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Arizona: The Latest Architecture and News

A Recycling Center in Zurich and a Resilience Hub in Arizona: 8 Unbuilt Projects That Champion Adaptive Reuse

As the landscape of architecture and urban development adapts to the modern climate, the traditional notion of construction has been significantly modified and adjusted. Specifically, principles of reuse, recycling, adaptive reuse, and the power of transforming existing structures into something more meaningful and sustainable have gained much traction. Looking at these curated collections of unbuilt projects, one can begin exploring a different way of looking at buildings and heritage, which is significantly more sensitive to the built environment.

From the austere office buildings of the United Kingdom to the proposal to re-activate a skyscraper in Ostrava, these diverse contexts tell stories of resilience, innovation, and a profound commitment to the existing built environment. Offering a new way of looking at things, the projects champion adaptive reuse and activation concepts.

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“Architecture is Like Writing a Song”: In conversation with Rick Joy

Vladimir Belogolovsky speaks with American architect Rick Joy about his early inclinations towards architecture, what kind of architecture he likes to visit, and about designing his buildings as instruments. 

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One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unpublished Projects Revealed to the Public: the Arizona State Capitol

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has uncovered the Arizona State Capitol project, a never seen before unbuilt proposal by Wright. An “oasis of democracy in the Sonoran Desert”, the intervention revealed in the latest issue of The Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, has been digitally remodeled, with photorealistic visualizations by David Romero.

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Studio Ma Breaks Ground on New Live-Work Tower Complex for ASU

Studio Ma has broken ground on a new mixed-use tower complex for Arizona State University in Phoenix. The downtown residence hall and entrepreneurial center aims to foster innovation and collaboration for students and the campus community. The 16-floor residential tower includes academic and interdisciplinary facilities with living space for up to 530 students. The design was made to connect with the city and regional businesses.

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New Petition Aims to Save The School of Architecture at Taliesin

Last month, The School of Architecture at Taliesin announced the closing of the school after 88 years. The school and the Frank Lloyd Wright foundation issued statements on the closure, as well as the students. Now, a new petition started by Simon DeAguero aims to save the school from closing. The news of closure followed the conclusion of a multi-year struggle back in 2017, when the school was approved to maintain its accreditation as an institute of higher learning.

Students Respond to The School of Architecture at Taliesin's Closure

Last week, The School of Architecture at Taliesin announced the closing of the school after 88 years. Both the school and the Frank Lloyd Wright foundation issued statements on the closure, and now the Student Body has created their own statement outlining the impact of the decision. The news of closure followed the conclusion of a multi-year struggle back in 2017, when the school was approved to maintain its accreditation as an institute of higher learning.

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The School of Architecture at Taliesin is Closing After 88 Years

The School of Architecture at Taliesin has announced the closing of the school after 88 years. The news follows the conclusion of a multi-year struggle back in 2017, when the school was approved to maintain its accreditation as an institute of higher learning. The decision was made by the Governing Board, as the school was not able to reach an agreement with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to keep the school open.

James Turrell’s Roden Crater Set to Open After 45 Years

American light and space artist James Turrell's best-known work, Roden Crater, is now set to open to the public within the next few years thanks to a series of partnerships and new funding. Part of the additional funds includes a $10 million donation from Kanye West that would allow the project to expand and open within the next five years. Only a small group of people have experienced the crater, and the new funding will jump-start the updated master plan, which includes a restaurant, visitor’s center, cabins, and a "light-spa."

Self-Driving Car Fatality Reveals Urgent Problems With “Driverless” Cities

Since the concept of driverless cars first became a serious prospect, a lot of attention has been given to the possibility of their malfunction—if an autonomous vehicle damages property or even harms a human, who is at fault? And, given a worst-case scenario, how should a vehicle's software choose between whose lives it prioritizes, the passenger or the pedestrian? This last question even became the basis for the Moral Machine, an online platform created by the MIT Media Lab that essentially crowdsources public opinion on different variations of the classic trolley problem thought experiment.

However, all of these questions had been considered largely theoretical until last night when, as The New York Times reports, a woman was struck and killed by an autonomous vehicle in Tempe, Arizona. As a major component of many predictions of futuristic "smart cities," the development and testing of autonomous vehicles hold huge implications for urbanism (ArchDaily has previously covered predictions of major change by car manufacturers and researchers) meaning that this fatal event could have a ripple effect on the development of cities.

Bill Gates Purchases 25,000 Acres of Land for Smart City in Arizona

An investment firm run by Microsoft founder Bill Gates has paid $80 million for 25,000 acres of Arizona desert to serve as the site of a new “smart city.” To be known as Belmont, the city will be made up of 80,000 residences, as well offices, retail spaces and civic amenities such as schools and police stations. The city will serve as a test ground for the latest in logistical and infrastructural technologies.

The One Redeeming Feature That Brings Humanity to the Sameness of Suburban Sprawl

This article was originally published by Common Edge as "The Work of Architecture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

I attended graduate school, in geography, in Tucson, Arizona, in the late 1990s. Tucson draws fame from a number of things, including its Mexican-American heritage, its chimichangas, its sky islands, and its abundant population of saguaro cacti.

Plenty of things about Tucson, though, are perfectly, achingly ordinary.

Perhaps the most ordinary thing about Tucson led me to develop something halfway between a hobby and an academic pursuit. On occasion, whether for sport or research, friends and I used to go “sprawl-watching.” We were not exactly, say, Walter Benjamin strolling through the arcades, embracing the human pageantry of Paris. But we did our best to plumb Tucson’s depths.

Watch How Paolo Soleri's Experimental City of Arcosanti is Designed for a Smarter Future

How much space do we really need to take up in order to have rich and rewarding lives?

In this short documentary for The Atlantic, filmmaker Sam Price-Waldman visits Arcosanti, the revolutionary experimental community and urban laboratory envisioned by architect Paolo Soleri. Since its founding by Soleri in the northern Arizona desert in 1970, the city has grown and evolved as it has demonstrated how to create a walkable, social city that could meet the needs of future societies.

The video is narrated by architect and Arcosanti co-president Jeff Stein, who explains how the city is able to maximize the potential of architecture for providing for communities, and features interviews with several Arcosanti community members.

Architecture Students From Taliesin West Learn Survival Skills by Creating "Little Shelters" in the Arizona Desert

Students from the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Taliesin West have designed and built “Little Shelters,” a collaborative project in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, as part of a design and build studio led by little maps.

The project began with an individual exercise, where students Daniel Chapman, Mark-Thomas Cordova, Jaime Inostroza, Dylan Kessler, Pablo Moncayo, Natasha Vemulkonda, and Pierre Verbruggen each created their own temporary shelters. Partially due to harsh desert conditions, the students, with their instructor David Tapias, later decided to design and build as a collective effort instead.