AIA recently made us aware of this year’s CAE Educational Facility Design Awards. The purpose of the design awards program is to identify trends and emerging ideas, honor excellence in planning and design, and disseminate knowledge about best practices in educational and community facilities. Check out the list of 13 after the break, including several of the firms we have previously featured.
Designed in 1924 in collaboration with the house owner Truus Schröder-Schräder, the Rietveld Schröder House continues to impress architects and interior designers with its innovative solutions to prominent design questions of its time (see our AD Classics about it).
ATKINS Shanghai has recently completed the design concept for a future skyscraper/mixed use center for the future central business district of Zhangjiagang, China. Additional renderings, plans and a description from the architects can be found after the jump.
French novelist Gustave Flaubert’s expression, “le bon Dieu est le détail” became a cliché for one reason, it is true. God does dwell in the details, and well done details are often the difference between a mundane building and a transcendent one. That is what makes it so easy to spend hours combing through books like Virginia McLeod’s Encyclopedia of Detail in Contemporary Residential Architecture. This book is a great resource of contemporary details with over 700 construction details and 100 of the best contemporary residences by firms such as The Miller Hull Partnership, Safdie Rabines Architects, Steven Holl Architects, and many more.
More information after the break.
We were excited to receive Mackintosh School of Architecture’s 36th addition of MacMag – a student publication that catalogues the work of the student body in a way that is as much about the graphical expression as it is about the architectural projects it contains (check out our coverage for the 35th addition of MacMag here). “MacMag 36 is a proud statement of where we are now, as students relating to contemporary and future architecture,” explained the student editors Joe Barton, Marguerita Kyriakidis, Heather MacSween, David O’Reilly and John Robson. The book is divided into 5 different stages – to coincide with the years of study – beginning in Stage One with creative and explorative work and moving through the fifth stage which showcases the architectural growth of the students in more comprehensive works.
More about the publication after the break.
The Economist has some really interesting articles on doing business. The latest are on the 100th anniversary of IBM and another which measures the success of multinational business vs. philanthropy in changing society for the better. IBM came out the winner in the latter one. Not, however, because it is a multinational corporation but because of the way it does business. IBM treats its employees well which directly shapes its influence on the larger, now global, community. Moreover, while many think of IBM as a “tech” company and its stock is often listed as such, IBM actually categorizes itself as a service company.
There are five major strategies that have ensured IBM’s ability to withstand the vicissitudes of a dynamic business sector, three of which directly apply to architecture firms. First, IBM puts its customers first and foremost. They do this by using a significant number of their employees to foster and maintain client relationships. That makes it more difficult for other companies to poach their customers. Why? Because those other companies don’t think developing and keeping clients happy is a good use of their resources, i.e. employees. IBM knows better. Clients trust them precisely because of their long relationship. So when clients need something, they turn to IBM. That means a steady client-base of loyal customers who in turn recommend IBM to their clients and friends.
“You’re not going to find any of Ai Weiwei’s work being shown in Beijing”, said each Beijing gallery representative. That’s because the artist and agent provocateur has been detained for 80 days now was released today, from what the government is saying was based on “economic charges”. The name “Ai Weiwei” has joined a long list of sensitive words in this country, and associating yourself with the artist has become tantamount to asking for trouble. Just ask the Chinese curator who was questioned by authorities after putting Ai Weiwei’s name under a blank wall in Beijing’s Incident Art Festival.
While Beijing’s lively art scene might currently be scrubbed clean of Ai Weiwei’s work, there’s one thing that’s a little difficult to “harmonize” away, as it’s known here. In 1999, Ai Weiwei began moving into the world of architecture, establishing his own architecture studio called FAKE design four years later. So Ai Weiwei’s artistic vision continues to stand in the form of buildings across the nation’s capital. The most concentrated of these is the artist district of Caochangdi, a few kilometres north of the more commercial art district called 798. It’s also the location of the artist’s studio and where he headed straight to after his release.
More after the break.
We have heard your cries, and we are finally taking our Architecture City Guide international. We like the new bottom-up approach, and we will be sticking with that for format as we branch out. So we need your help. To make the City Guides more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to an image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. (The image must be from a site that has a Creative Common License cache like Flickr or Wikimedia. We cannot use images that are copyrighted unless they are yours and you give us permission.) From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons. Additionally, we try to only show completed projects.
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.
Architects: de Architekten Cie / Branimir Medic, Pero Puljiz Location: Kaohsiung, Taiwan Collaborators: Malone Chang + Yu-lin Chen Architects Client: Kaohsiung County Mayor Project Year: 2007 Project Area: 24,470 sqm Photographs: Courtesy of de Architekten Cie.
Courtesy of sTARTT
“WHATAMI”, winner of the 2011 Young Architect Program at the MAXXI, is beginning to take shape. This summer installation is situated within the exterior spaces of the museum and is the result of a partnership between MoMA’s P.S.1 and the National Museum of the 21st Century Arts in Rome. Simultaneously Interboro Partners‘ “Holding Pattern” will on display at the MoMA in New York and sTARTT’s winning design “WHATAMI” at Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI.
Phaidon Press recently made us aware of a video they posted on what makes a successful city. It is part of a series by Ricky Burdett that promotes the book Living in the Endless City. This video features Ricky Burdett, Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen. This is an important topic as three quarters of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050.
On the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for New York, the foundational document that established the Manhattan street plan from Houston Street to 155th Street, the Architectural League invites architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and other design professionals to use the Manhattan street grid as a catalyst for thinking about the present and future of New York.
The Rotterdam based design team STAR strategies + architecture has shared with us their recent project, O’ Mighty Green, a critical piece about Green – washing and especially about the abuse of “Green” in architecture. Additional images and text can be seen after the break.
Architects: Hawkins\Brown Location: Northants, United Kingdom Project Year: 2010 Client: Corby Borough Council Project Area: 715.35 sqm Photographs: Tim Crocker, Hufton + Crow
The lecture will take place at the Art Institute of Chicago on Wednesday, June 29 at 6:30 p.m. Their talk, organized by the museum’s Architecture & Design Society, will be given in the museum’s Rubloff Auditorium. The cost is $15 for the general public, $10 for society members, and $5 for students with a valid ID. For more information, please click here.
Young Greek architects Dimos Moysiadis and Xaris Tsitsikas, have just shared their latest project, an architecture competition entry for the redesign of the central square in Kozani, Greece. The proposal is focusing on a redesign of the public space for hosting various social activities while composing an attractive pole for gathering people of all ages 24 hours a day. The proposed design philosophy was developed by considering the square as the kernel of social everyday life. For additional images and a brief description, follow after the break.
The Brooklyn architecture team Popular Architecture has recently had their proposal for Cinema Pushinsky shortlisted in DuPont’s 2011 Changing the Face competition. Further images of their proposed restoration and a brief narrative after the jump.
This week, with the help of our readers, we visited Indianapolis for our Architecture City Guide. Our readers suggested a lot of really nice buildings and we greatly appreciate their help. Indianapolis’s numerous sporting events and conventions continually draw crowds to this industrious state capital throughout the year. It is only fitting that there is an architecture city guide for its various contemporary buildings. As a seat of government and industry, Indianapolis also boasts a nice variety of historic architecture that is worth seeing. Take a look at the list our readers help put together and add your favorites to the comment section below.
The Architecture City Guide: Indianapolis list and corresponding map after the break.
Check out this crazy project we found headed by Armin Blasbichler with 21 students from the School of Design and Crafts at the University of Innsbruck. The task challenged the students (known as Blasbichlers Twentyone) to analyze a local bank and exploit the bank’s weaknesses by planning a robbery. According to Blasbichler, planning this robbery builds upon key aspects of an architectural mind such as the ability to constantly re-imagine and re-think. In a broader scope, the project questions the value of this kind of immaterial architecture to see whether “architecture itself of any monetary value.”
In an interview from We Make Money Not Art more about the project is revealed.
Back in February we shared with you that part of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address focused on highlighting future plans for making American businesses more energy efficient. The Better Buildings Initiative (BBI) that the President proposed would invest in innovative clean energy technologies, aiming to increase energy efficiency in commercial by 20 percent in the next ten years.
Two churches, two chapels, and one temple. Check our seventh selection of previously featured religious architecture after the break.
Kuokkala Church / Lassila Hirvilammi The wish of the Parish of Jyväskylä was to build “a church that looks like a church”. Our proposal was a simple, sculptural form within which all of the church’s different functions could be contained. The design is “of our time”, yet permeated with nods to and re-interpretations of church-building tradition (read more…)
In September 2008, HKSARG and SMPG jointly announced the implementation of a new BCP at Liantang/Heung Yuen Wai in the north-eastern New Territories of Hong Kong and Luohu in Shenzhen to serve the cross-boundary goods vehicles and passengers travelling between Hong Kong (HK) and Shenzhen (SZ) East. The new BCP will connect with the Shenzhen Eastern Corridor and provide an efficient access across the boundary to the SZ East, Huizhou, various cities in Guangdong East, and the adjacent provinces such as Fujian and Jiangxi.
Directed with respect for all views and spatial elements of the incredible energized given space, the concept for the Beton Hala Waterfront by Pero Vukovic, in collaboration with Branka Vukovic, becomes a zone of overlap of the two natural barriers, park/forest (Kalemegdan) and the rivers Sava and Danube, where a huge value of the area belongs to their confluence. More images and architects’ description after the break.
But you can browse the last one: 417
