When architects were asked to re-imagine Chicago’s neglected buildings for an exhibition, Dirk Lohan designed a revitalization plan for Louis Sullivan's Pilgrim Baptist Church. Soon Sullivan’s landmark building will become the nation’s first National Museum of Gospel Music, complete with a cafe, retail store, event space, research and listening library, and a 350-seat auditorium.
Mercer released their annual list of the Most Livable Cities in the World last month. The list ranks 231 cities based on factors such as crime rates, sanitation, education and health standards, with Vienna at #1 and Baghdad at #231. There’s always some furor over the results, as there ought to be when a city we love does not make the top 20, or when we see a city rank highly but remember that one time we visited and couldn’t wait to leave.
To be clear, Mercer is a global HR consultancy, and their rankings are meant to serve the multinational corporations that are their clients. The list helps with relocation packages and remuneration for their employees. But a company’s first choice on where to send their workers is not always the same place you’d choose to send yourself to.
And these rankings, calculated as they are, also vary depending on who’s calculating. Monocle publishes their own list, as does The Economist, so the editors at ArchDaily decided to throw our hat in as well. Here we discuss what we think makes cities livable, and what we’d hope to see more of in the future.
Foster + Partner’s Musée de la Romanité Narbonne (Roman Museum of Narbonne) has moved closer to completion, with the scheme's building envelope now fully constructed. The museum seeks to become one of the most significant cultural attractions in the Southern French region, hosting more than 1000 Roman artifacts. The scheme’s progress was celebrated at a topping out ceremony on 30th January 2018, with the installation of VELUX Modular Skylights marking the completion of the building envelope.
Once a major Roman port, the city of Narbonne has amassed an abundance of ancient buildings, relics, and archaeological sites. The Foster + Partners scheme, designed in collaboration with museum specialist Studio Adrien Gardere, centers on the prime exhibit for the museum: a collection of over 1000 Roman funerary stones recovered from the city’s medieval walls in the 19th century. The stones are to be placed at the heart of a simple rectilinear structure, separating the public galleries from private research spaces.
MVRDV has released details of their alternative design for the Taoyuan Museum of Art, an entry for an international competition ultimately won by Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop. The MVRDV scheme, developed in collaboration with JJP Architects and Planners, seeks to become a nature-centered cultural destination, transforming the area into a “cherry room for the city.”
Throughout the design process, MVRDV drew inspiration from the natural world, recognizing the potential for public spaces in the rapidly-expanding Taoyuan City to blur the boundaries between the built and natural environment.
Update 3/2/18: A previous version of this article named Snøhetta as the leader of the team; the principal architect is in fact Liminal Studio.
Australian firm Liminal Studio, in collaboration with Snøhetta and Rush Wright Associates, has been selected as the winner of an international competition for the design of the new History and Interpretation Center at Cascades Female Factory Historic Site in South Hobart, Tasmania.
One of the most significant female penal sites dating back to 19th century, when Australia was still a British penal colony, the Cascades Female Colony was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. The new History and Interpretation Center will allow visitors to learn about the site’s history and how its social, cultural and political implications have impacted present day Australia.
Studio Gang has revealed the design of their $70 Million expansion of the Arkansas Arts Center, located in historic MacArthur Park in the state capital of Little Rock. Working with associate architects Polk Stanley Wilcox and landscape architecture firm SCAPE, Studio Gang has envisioned a sweeping roof structure that will connect the existing architecturally disparate museum pavilions into a cohesive whole.
An international team of young architects based in Copenhagen have won first prize for their proposal ‘Finnskogens Hus’ in a competition for a new Museum of Forest Finn Culture in Svullrya, Norway.
The fourth largest architectural competition in Norway, the new museum aims to inform and educate visitors about the Forest Finns, Finnish migrants who settled in Swedish and Norwegian forests in the late 16th to 17th centuries.
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The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia has announced that award-winning New York-based Selldorf Architects have been selected to develop a large-scale reinstallation of the institution’s galleries in collaboration with the museum staff. The renovation will encompass all seven of the collection areas—from Photography and European Art to Decorative Arts and Design—while emphasizing visitor experience, contemporary narratives, and the strengths of the Museum’s holdings to create a cohesive experience thats deepens engagement inside the Richard Meier and Renzo Piano-designed complex.
The Getty Conservation Institute has announced a workshop to address the care and conservation of three museums designed by Le Corbusier. The three museums are the only museums designed by the prolific architect. The workshop will be held in India, where two of the three museums are, with municipal corporations from Ahmedabad and Chandigarh serving as hosts for the event. The Foundation Le Corbusier, located in Paris, will also be assisting with the workshop.
Architect Emmanuelle Moureaux’s latest art experience, “COLOR OF TIME,” allows observers to experience the passage of time through color. Moureaux’s installation is one of a series called, “Art and Design, dialogue with materials,” for Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art & Design’s opening ceremonies. Throughout the series artists played with different materials, showing their varying potentials and characteristics.
Moureaux chose paper; layering over 100,000 number cutouts into a 3D grid. From sunrise at 6:30 to 19:49, the numbers turn over 100 shades of color, ending in black. A color changing experience totaling 799 minutes.
From the creators of Museum Of The History Of Polish Jews in Warsaw, comes a competition finalist proposal for the new Museum for the Defense and Siege of Leningrad in St. Petersburg. Lahdelma & Mahalmäki Architects, in collaboration with Ralph Appelbaum Associates, designed three main parts: the Thread of Life (museum and exhibitions), the Memorial of Heroes of Leningrad and the Square of Testimony. Thought to have the popular vote, this entry sought to redevelop and reconnect the city of to the park and museum with its Neo-Classical grid.
BACKGROUND
Carl Sandburg has accurately described language as the most indispensable tool in the life of us social animals, men. Men have traversed through ages and grown into the most superior race on Earth because of their advanced linguistic and communication skills. Human language is unique in comparison to other forms of communication, as it allows us to produce a vast range of expressions and emotions from a finite set of elements.
The timeline for the development of modern day languages spans thousands of years. Sounds have developed into words, meanings, scripts, grammar, fonts and a formal system of communication called linguistics. One organization suggests that there are about 7099 living languages in the world, but which are not evenly distributed around the world geography. Only 23 languages account for more than half the world’s population. Roughly a third of languages are now endangered, often with less than 1,000 speakers remaining.
Language is much more than just a means of communication. It is also an inseparable part of our culture. In fact, language allows culture to exist. Language allows us to pass on ideas, knowledge, and even attitudes on to the next generation. Language allows culture to develop by freeing people to move beyond their immediate experiences”. Language is intrinsic to the expression of culture. As a means of communicating values, beliefs and customs, it has an important social function and fosters feelings of group identity and solidarity. It is the means by which culture and its traditions and shared values may be conveyed and preserved.
Languages are the most important part of a particular cultural heritage. As one culture dies and another grows, the same happens to their languages. Language is a relic that needs preservation as other inventions and objects of importance. It is an intangible resource that can also unlock some of the lost secrets and even civilizations that existed on the face of the earth.
The aim of the competition is to design an iconic museum of language in the heart of London that will deconstruct the science of linguistics into various aspects of- speech, script and sense. The proposal must not only become an archive for the past and present world languages but also serve as a learning center that works to develop languages and future communication systems.
Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners has broken ground on a new conservation and storage facility for the Louvre in Liévin, France. Capable of housing conservation and storage facilities for as many as 250,000 works, the building will is aiming to become of one of the world’s most advanced research and study facilities.
AMO, the research and think tank wing of OMA, has completed a flexible new exhibition space for the permanent collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Named Stedelijk BASE, the bespoke display system is constructed from “very thin yet solid” free-standing steel partitions that interlock like puzzle-pieces to create an open-ended flow for viewing art from the late 19th and 20th centuries.
ETAR MUSEUM HOTEL
Architectural Competition for Reconstruction of the Strannopriemnitsa Hotel,
part of Open Аir Ethnographic Museum "Etar", Gabrovo
The Kharayeb Archaeological Museum (KAM) was designed by Shiogumo in the agricultural lands of the coastal village Kharayeb, in the south of Lebanon. The site-specific museum was commissioned to preserve and enhance the historical, cultural, and public significance by the directors of the archeological mission and site, Dr. Ida Oggiano (Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo Antico of CNR, Italy) and Dr. Wissam Khalil (Lebanese University).
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Earlier this month, Abu Dhabi’s much-awaited “universal museum,” the Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Pritzker Prize-winner Jean Nouvel, was opened to the public. After several years of delays and problems including accusations of worker rights violations, revisions in economic strategies, and regional turmoil, the completion of the museum is a feat in itself. Critics, supporters, naysayers, artists, economists, and human rights agencies, have all closely followed its shaky progress, but now that it’s finally open, reviews of the building are steadily pouring in.
Read on to find out how critics have responded to Nouvel’s work so far.
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