions are due by May 13. For more information, please visit here.
Design Talk: Abhay Wadhwa of AWA Lighting Designers
Organized by New York Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (nycobaNOMA), lighting designer Abhay Wadhwa, founder and design principal of AWA Lighting Designers, will speak about Contextualizing Light: The Impact of Culture and Climate on Lighting Design at the 2013 Design Talk. AWA Lighting Designers are known for their architectural lighting designs nationally and internationally and were just featured in the Index Furniture Journal’s January-February 2013 issue. The event will take place at the Mohawk Showroom in New York City on April 18th from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. For more information, please visit here.
CAPACITY: Gensler Los Angeles Academic Studio
CAPACITY, the Gensler Los Angeles led academic studio at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, was created with the intent to survey, understand and visualize the dynamic set of infrastructure constraints impacting and contributing to Downtown Los Angeles’ capacity to evolve. The video above highlights the documentation and synthesizing done by the SLO_GenLA ’13 Professional studio which shows the capacity of Los Angeles’ infrastructure and demonstrates how the limits of each system may physically impact the future built form of the city. Once these variables, which include building information and zoning, energy, waste management, and water were universally known and their units of measure understood, scenarios for the future were generated.
Living Arts City: Art and Urbanism in Phnom Penh and New York
As part of Season of Cambodia, a multidisciplinary arts festival taking place this spring in New York City, Parsons The New School for Design and Cambodian Living Arts will be presenting a two-day colloquium titled, ‘Living Arts City: Art and Urbanism in Phnom Penh and New York’. Taking place April 6-7, the event will bring together artists, performers, curators, arts managers, scholars and students in a series of facilitated workshops and discussions on how to make the arts central to a sustainable future in Cambodia, in the face of rapid growth and urban development. For more information, including a complete schedule of events, please visit here.
AIACC 2013 Monterey Design Conference
Founded in 1979, the Monterey Design conference, which is presented by AIACC (California Council), has become the “Renaissance Weekend” for architects. Held in Pacific Grove at the historic Asilomar Conference Grounds founded in 1913, it has been praised as the most prestigious and best attended architectural design conference in the United States. This year, the conference will take place September 27-29 and all are invited to watch, think, interact, learn and recharge your creative energies with more than 700 of California’s best-known architects. For more information, please visit here.
Wang Shu Lecture at The Cooper Union
Presented by The Architectural League of New York, the Wang Shu lecture is coming up this Tuesday, April 2nd, at The Cooper Union at 7:00pm. The 2012 Pritzker laureate will be discussing his current work and how Amateur Architecture Studio, founded by him and wife Lu Wenyu, incorporates his knowledge of everyday techniques to adapt and transform materials for contemporary projects. Some of his most important built works include the Library of Wenzheng College, Suzhou University; Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum; the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art; and the Ningbo History Museum. For more information, please visit here.
‘Future of Cities’ Daniel Libeskind Lecture
Taking place this coming Tuesday, April 2nd at 6:30pm, Daniel Libeskind, one of the most celebrated architects working today, will be delivering the ‘Future of Cities’ lecture as part of the Assembly Series at Washington University in St. Louis. His presentation, sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Architecture Student Council, is free and open to the public and will take place in Graham Chapel. Well known for his Jewish Museum in Berlin, the museum’s radical, strikingly asymmetrical design, is a true icon for the city and the country of Germany. He has received numerous awards including the 2001 Hiroshima Art Prize – an award given to an artist whose work promotes international understanding and peace, never before given to an architect. Fore more information, please visit here.
