New Republic has presented a list of 100 great thinkers from the past 100 years. The list, as the magazine puts it, honors “people we believe have made the greatest intellectual contributions to the fields and causes that this magazine holds dear.” One of these fields is architecture, and New Republic’s honoree for that category is the illustrious Louis Kahn. Kahn is famous for projects such as the Kimbell Museum and the Salk Institute. His work displays what architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen describes as a “cognitively rich, metaphorically complex, multi-sensorial approach.” Curious to see who else made the list? See the full roster here!
The USA's tallest building shoulders one of the nation's greatest challenges: paying tribute to lives lost in one of the country's greatest tragedies. One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan has yet to be completed and yet has still recently been condemned by a number of critics, who cite the former "Freedom Tower" as an inspirational failure. Thirteen years after the attacks, the wider site at ground zero also remains plagued by red tape and bureaucratic delays, unfinished and as-yet-unbuilt World Trade Centers, Calatrava's $5B transit hub, and an absence of reverence, according to critics. Read some of the most potent reviews of the new World Trade Center site from the press in our compilation after the break.
Final Call! All entries for the 2015 Bauwelt Award must be submitted by September 30th. The award (consisting of 5 awards at 5000 Euros each) is applicable for all architects and landscape architects’ "First Works" projects - any work realized by independent responsibility and completed after September 30, 2011. In addition to the prize, award-winners will be published in an exhibition at the BAU 2015 on the Munich fairgrounds starting January. An Advancement Award grant is also available, prized at 5,000 Euros, to fund an interdisciplinary research, exhibition or installation project that has yet to be completed. Visit the official website to learn more about the competition and how to apply.
Architects have been known to dabble in product design, but what about board game design? A team of Washington, D.C.-based architects, urban planners, and designers have come together to create a game with a comedic (yet somewhat serious) take on the nuances of city living. Cards Against Urbanity, a parody on the wildly successful Cards Against Humanity, is simultaneously a critical and satirical game designed to open a dialogue about the development of cities among those who influence them.
FuturArc, a bimonthly journal that promotes the enhancement of sustainable architecture in Asia, have launched their annual contest to generate ideas for innovative and sustainable design. The contest is split into two, with the FuturArc Prize and the FuturArc Green Leadership Award rewarding sustainable design in both unbuilt and built projects. Read on after the break to find out more about both competitions.
Peter Smithson (18 September 1923 – 3 March 2003), the acclaimed British architect often associated with New Brutalism, would have turned 91 today. He attended the school of architecture in Newcastle, but left to serve in the war in India and Burma. After returning to complete his degree in 1948, he enrolled in the Royal Academy architecture school. In 1950 he set up his own practice with his wife Alison, and the two went on to become some of the most influential British architects of the mid-20th century.
Trimble and Frank Gehry have recently announced their plans to enter into a strategic alliance in which Trimble will acquire Gehry Technologies to integrate digital software development and on-site fabrication techniques. As a company working in 'geospatial solutions,' Trimble combines software development, communication tools and services to increase productivity in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, among others. The two companies hope that their alliance will enable complex architectural designs to be realized without the construction snags that often affect such ambitious projects.
The Architectural League hosts the design party of the year at its annual Beaux Arts Ball on September 20. Held in the recently restored, exquisite interiors of Williamsburg’s Weylin B. Seymour’s, the Ball will feature a projection installation by Nuit Blanche New York that reflects on the theme of “Craft.” In addition to the installation, a series of digital presentations and photographic essays will reveal more information about the building and the team of artisans and consultants behind its restoration.
"The Biennale reveals that modernism was never a style. It was a cultural, political, and social practice," says Sarah Williams Goldhagen in her recent article for New Republic, The Great Architect Rebellion of 2014. This year, the Venice Biennale dissects the notion of modernism by providing a hefty cross-section of architectural history in the central pavilion. However contrary to Koolhaas' prescriptive brief, the 65 national pavilions show modernism was not just a movement, but a socially-driven, culturally attuned reaction to the "exigencies of life in a rapidly changing and developing world." Unexpected moments define the 2014 Venice Biennale: from Niemeyer's desire to launch Brazil into the first world through architectural creation, to South Korea's unveiling of a deep modernist tradition with influence across the nation. This Biennale proved to be truly rebellious - read Goldhagen's article from New Republic here to find out why.
Are Brutalist buildings, once deemed cruel and ugly, making a comeback? Reyner Banham's witty play on the French term for raw concrete, beton brut, was popularized by a movement of hip, young architects counteracting what they perceived as the bourgeois and fanciful Modernism of the 1930s. Though the use of raw concrete in the hands of such artist-architects as Le Corbusier seems beautiful beneath the lush Mediterranean sun, under the overcast skies of northern Europe Brutalist architecture earned a much less flattering reputation. Since the 1990s, however, architects, designers, and artists have celebrated formerly denounced buildings, developing a fashionably artistic following around buildings like Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower, "even if long-term residents held far more ambivalent views of this forceful high-rise housing block." To learn more about this controversial history and to read Jonathan Glancey's speculation for its future, read the full article on BBC, here.
Looking for your dream home? Picket fence, driveway (sedan included), basketball net, and terracotta pots complete with flowers in bloom, available now in the quiet neighbourhood of Rancho Santa Fe in Shanghai, China. According to this article in The Guardian, "The Chinese Dream" is currently sweeping the People's Republic, with Western planning models replicated with identical ineffective results. The article offers an intimate insight into the role of American architectural fetishism in modern China, and how the government is now fighting to curb the trend. Read the complete article here.
The design of prisons is a controversial topic for architects, but Deanna VanBuren takes a novel approach to the subject. Designing for a judicial system that advocates “restorative justice,” VanBuren works with felons, victims, and other architects to create spaces where everyone can undergo a healing process following a crime. In a recent profile, the L.A. Times documents one of her design workshops with prisoners, demonstrating how this form of outreach can change the lives of those inside. Read the full story here. Also, be sure to check out our interview with Deanna VanBuren here!
The Farnsworth House by Mies Van Der Rohe, 1951. Plano, Illinois. Image Courtesy of Blouin Art Info
What is the true value of architecture in today's society? According to this article by Anna Katz, rare pieces of architectural history have recently soared in value. Katz discusses the booming world of architecture at auction, featuring pieces by Mies Van Der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright among others. The article gracefully compares some of the most important architecture of our time against current real estate prices, exploring the catalyst of rising values in architecture of the recent past, while deliberating on the pitfalls of owning a delicate piece of architecture history. Read the story in full on Blouin Art Info.
When Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu arrived in Shanghai in 2000, working on a project for Michael Graves, they had no plans to stay. "Three months turned into six, then eight," said Neri of his first visit; fourteen years later, Neri & Hu Design and Research Office operates from Shanghai with more than 100 multi-disciplinary staff. The firm has developed a reputation for their original designs in a landscape dominated by duplicate architecture. In a recent article in The Star Online, Leong Siok Hui maps Neri & Hu's road to success, featuring their work on Design Collective and The Waterhouse at South Bund. Read more here.
With a voluminous portfolio and a bold, light-hearted persona, Bjarke Ingels is among the most respected young architects of the era. Now, as he enters his forties, this article from Icon looks at one of his longest-running projects: The Danish National Maritime Museum. Exploring the development of this project from competition winning proposal in 2006 to completion last year, it discusses some of BIG’s more daring decisions for the museum’s design, as well as Ingels’ development as an architect on the international stage.
In 2008, a group of students from SCI-Arc put out a proposal for a series of mixed income city housing projects for Dubai. In their design, wealthy residents would live in apartments on the building’s perimeter, with natural daylight and views of the city, while low-income housing tenants would live in the core of the building, isolated from “the upper class.” The proposal was a parody aimed at the classist design of residential development in Dubai, but what unsettled the SCI-Arc students was that their proposal generated almost no controversy. Inspired by the recent approval of a similar 'poor door' in a project in New York, this article from the LA Times covers that parody, and shows that both at home and abroad, residential design is slipping towards socio-economic segregation.
Aerial View of Zaatari Refugee Camp. Image Courtesy of Wikimedia
As the Syrian civil war continues to rage, more and more Syrian citizens are emigrating across the border to refugee camps in Jordan. While these camps were intended to be temporary, the sheer number of people they support and the uncertainty of when the Syrian crisis will end has leant them a sense of permanence. This article from the New York Times takes a look at how Syrian refugees are prompting urban development and what this means for the future of refugee camp design.
Mirroring the Serpentine Galleries of London, the Naomi Milgrom Foundation has announced its own yearly pavilion commission for the city of Melbourne. Sited in the Queen Victoria Memorial Gardens, the premier "MPavilion" will be designed by Sean Godsell, opening October 6th of this year. The pavilion will host a variety of community events, including art installations and performances, over a four month period. It remains to be seen whether the MPavilion will have a lasting impact on the architectural culture of the city, as some critics have pointed out. To learn more about this now annual commission, visit this article from infolink.
