Hou de Sousa (Nancy Hou and Josh de Sousa) have recently won two competitions for temporary installations in Washington DC and New York, both using salvaged materials. The first, Raise/Raze, is the winning proposal for DC’s Dupont Underground, an abandoned trolley station repurposed as a contemporary arts and culture space. The project reuses the balls from Snarkitecture’s “The Beach” installation at the National Building Museum for a new environment-generating initiative, which opens on April 30.
As winners of the 2016 Folly Competition held by the Architectural League of New York, Hou de Sousa will also soon build a pavilion in Socrates Sculpture Park, in Queens. A simple wooden canopy, the structure is a multi-purpose space made of standard dimensional lumber, but has been accentuated with shingles of scrap wood found on-site. Known as Sticks, the pavilion will open to the public on July 9.
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has announced the winners of the 2016 Publication Awards and SAH Award for Film & Video as part of their annual International Conference Awards ceremony in Pasadena, California.
Awarded annually, the SAH Publication awards honor excellence in "architectural history, landscape history, and historic preservation scholarship," alongside outstanding architectural exhibition catalogs. Eligible publications must have been published in the two years immediately preceding the award, with nominations for the 2017 Publication Awards and SAH Award for Film & Video opening on June 1, 2016
Learn more about the winning publications after the break.
Coachella, the annual music festival that takes place in California's Colorado Desert, is a spectacle on numerous levels, but it is the associated visual artists, architects, sculptors, and designers that are an often overlooked element of event's success. Below are the best architectural installations of Coachella 2016.
In an interview with the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), Bjarke Ingels reflects on the design of skyscrapers, noting how "sculpture is fine, but if its arbitrary it's not as interesting." Architects, Ingels argues, have the problem of "skilled incompetence:" the notion that they "already know the answer before [they've] even heard the question." This prevents them "from questioning the question, or having the question rephrased, or elaborating on the question, or even listening for the question – because [they] already know the answer."
In a new film by NOWNESS, Dutch photographer Iwan Baan explains his process for photographing MAD architects’ Harbin Opera House in the northern region of China. The short documentary describes the power of architectural photography and how Baan aims to capture the present moment of a place, instead of creating a timeless scene.
At the end of 2015, OMA’s first major commission, the Netherlands Dance Theater (NDT) was swiftly demolished. The once-praised building was reduced to dust and debris within a few months, without drawing much attention from the architecture world. Koolhaas had heard rumors about the demolition of the NDT over the last decade, but did not expect the lack of public outcry. “There was almost nothing, almost zero,” he said.
Using the NDT as a case study, Metropolis Magazine takes a look at how the early works of our most lauded architects are treated when they are no longer fit for purpose, and asks how we decide on the role preservation plays in the architectural profession. Is the demolition of the NDT a sign of lack of respect for OMA? Or is it a more general sign of our current era of rapidly changing styles and a need for larger buildings? Read the full story by Metropolis Magazine, here.
Several new renderings have been released of Robert A.M. Stern Architects’ TriBeCa condos at 70 Vestry Street, according to New York YIMBY. Located next to the West Side Highway in TriBeCa in New York, the 14-story building will contain 46 condos and over 153,000 square feet of residential space, with each apartment ranging from 1,700 to 7,000 square feet.
Clockwise from top left: Rosemary Park, Rebecca G. Barnes, Amity Kurt, Patricia Galván, Farida Abu-Bakare and Claire Weisz, women who responded to the survey. Image via The New York Times
Gender inequality in the architecture profession has continued to be a cause for concern, with a recent survey from the AIA showing that women feel that little to no progress has been made with overcoming gender obstacles. Following the recent passing of Zaha Hadid, a powerful pioneer and role model for female designers, The New York Times launched an online survey asking women in architecture about their experiences in the profession. Read some of the excerpts from the two hundred responses they received after the break.
"Part of war and conflict has always been the collateral damage. Buildings have fallen in the path of military objectives, but, [...] in this war, buildings aren't destroyed because they're in the way of a target. The buildings are the target." As the narrator of The Destruction of Memory so eloquently explains, the destruction of culture—of buildings, books, and art—is often not an accidental consequence of conflict. As we can see by the actions of ISIS in Iraq and Syria today, the destruction of cultural artifacts is part and parcel of a conscientious strategy to target and destroy the collective memory, history, and identity of a people.
Kengo Kuma and Associates has completed its 10,440 square meter Wuxi Vanke arts and shopping complex, a renovated red brick cotton mill in Wuxi, China, featuring an aluminum-clad extension.
Located along the shore of the Golden Horn in Fatih, Turkey, the Bulgarian Church of St. Stephen is no ordinary basilica. Unlike most churches of its time, St. Stephen’s is constructed entirely out of cast iron, explains Atlas Obscura in their article "Bulgarian Iron Church." This method of construction was cost-effective and efficient for the time, but never became popular.
Following the death of Zaha Hadid on March 31st of this year Section D, Monocle 24's weekly review of design, architecture and craft, hones in on the role of women in architecture and design. They discuss why, despite an almost 50:50 gender split in undergraduate architecture courses, women are still grossly underrepresented at senior levels within the profession by featuring conversations with two leading female architects, Angela Brady OBE and Amanda Levete. The episode also looks back over the lives of some of architecture's overlooked heroines.
OMA's first building in Manhattan will be a condo project at 122 East 23rd Street, built in collaboration with Toll Brothers City Living. Designed by OMA's New York principal Shohei Shigematsu, the residential tower culminates a decade leading the office and several previous attempts to realize a project in the region.
Manuelle Gautrand Architecture, DesignInc, and Lacoste + Stevenson have won an international competition for the design of a civic and community building in the Australian city of Parramatta. The six-story, 12,000 square meter building, a mixture of rectilinear sharpness and parabolic curves, extends back from the city’s Victorian Free Classical style town hall. The new structure will include a variety of spaces, including: council chambers and offices, a library, public roof gardens, a customer care center and visitor experience center, community meeting rooms, a technology hub, and an innovation space.
The Venice Biennale has released a list of 19 Collateral Events that will take place alongside the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, Reporting from the Front, curated by Alejandro Aravena and chaired by Paolo Baratta. Previews of the main event begin May 26th and 27th, and it is open to the public from May 28th to November 27th 2016.
The collateral events, each selected by Alejandro Aravena and promoted by a non-profit sponsor, take place around Venice, and, in the words of Paolo Baratta, "[they] contribute, along with a good number of participating countries that do not have a pavilion in the Giardini or in the Arsenale, to spread the 15th International Architecture Exhibition by turning it into an urban phenomenon, that would engage every corner of the city."
The complete list of events can be found below, and make sure to follow ArchDaily's complete coverage of the Venice Biennale.
Courtesy of ROGERS PARTNERS Architects+Urban Designers
The St. Petersburg City Council has approved the schematic design for the new St. Pete Pier. First awarded in a competition in 2015, the new site was designed by a team composed of three firms: Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers (lead designer); ASD (executive architect); and WORKSHOP: Ken Smith Landscape Architect (landscape architect). Although the final design was updated based on city and public requests, the core programming of the original scheme was maintained.
Matthew Simmonds, an art historian and architectural stone carver based in Copenhagen, is known as the creator of exceptionally beautiful miniature spaces hewn from stone – a number of which have been previously featured on ArchDaily. Drawing on the formal language and philosophy of architecture, his work "explores themes of positive and negative form, the significance of light and darkness and the relationship between nature and human endeavour." Here he shares four recent projects: Ringrone (Faxe Limestone, 2016, 61cm tall), Corona (Faxe Limestone, 2016, 30cm tall), Ararat: Study II (Faxe Limestone, 2016, 20cm tall), and Tetraconch (Limestone, 2015, 31cm tall).
Pier 55, the floating park designed by Heatherwick Studio and landscape architecture firm, Signe Nielsen, received a green-light from the New York Supreme Court this past Friday, April 8, according to a report bythe Architect’s Newspaper. Floating above the Hudson River on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, the park is anchored by an aggregation of enormous petal-like stilts that are submerged in the water below. The park is being funded by the philanthropy of Diane von Furstenberg and her husband Barry Diller.
Pier 55’s legal troubles began last spring when the non-profit, City Club of New York filed a lawsuit against Pier55 Inc. and Hudson River Park Trust (HRPT) to stop the project.
Herzog & de Meuron have released new images of their design for National Library of Israel. Located on a prominent site in West Jerusalem, the National Library is at the base of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) and adjacent to the Israel Museum, Science Museum and Hebrew University.
Rafael Moneo has unveiled the design of his first Miami project, a luxury high-rise at the north end of the city. Known as Apeiron at The Jockey Club, or simply Apeiron, the condo project features a pair of towers to be completed in separate stages and will include 240 serviced residential units, a 90-key boutique hotel, a deep-water marina, health and wellness facilities, and outdoor pools. With Apeiron, The Jockey Club hopes to hearken back to its 1970s heydey, when it was a center of Miami’s vibrant social and nightlife scenes. Apeiron, a Greek work meaning ‘limitless’, is at 11111 Biscayne Boulevard, a location with expansive views of the water and surrounding landscape.
MVRDV and Traumhaus, a producer of low-cost, high-quality homes based on standardized elements, have teamed up to develop a 27,000 square meter project redeveloping former US Army barracks in Mannheim, Germany.
