Architects: The Latest Architecture and News

Today Lord Norman Foster issued a tribute to Steve Jobs (1955-2011), who passed away yesterday at the age of 56. Foster + Partners is working on the new Apple Campus in Cupertino, scheduled to be completed in 2015.

In this video from Cities of Opportunity 2011, architectural superstar and OMA founder Rem Koolhaas shares his views on the contemporary evolution of the city and his vision for the future of urban centers. Produced by accounting giant PwC (a.k.a PricewaterhouseCoopers before their 2010 re-branding) and the Partnership for New York City, Cities of Opportunity 2011 “analyzes the trajectory of 26 cities, all capitals of finance, commerce, and culture and through their performance, seeks to open a window on what makes cities function best.”

Two of the brightest minds from the past century.

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).

Do you think maybe it’s people that respect and admire these architects, and it’s reflected on their fan pages?

I was asking myself this question a few minutes ago, so went online to do some quick research and Googled “How much do architects earn per hour?”.

We, the architects, are a special breed. We have very particular tastes, dress in very particular ways and we even invented our own language. For us, a pen can be even more meaningful than our computers, and you might find yourself looking all around town for that perfect standard notebook that you have used for ages. So we decided to compile this special gift guide with things that we use, we like, and that we would love to find below our christmas tree.

Hope you like it! Feel free to share your gift ideas for architects on the comments below.

From the mid 1900′s to the beginning of the 2000′s, being an architect as a profession has made its way into key roles on the big screen for many big shot celebrities. Whether the roles they play in the movies are similar to the reality of the profession or not, I’m sure many architects that have watched some of these movies feel honored that their profession is one that deserves to be highlighted in ways that are not not just in architectural publications, but in the cinema world as well. More images after the break.

Office disputes happen all the time, it’s in our architect’s DNA.

The Iakov Chernikhov International Prize for Young Architects recently announced its 2010 laureate, Fantastic Norway, recently featured here on ArchDaily and now we have the complete Top Ten nominee list to share with our readers. Among this group of young and promising architects you will find some outstanding works that will hopefully go a long way to shaping the future of the profession. The complete Top Ten and links to their work after the break.

On November 17th Fantastic Norway was awarded the 2010 Iakov Chernikovs Architecture Prize by the ICIF. We here at ArchDaily have previously featured the work of Fantastic Norway and wish to congratulate them on their accolades and share with our readers some examples of their work.

More after the break.

Charles Holland, director at UK based firm FAT Architecture (see their public bathroom proposal for London) runs Fantastic Journal, an interesting blog on which he recently published the following open letter to us, the other architects:

It’s that time of the year. Architectural Record has published their list of Top 250 architecture firms. The companies are ranked according to revenue for architectural services performed in 2009 in $ millions.

The list is compiled from a survey conducted for Engineering News-Record’s annual Top 500 Design Firms Sourcebook. As last year, number 1 was for AECOM Technology Corporation, an engineer-architect firm from Los Angeles, California.

The firms classify themselves by:

A = Architect AE = Architect-Engineer AP = Architect Planner EA = Engineer-Architect AEC = Architect-Engineer-Contractor

See the top 25 after the break.

Derek Leavitt (@architectderek on Twitter) recently posted an opinionated blog entry on ‘Why Open Architecture Competitions Are Bad for Architects’ . The author outlined why entering competitions is detrimental not only to the individual, but also to the field of architecture.

Competition has been a defining characteristic of architecture for centuries.  Without competitions to spur creativity, a young woman would have never submitted her graceful yet powerful black line…and we would be without the Vietnam Memorial.  Without architects using competitions as a way to test urban gestures, a young team would have never submitted their idea to use just a portion of their allotted site, leaving the rest for a public plaza…and we would be without the Pompidou Center in France.  And, dating quite farther back, without an Italian man initially losing a competition and then determined to further his architectural understanding, we would be without the grand achievement of Brunelleschi’s dome.

The point is that although competitions are demanding, and at times may seem unfair, they are a staple in our profession which pushes the field forward.  With this in mind, we will attempt to argue in favor of the open competition, in the hope that we can persuade and inspire you to keep listening to your instinctive competitive nature and keep compiling those entries.

Philip Johnson (1906-2005), one of the most influential American architects portrayed by David LaChapelle.

Livestream + Live4Space are co-hosting a live interview with Daniel Libeskind today at 2:00PM ET (GMT -5). Thanks to the Livestream platfom, Libeskind will not only discuss his role on the WTC master plan, but will also answer questions by the audience. All you have to do is go to the streaming website here and send your questions during the interview.

Joshua Prince Ramus is one of the best architects I’ve meet, and also a very good speaker. I think most of you have already seen his presentation at TED back in 2006, where he presented the Seattle Central Library, a powerful talk on which he talked about the role of the architects in the process, as an editing/team approach rather than authorship. We interviewed Joshua back in 2008, where we first heard about his position regarding the separation of conception and execution on architecture, as architects became the “artists” leaving the execution to engineers, which can be seen on the first minutes of his talk at TEDx Dallas posted above, before explaining how the Wyly Theatre re interpreted the typical theatre programatic configuration.