Monday, October 22, 2012

Click here to see today's news:
ArcSpace offers eyefuls of Hadid in Montpellier, and Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos in Portugal. -- Beijing Design Week is doing its part in revitalizing the city's crumbling neighborhoods. -- A big day for winners: CTBUH names Nouvel's Doha Tower 2012 Best Tall Building. -- Höweler + Yoon take home the €100,000 2012 Audi Urban Future Award. -- From Down Under, Sydney picks a shortlist in its Green Square Library and Plaza design competition + It's a banner year for Andrew Burns. -- The Society of Architectural Historians announces winners in its inaugural Awards for Architectural Excellence (way to go, Gwen!). -- SOM, WXY, and Foster offer up some really grand plans for NYC's Grand Central + They each tell their story (with link to lotsa pix). -- Taylor takes on ArtPlace's new Vibrancy Indicators intended to measure the success of their grants and grantees. -- Vuocolo takes issue with Frank's criticism of buzzwords like "vibrant": "trying to measure it means that policymakers are at least acknowledging some of the abstract qualities that make communities appealing." -- Rochon is heartened by what she finds at the Winnipeg Design Festival: the city "is being changed by its highly energized, collegial architects, who are demanding more from each other - and of architecture - than are many of their overworked colleagues" elsewhere. -- Bruhn tools around with Cook at his new school of architecture in Queensland, Australia, and cheers "un-programmable spaces for critiques, group work and exhibitions (and of course alumni gossip)." -- Former MIT dean Zhang Yonghe returns home to Beijing to transform the halls of Ullens Center into a hutong neighborhood: "What is China's architecture today? It seems that the connection between a house and the people living in it has been lost." -- Eliasson lights up the Ukrainian sky with "Dnepropetrovsk Sunrise" for Pinchuk's new steel mill: "we wonder if citizens and steel melters need all this" (great slide show, though). -- Don't look for Hadid Shumacher Architects to be the firm's new moniker any time soon, though "she conceded that Schumacher was 'the king of parametricism.'" -- Heathcote finds "a number of intriguing similarities" in two very different homes belonging to Soane and Goldfinger that "remain London's most inspirational interiors." -- Q&A with architect and author Lukeš re: Gocár's "significance for Czech architecture" (and the only surviving Cubist café in the world). -- One we couldn't resist: a Serbian film director's plans to build a "mini-town" theme park sparks controversy in Visegrad, scene of atrocities in Bosnian war: "his aim is to teach Bosnia's Serbs about their past, including the bits they do not like."

A new traveling exhibition celebrates the 90th anniversary of the birth of Harry Seidler, the leading Australian architect of the 20th century who followed his convictions and vision.

 
by Vladimir Belogolovsky

October 3, 2012

How architecture's and urban design's practice can change through studying of a little-appreciated Renaissance art, intarsia.

 
by Norman Weinstein

September 21, 2012

Prix takes issue with the state of the Venice Architecture Biennale, saying "architects are playing on a sinking gondola while, outside in the real world, our leaky trade is sinking into powerlessness and irrelevance."

 
by Wolf D. Prix/COOP HIMMELB(L)AU

August 30, 2012