Box of plenty: design for Berkeley art museum: He doesn’t have the name recognition of a Frank Gehry or a Daniel Libeskind, but Toyo Ito is one of Japan’s most acclaimed and adventurous architects. Looking at the design for a downtown Berkeley museum that would be his first building in the United States, it’s easy to see why. [San Francisco Chronicle]
Antimodernist Léon Krier designs urban environments to human scale: Architects like Quinlan Terry, Liam O’Connor, Demetri Porphyrios, and John Simpson, who grew up amid the advancing chaos, burst the chains forged by their obligatory modernist education and began designing buildings and urban projects in a classical style. At the same time, working in comparative obscurity as an assistant to the eclectic James Stirling was a graduate of the University of Stuttgart’s modernist school of architecture: Léon Krier, born in Luxembourg in 1946, who was beginning to publish the laconic monographs and satirical drawings that were later to form the basis of an antimodernist manifesto. [City Journal]
From blueprint to database: That is why Dr Eastman and others have long championed a more powerful approach, called building-information modelling (BIM). This involves representing a building as a full, three-dimensional computer model, with an associated database. It is as big a leap forward from conventional CAD as a computer is from a slide rule, says Dr Eastman. [Economist]
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