Articles

Today’s selection includes a neighborhood information tower in California, a Lithuanian passenger terminal, a creatively glazed education center, and an unconventional vernacular day care centre in the Netherlands.  We hope you enjoy taking a look at these projects that deserve a revisit!

A preview of the interview we did with Steven Holl. In this part he describes the recently opened Museum of Ocean and Surf in Biarritz, France.

1. Architects are not leaders

In fact, we wait to follow. Architecture is a service profession. Clients hire us to help implement their vision, if we’re lucky. Or, they hire us because of a legal obligation to have a licensed professional seal a set of drawings, when we aren’t lucky. We don’t define the needs of the community; in fact, we usually don’t even recognize them on our own. We need a patron to guide us. Until then, we wait, for instructions.

2. Architects are not relevant

We are losing (or have already lost) our position in the public conscience. Don’t believe me? Just ask a stranger what an Architect does. They’ll have no idea, or worse, they’ll think Architecture is for someone else; someone with more disposable income; someone with more elite taste; someone more urbane; someone with different priorities; someone else; but not them. We have systematically put ourselves and our profession into the margins of society.

This en-route experience, a three city touring seminar on digital fabrication, draws a diverse group of design participants from afar for a full schedule of exchanges with leading practitioners, practices, fabrication labs… all while exposed to European transit infrastructure: trains planes & even a few mountain roads.

On June 26 of this year, Steven Holl’s Museum of Ocean and Surf opened in Biarritz, France, and we recently learned that the building has been named the Public Building of the Year by the 2011 Emirates Glass LEAF Awards. Designed in collaboration with Solange Fabião, the museum has a strong connection between the sea and the built environment both on the programmatic level as the museum serves as a “teaching tool” to educate people about the health of the ocean, and on a formal level as the massing was conceptually influenced by “ under the sky and under the sea.” Yesterday, we shared an amazing clip from our interview with Steven Holl about the museum – check it out and tell us your thoughts on the project.

 More about the project after the break.

People have been communicating through storytelling since they lived in caves and sat around campfires. Today, businesses use narrative to convey their companies’ messages and stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace. So how does storytelling apply to design firms? What distinguishes one firm from another is not only its portfolio, but messages conveyed through creative and compelling stories. These speakers will demonstrate how design firms can use multimedia tools and different platforms to create effective stories that boost marketing, communications, and public relations programs.

The Museum of Art at Washington State University is organizing ‘Architecture for Art,’ the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to the career of Jim Olson, one of the Northwest’s most significant architects and founder of the internationally recognized Seattle-based firm, Olson Kundig Architects.

The exhibit, which is open from now until December 10th, will serve as a retrospective for Olson’s 45-year career, highlighting his residential legacy, including his own homes-an apartment in downtown Seattly and his cabin on Puget Sound-as well as his public design work, which encompasses the Lightcatcher Museum in Bellingham, Washingtom, St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Pike and Virginia Building in Seattle, and the Noah’s Art Exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.  More information on the event after the break.

Winners of the Cityscape Awards for Architecture in Emerging Markets were recently announced at a glamorous gala dinner held at the Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai.

The Awards rewarded excellence in architecture and design from the emerging regions of the Gulf States, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia (excluding Japan, New Zealand and Australia) and recognized architects and their projects that have shown outstanding designs, performance, vision and achievement in key areas of architecture. More information on the winners after the break.

The AIA New York Chapter has chosen Richard Meier has the 2011 President Award recipient, past award winners include Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, and Henry Cobb. Recognizing Meier’s contribution and influence to the city of New York, he will be honored at the upcoming Heritage Ball on October 27th, which is part New York City’s Archtober, the month long celebration of architecture and design.

The Met in Bangkok, Thailand by WOHA has scooped the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) prestigious RIBA Lubetkin Prize for the most outstanding work of international architecture by a member of the RIBA.

A residential skyscraper incorporating outdoor spaces, balconies and gardens, The Met is a 66 storey perforate tower which uses the power of nature to cool the apartments. Wind speeds at that height are considerable, so by punching holes through the building and drawing air up vertical voids in the structure, the architects have been able to introduce natural ventilation to flats at all levels. Some of these floors are kept open to provide communal spaces, which include a garden, a gym, a 50 metre swimming pool and other leisure facilities, such as barbecue and seating areas. More information on the award after the break.

In its inaugural year, Archtober, is a month long festival focused on architecture exhibitions and activities in New York City. After holding eight years of successful architecture weeks typically held in October, that included openhousenewyork (OHNY), and exhibition at the Center for Architecture, AIA NY’s Heritage Ball, and last year Architecture & Design Film Festival’s first NYC event, New York City has created a month long celebration of exciting events for the general public, visitors and architecture aficionados to enjoy.

The MVRDV and COBE scheme for the transformation of a former concrete factory into a multifunctional creative hub was chosen as the winner of an international design competition. The masterplan proposes an informal transformation of the 45.000m2 site into a dense neighborhood, incl. 8.000m2 existing factory halls, organized around a plaza for events. Three new volumes will be added on top of the halls: The 11.000m2 ROCKmagneten consists of The Danish Rock Museum, The Roskilde Festival Folkschool incl. student housing, and the headquarters of the famous Roskilde Rock Festival. They share program in a public creative communal house. The museum with a total of 3.000m2 will be completed as the first phase in 2014. More images and architects’ description after the break.

In an elimination that began with 14 participants in the starting line-up, CuraVita won the competition for their design of a new 133,730 m2 hospital just outside Herning, Denmark known as the New Hospital in the West. With this honoring selection, they have taken a big step toward the construction of their professionally ambitious and attractive hospital to ensure a hospital of international standard. More images and architects’ description after the break.

From the beginning of September until mid-December, BOFFO Building Fashion will feature five amazing collaborative expressions of fashion and architecture just south of Canal Street in Tribeca. BOFFO, a non-profit arts and culture organization based in New York, has organized these temporary gallery exhibitions as a way to introduce art and design to the public realm while creating opportunities for artists and designers to explore a subject matter that educates and informs the public. The first installation of Nicola Formichetti and Gage/Clemenceau Architects manifests Formichetti’s futuristic eye for fashion into a faceted, almost robotic, entity for showing his collection.

More about the exhibit after the break.

Jeju is an island formed by volcanic activities and celebration of its distinctive geological features was one of the main objectives of the brief. The design started from answering the brief which explicitly requested that the scheme to symbolise the volcanic landscape of Jeju consists of caves and mounds. poly.m.ur viewed these two geological feature in terms of their morphological forma-tions – one as constructive space (volcanic mounds) and the other one as subtractive space (volcanic caves), and were repre-sented in the formation of the massing of our scheme.

For the second year in a row, Zaha Hadid was announced as the winner of the prestigious RIBA Stirling Prize. Often labeled as the UK’s most important architecture award, Hadid will be awarded £20,000 for her design of the Evelyn Grace Academy in London. Recognizing the ‘architects of the building that has made the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture in the past year’, to be considered the project must be built in Britain or the architects head office must be in the UK.

This exclusive video of OMA’s Maggie’s Centre by BD online features OMA partner Ellen van Loon discussing the design for the cancer care center. Led by OMA Partners Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon with Associate-in-charge Richard Hollington the Maggie Gartnaval center located in Glasgow opened today.

“In the more recent past, it is the architecture of minimalism that has provided the most explicit and significant contribution to the reciprocal relationship between fashion and architecture. In many ways the abstraction and literal emptiness of minimalism has been the ideal setting for the valorization of fashion–a technique not dissimilar in its impact to the exotic settings of nineteenth-century department stores, both ultimately leading to the construction of desire…We are now at a period when the luxury retail store has become a crucial forum for architecture. A previously off-limits relationship has now found mutually beneficial common ground. Through the realization of numerous projects, the Architecture Department at Louis Vuitton has been involved in establishing this new territory, and continues to pursue the exploration of architecture in a continually changing present.”–Mohsen Mostafavi