Architecture News

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has announced two gifts totaling $75 million dollars, bringing the museum’s Peter Zumthor designed campus overhaul one step closer to reality, reports the Los Angeles Times. Elaine Wynn, one of the world’s top art collectors, has pledged $50 million dollars, and former Univision chairman A. Jerrold Perenchio has promised $25 million, bringing the total funds raised and approved to $275 million, just shy of halfway to the $600 million required for the project.

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With the conclusion of this year’s Met Gala, on Thursday the public will have their first look at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new spring show, "Manus x Machina". According to the museum, “[the exhibition] will explore [an] ongoing dichotomy, in which hand and machine are presented as discordant tools in the creative process, and question the relationship and distinction between haute couture and ready-to-wear.” Occurring in the museum’s Robert Lehman Wing, a 1975 expansion by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, the exhibition design has been developed by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA New York. Organized by Andrew Bolton, the Curator of The Costume Institute, the exhibition will feature over 100 samples of “haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear, dating from an 1880s Worth gown to a 2015 Chanel suit.” Read on for a small preview of the exhibition, fashion, and spectacle of Manus x Machina, on view from May 5 - August 14.

Santiago Calatrava has won the competition to design the United Arab Emirates Pavilion for the Expo 2020 Dubai in 2020. Nine finalists submitted 11 concepts that were evaluated on three criteria: their expression of Expo’s theme, “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future,” whether the design was evocative of the UAE, and if a balance was struck between the country’s past and future. Calatrava’s design proposes a 15,000 square meter pavilion with exhibition areas, an auditorium, food and beverage outlets, and VIP lounges. The design is meant to evoke the wings of a falcon in flight, linking itself to the country’s history of falconry to emphasize the country’s present-day goals of global connectedness.

Two sculptures—Obelisk by Alison and Peter Smithson and Columns by Álvaro Siza Vieira—have been re-erected in Shatwell, a "semi-derelict agricultural complex" located in rural England. The instatement of the monuments form a part of an evolving programme of installations which Drawing Matter, an organisation founded by Niall Hobhouse "that champions the process of architecture through collecting, archiving and commissioning," will use to explore the relationship between architecture, sculpture and landscape.

The Australian Institute of Architects have awarded their highest honor, the Gold Medal, to the founders of ARM Architecture during the 2016 Australian Achievement in Architecture Awards. Based out of Melbourne and Perth, ARM is widely known for their “contemporary, often daring, sometimes controversial designs.”

Established in 1988 by directors Stephen Ashton, Howard Raggatt, and Ian McDougall, the large scale practice has had a significant impact on design throughout Australia. They've designed a range of projects including cultural buildings, urban design and planning, office buildings, apartments, community projects, and shopping centers.

A photo posted by SWEENEY ART NYC (@sssweeney) on May 2, 2016 at 11:32am PDT

The Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava, a New York landmark built in 1851 by Richard Upjohn, burned Sunday night in a fire after more than 700 parishioners celebrated Easter, reports NBC New York. Originally known as Trinity Chapel, the cathedral was created as satellite location for Trinity Church at Wall Street and Broadway in Lower Manhattan, also designed by Upjohn, after parishioners began to settle farther from the original location. The church was later joined by a Clergy House and the Trinity Chapel School in an ecclesiastical complex, but in 1943 the chapel and neighbors were sold to the Serbian Orthodox Church. The cathedral, stretching between 25th and 26th Street, was nearly 180 feet long, and had one of the largest hammerbeam roofs in the city. The New York Landmarks Conservancy partnered with the church for a 2002-03 restoration of the building's facade and roof. The four-alarm fire that was contained by Monday morning is under investigation as suspicious.

Architects are famously cynical about the long hours and over-education required for what can be a thankless career. But in a recent study conducted by WalletHub, “2016’s Best & Worst Entry-Level Jobs”, recent grads and seasoned professionals alike may be surprised to find that “architect” is ranked 10th out of 109 evaluated professions. Read on to find out how they calculated their result.

"I always liked play as a form of learning; toys are often a prelude to serious ideas," says Federico Babina about his latest series of illustrations, titled ARCHICARDS. "The game can also be a thought experiment. I'm interested in playing with architecture's seriousness and illustration's lightheartedness."

Babina's illustrations turn 12 of the architecture world's most recognizable faces into card-game caricatures, accompanied by the designs and symbols that most characterize their design style. Whether it's the dislocated planes of Mies van der Rohe (a Jack), Queen Zaha Hadid's jagged curves, or the modulor man that accompanies Le Corbusier - who is, of course, a king - Babina's playing cards are loaded with design references. They might indeed have some educational value, but they are mostly, as Babina points out, for "serious fun."

Read on to see the full set of 12 illustrations.

Twelve years after Santiago Calatrava revealed his design for the World Trade Center Oculus, the PATH station finally opened to the public in March. Although not officially confirmed by the Port Authority, the total cost of the Oculus is estimated to be nearly four billion dollars - almost double the original budget. The Real Deal has broken down the big-ticket costs that went into the making of the Oculus.

KAAN Architecten, in collaboration with VORM, have designed a new 11,000 square-meter Education and Study Center (OZC) for the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands. The OZC will be used by approximately 2,500 students and educators on the campus. The goal is for the new facility to increase the quality of education at the university.

The Parliament of the United Kingdom has announced a series of renovations that will take place on Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben in London, starting in early 2017. During the renovation period, the tower and clock will be partially covered with scaffolding, which will be removed as the work progresses. Moreover, the clock mechanism will be stopped for several months, during which there will be no chiming or striking of the iconic bells.

The World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced that Lars Krückeberg, Founding Partner of GRAFT, and Juergen Mayer, Founder of J. Mayer H., will speak at this year's festival as part of a session titled ‘Architect as Instigator,’ exploring issues of housing, immigration, and how architects can drive social change through the buildings and spaces they create.

The world’s largest, annual, international architectural event, WAF will be held from November 16 to 18, at Franz Ahrens’ historic former bus depot now known as Arena Berlin, in Berlin, Germany. WAF also features the biggest architectural awards programme in the world. Projects can be submitted for consideration for an award until May 19th via this link.

MVRDV’s design for the Dutch exhibition “Hola Holanda” at the Book Fair of Bogotá (FILBO) features a modular system of crates that will be repurposed as neighbourhood libraries after the Book Fair ends. Avoiding the waste of resources created by one-time pavilions, the Dutch firm has introduced a playful element of sustainability to the fair, maintaining its spirit even after the event ends.

"What is the most expensive object on Earth?" posits an article by Ed Davey published by the BBC. A new nuclear power station being built in the south west of the United Kingdom may well end up holding the title. At £24 billion ($35 billion) Davey estimates, "you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas - the world's tallest building, in Dubai, cost a piffling £1bn ($1.5bn)." The article later compares the construction to other projects like bridges and particle accelerators, as well as historic precedents like the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Great Wall of China, Hong Kong International Airport, or the International Space Station – the last of which cost a whopping $110 billion. But comparing monumental building and engineering projects comes with some caveats, such as: “what is strictly an individual object?” “Is cost measured by today’s values or those at the time of construction?” “Are we talking about modern methods or those used historically?” Read the full article here.