The West Hollywood City Council has selected Australian designer Daniel Tobin to build an AIDS memorial for West Hollywood Park. As stated by the non-profit Foundation for an AIDS Monument, Tobin’s installation of 341 vertical strands “functions as a destination piece — recognizable as an AIDS monument, leaving no question about the work when you leave the space.” Each vertical strand represents 5,000 Americans who have died from or living with AIDS. You can learn more about Tobin’s selection and design, here.
Courtesy of Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission
The US Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) has approved Frank Gehry's revised design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington DC, meaning that after a fifteen-year process, all the involved parties have finally agreed on a design. Gehry's most recent design - a slightly scaled-down version of the one he produced in 2011, with the two smaller woven steel tapestries removed to open up the view to the Capitol - was approved by the National Capitol Planning Commission (NCPC) earlier this month, allowing the CFA to give their final verdict on the new design.
Courtesy of Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission
The National Capital Planning Commission has granted preliminary approval to a modified version of Frank Gehry’s controversialDwight D. Eisenhower Memorial design, which removed two of the stainless steel tapestries to clear views towards the Capitol. The project, which has remained stagnant since 2011, has been shawled in turmoil largely due to criticism regarding its "grandiose" design and focus on Eisenhower as a boy. The vote will now advance Gehry’s design to the Commission of Fine Arts for approval.
More images of the revised design, after the break.
matterbetter has launched an international open-ideas competition for a Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) Memorial and Park in Amsterdam. MH17 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down near the Ukraine–Russia border on July 17, 2014, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board.
From Gaudí-designed pavilions in Barcelona, Spain to the Tenyuji Temple in Ogatsu, Japan, nine "at-risk" historical monuments will receive funding for preservation works, thanks to a $1.5 million grant from American Express to the World Monuments Fund (WMF). The nine sites were all included on WMF’s 2014 Watch list, and include Pokfulam Village in Hong Kong (SAR), China; the churches of Saint Merri and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Paris, France; the Farnese Aviaries in Rome, Italy; Tenyuji Temple, in Ogatsu, Japan; Fundidora Park in Monterrey, Mexico; the Güell Pavilions in Barcelona, Spain; the House of Wonders in Stone Town, Zanzibar, Tanzania; Battersea Power Station in London, United Kingdom; and Sulgrave Manor in Sulgrave, United Kingdom.
This is the second portion of a $5 million, five-year grant from American Express to support WMF. "The longstanding support of American Express to the World Monuments Watch has resulted in preservation work at more than 150 sites in over 60 countries," said WMF President Bonnie Burnham in a press release. "The sites on the 2014 Watch that will receive support are extraordinary places whose preservation will benefit both local populations and visitors from around the world."
Read on after the break for a description of the sites.
Daniel Libeskind’s “elongated Star of David” has been announced today, the architect's 67th birthday, as the winner of an international design competition for Canada’s National Holocaust Monument. Selected from a shortlist of six, the winning "Landscape of Loss, Memory and Survival" monument is expected to be constructed in the Canadian capital of Ottawa on the corner of Wellington and Booth Streets sometime next year.
Manhattan-based Zerafa Architecture Studiohas been announced as winner of a competition to design a monument to Orange County’s crime victims. Placed between two natural mounds on axis with Irvine’s Mason Regional Park office, the winning scheme carves a subtle, circular void within the park’s forested landscape that offers a range of experiences to the community.
Spanish architect Rafael de La-Hoz has designed a mirrored, 60-meter monument to commemorate the 30 anniversary of the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area (TEDA). The design, titled “A Cut between heaven and earth”, was “driven by an effort to analyze the process of abstraction and reinterpretation of the site.”
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this autumn, Germany planned two memorials, one in Berlin and one in Leipzig. However, as Der Spiegel reports, not only are they almost certainly not going to be complete in time for the anniversary, they have both proven highly controversial with the local people. Will these designs turn out to be monuments to German reunification, or just monumental failures? Read the article on Der Spiegel to find out more.
Envisioned as a three-and-a-half-meter wide “wound” within the landscape, Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg’s powerful monument to those lost in the 2011 Utøya terror attacks has won Oslo’s July 22 Memorial competition.
“My concept for the Memorial Sørbråten proposes a wound or a cut within nature itself. It reproduces the physical experience of taking away, reflecting the abrupt and permanent loss of those who died,” described Dahlberg.
Congress budget cuts have officially stalled Frank Gehry’s controversial Eisenhower Memorial, according to a recent report, rejecting $49 million in construction funds and cutting the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s annual budget in half. Unless the commission is able to raise a substantial amount of private funds, as well as win support from the Eisenhower family (which is doubtful), Gehry’s “grandiose” memorial is unlikely to ever break ground. Despite this, the commission’s director is optimistic, stating that the FDR Memorial took nearly 45 years to get built. You can read more about the controversy here.
In honor of Alabama’s 50th Anniversary of the Birmingham Civil Rights Campaign, a national design competition was launched to envision a “Monument to Foot Soldiers.” New York City-based Jaklitsch / Gardner Architects was one of many entrants who responded, hoping to design a monument that would honor the sacrifices made by the unnamed activists who fought for civil rights and celebrate the power of the human spirit.
Eight candidates have been selected for the second phase of the international competition to design two national public art memorial sites to commemorate the 2011 terror attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utøya. Selected from over 300 artists and architects from 46 different countries, the Art Selection Committee have shortlisted the following candidates:
Beginning with Charles McKim, William Mead, and Stamford White and concluding with Michael Arad, Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume II examines the people behind the work at the forefront of 20th and early 21st century architecture. Critic Martin Filler masterfully integrates each person’s unique biography and distinctive character into the architectural discussion. Here is his revealing profile of Michael Arad, the young architect whose design for the National September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero brought him into the national spotlight. It was originally published on Metropolis Mag's Point of View Blog.
I wept but about what precisely I cannot say. When I first visited Michael Arad’s newly completed National September 11 Memorial of 2003–2011 at Ground Zero, which was dedicated on the tenth anniversary of the disaster—the ubiquitous maudlin press coverage of which I had done everything possible to ignore—it impressed me at once as a sobering, disturbing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming masterpiece. Arad’s inexorably powerful, enigmatically abstract pair of abyss-like pools, which demarcate the foundations of the lost Twin Towers, came as an immense surprise to those of us who doubted that the chaotic and desultory reconstruction of the World Trade Center site could yield anything of lasting value.
Yet against all odds and despite tremendous opposition from all quarters, the design by the Israeli-American Arad—an obscure thirty-four-year-old architect working for a New York City municipal agency when his starkly Minimalist proposal, Reflecting Absence, was chosen as the winner from among the 5,201 entries to the Ground Zero competition—became the most powerful example of commemorative architecture since Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial of 1981–1982 in Washington, D.C.
Frank Gehry’s revised design for the controversial Eisenhower Memorial has been approved by US Commission of Fine Arts in a 3-1 vote - a major step forward after the project’s funding was nearly scraped last year. Though Gehry’s redesign was welcomed by the commission, BDOnline reported that they’ve requested he removes the three woven metal tapestries that border the site, as they believe the scale “undermined Gehry’s attempt to convey the president’s humility.” Gehry accepted this request and now awaits re-authorization from Congress.
Despite harsh criticism and a lingering threat from the House to scrap funding and start anew, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission has unanimously approved Frank Gehry’s design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington DC. The $110 million project, nearly fourteen years in the making, has undergone numerous revisions in the past couple years in search of a compromise between the commission and its opposition, namely the Eisenhower family.
Though the odds started to lean in the opposition’s favor, the commission is pressing forward with their plans and Gehry is expected to present his design to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts next month and the National Capital Planning Commission in early fall for review and approval.
Completed in 1994, the Igualada Cemetery was designed by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos to be a place of reflection and memories. After 10 years of construction, their envision of a new type of cemetery was completed and began to consider those that were laid to rest, as well as the families that still remained.
The Igualada Cemetery is understood by the architects to be a “city of the dead” where the dead and the living are brought closer together in spirit. As much as the project is a place for those to be laid to rest, it is a place for those to come and reflect in the solitude and serenity of the Catalonian landscape of Barcelona, Spain. More on the project after the break.
