William Bostwick on the Life and Death of Green Design: More and more architects have realized that the old standby for certification, with its checklist approach to what’s good for the environment and what’s not, rewards rule-following and ignores the kind of big thinking that makes architecture worth caring about. Not only that, many architects have an alternative—one that scraps LEED altogether in favor of a holistic approach to sustainable design. [Good]
Beijing’s great new architecture is a mixed blessing for the city: In Beijing, the latest trend is architecture that will force the world to pay attention, and the result is a striking, unmistakably twenty-first-century city, combining explosive, relentless development with a fondness for the avant-garde. [New Yorker]
Architect David Fisher designs first rotating skyscraper for Dubai and Moscow: Extravagant plans were unveiled yesterday for the world’s first swirling skyscrapers, with each floor rotating up to once an hour to form an ever-changing profile on the skyline. [Times]
June 25th, 2008 at 10:18 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
Mile-high tower wars: How tall is too tall?: The structure set to beat them all was announced at the end of March. The Mile High Tower, to be built in a “mini city” near the Red Sea port of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, will be about 1,600 metres tall – seven times the height of the Canary Wharf tower in London Docklands, or four Empire State buildings on top of each other. [Independent]
Last Call, Bohemia: Every successful society needs its Bohemia, a haven for the artists, exiles, and misfits who regenerate the culture. With the heart of New York’s West Village threatened by developers, London, Paris, and San Francisco have a message for Manhattan: Don’t do it! [Vanity Fair]
Revivifying Yale’s Brutalist Pile: A sullen gray megalith fashioned out of corduroy concrete, this bully of a building was perhaps the first on our continent to introduce the more subjective, Brutalist aesthetic that Le Corbusier had developed in the postwar period. To a culture that, for two decades, had been fed a mortifying diet of glass and steel, the abrupt intrusion of so much raw emotion was a shock to the system. [NY Sun]
June 19th, 2008 at 10:35 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
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]
June 11th, 2008 at 9:59 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
Daniel Libeskind’s Contemporary Jewish Museum: And yet the project also shows Libeskind working in a more restrained, even muted, mode than ever before. In part this is due to various delays and budget problems that have plagued the project, which got its start in 1998, well before Libeskind prevailed in Lower Manhattan. (The San Francisco commission was his first in North America.) In part it’s due to the tight urban site occupied by the museum, which opens onto a new public plaza across the street from Yerba Buena Gardens and down the block from Mario Botta’s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Whatever the explanation, the generally happy architectural results are not just surprising but encouraging. At ground zero, Libeskind’s designs were crippled and eventually rendered meaningless by compromise. Here they’ve been enriched by it. [LA Times]
Comcast Center, Phila.’s tallest building, is clean-lined and dignified: It’s hard to talk about Comcast without mentioning the Cira Centre, the only other sizable office tower built here in the last 17 years. The petite Cira is more exhilarating, sculptural and satisfying as architecture, though it, too, has some blank moments. But Comcast Center blows Cira away where it counts: at its intersection with the city. It’s still early, but Comcast’s plaza cafe and concourse mall promise to become a bustling urban nexus. How typically Philadelphian that the best feature of the city’s tallest building should be hidden below ground. [Philadelohia Inquirer]
Welcome to the EcoMosque: A new mosque will be opening this month in Levenshulme, Manchester. Nothing unusual in that, except that al-Markaz al-Najmi Mosque is eco-friendly. It is built with recycled materials and generates part of its energy from solar panels. British mosques are not re nowned for their friendliness by any barometer, so this is an event worth celebrating. [New Statesman]
Creating Street-Level Intimacy at NYU: As New York University has grown in recent years, and frenetically gobbled up space to keep some semblance of pace with that growth, a dilemma has emerged: How to forge the visual identity every university craves? [NY Sun]
June 5th, 2008 at 11:18 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
A Developer’s Unusual Plan for Bright Lights, Inspired by a Dark Film: A flying car glides past the enormous eye of a smiling geisha hundreds of stories above the wet urban streets. That is the world of “Blade Runner,” Ridley Scott’s 1982 film set in a futuristic dystopia. It is also an obsession of a real estate developer, Sonny Astani, who hopes to evoke those atmospherics by affixing rows of light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, to the facades of his two newest condominium towers in downtown Los Angeles. [NYT]
Verdict on the new US embassy in Berlin: as elegant as a council house: The design of the embassy drew scorn from critics, who felt it would be more at home in Baghdad’s green zone. [Times]
Why is symmetry so satisfying?: Symmetros is a Greek word, and ancient Greek architecture used symmetry as a basic organizing principle. As did Roman, Roman-esque, and Renaissance. Indeed, it is hard to think of any architectural tradition, Western or non-Western, that does not include symmetry. Symmetry is something that Islamic mosques, Chinese pagodas, Hindu temples, Shinto shrines, and Gothic cathedrals have in common. [Slate]
May 28th, 2008 at 11:20 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
Cooper Square In Flight: In his nearly completed Cooper Square Hotel, Carlos Zapata has created a 22-story tower that exploits, to no memorable effect, this infinite elasticity of postindustrial form. [NY Sun]
Redesigning a Building to Preserve Peace in the Neighborhood: But the new design is more polite and less original, hewing to the reactionary view that most contemporary architecture is best when it is invisible. Little wonder that this neighborhood has not gained a significant new work of architecture in more than a quarter-century. [NY Times]
The last modern architect: Richard Rogers’s achievements as a maker of extraordinary buildings are in danger of being obscured by his status as a new Labour panjandrum. [New Statesman]
May 20th, 2008 at 8:37 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
Post-Katrina housing fits designers’ agendas. But can the city live with it?: The style wars between the modernists, the traditionalists, and the free-thinking blobists were the farthest thing from Vernessa Rogers’ mind when she was asked to choose from a group of sleek house designs commissioned by actor/architecture buff Brad Pitt. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
No Gothic style for this library: Helmut Jahn is either daring or he’s crazy. We’ll know better when the ellipse-shaped glass dome of his planned, mostly underground library takes its place amid the Collegiate Gothic buildings of the University of Chicago in fall 2010. [Chicago Tribune]
Award for world’s best building – and it could be a bus garage: Unsung local architects are to be pitted against the globetrotting mega-stars of the profession in an attempt to seek out the best new building in the world. Zoos, police stations and dentists’ surgeries will have as much chance of winning the inaugural World Architecture Festival (WAF) Awards as cutting-edge football stadiums and airports, the organisers promised yesterday. [Times]
Modern American architectural gems set for auction: Both the Esherick and Kaufmann are beneficiaries of the fashion for the new trophy homes, the modern architectural masterpieces that now command million-dollar premiums but were sold - or often failed to sell - as tear-downs less than two decades ago. [IHT]
May 13th, 2008 at 10:19 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
The Heatherwick Effect: What can a designer bring to the world of architecture?: For the past few years, an office development tucked away overlooking an old canal behind Paddington Station, in London, has been attracting clusters of people who come to see a footbridge. Made of steel and wood, and crossing the water in eight short sections, the bridge looks ordinary, but, when a boat needs to pass, it arcs up and back from one side like a scorpion’s tail, and folds itself into a neat octagon on the opposite bank. The Rolling Bridge is the best-known project of the British designer Thomas Heatherwick. [New Yorker]
New mayor of Rome threatens to scrap “disfiguring” Richard Meier museum: The famous American architect Richard Meier has denounced as incredible plans by Rome’s new right-wing mayor to dismantle a state-of-the-art museum designed by Mr Meier that opened just two years ago. The white marble, glass and steel structure housing the Ara Pacis, an ancient Roman altar with a sculptured frieze on the banks of the Tiber, is regarded by some architectural experts as a masterpiece. Others, however, find it hideous, with some critics dismissing it as being “like a suburban swimming pool or a giant petrol station”. [Times]
May 5th, 2008 at 10:34 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
Olympic Landscape: When it comes to dreaming up grand architectural visions, repressive authoritarian regimes are clearly the way to go. In less time than it takes for New Yorkers to draw up a committee to decide whether to vote on drawing up a committee, the city of Beijing has reinvented itself in anticipation of this August’s Olympic Games. Whole neighborhoods have been gleefully wiped out in order to build the Beijing CBD, or Central Business District, situated between the capital’s 3rd and 4th Ring Roads and now the site of CCTV headquarters, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Meanwhile, in another part of town, the Olympics’ main venue, the titanic National Stadium (also called Bird’s Nest stadium) — designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron — has just opened. So too has the National Aquatics Centre, known as the Water Cube, by the Australian architecture firm PTW Architects, together with CSCEC + Design and Arup. Perhaps most striking of all is the thrilling new Beijing Capital International Airport, conceived by Norman Foster. [NY Sun]
In Inner Mongolia, Pushing Architecture’s Outer Limits: At a time when housing markets across the West are contracting and American architects’ billings are at their lowest point in 12 years, according to the American Institute of Architects, Mr. Cai (pronounced sigh) was offering his guests a rare chance to build big — and paying them, improbably, in wads of cash. “Basically, Ordos is Texas,” explained Michael S. Tunkey, an American architect based in Shanghai whose firm has designed an opera house that, along with half a dozen museums and a boutique hotel, will anchor Mr. Cai’s new cultural district. [NYT]
China’s cities imperial style: Beijing is not a city that inspires deep affection. The picturesque is at a premium, regimentation prevails, and sheer size is a subject of tiresome pride. But so it always was. Unlike most European cities, the imperial capitals of China seldom grew up organically. Pre-planned in accordance with beliefs about the centrality of the emperor at the axis of the cosmos – and commensurate with the scale of this presumption – imperial cities conformed to a rigid geometry that precluded whim and often preceded actual settlement. [TLS]
Whitney’s Downtown Sanctuary: Optimism is in the air again at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has just released a preliminary design by the Italian architect Renzo Piano for its proposed satellite museum downtown. [NYT]
Sleek modern shape of ’60s now being called landmark: By putting the flying saucerlike Assembly Hall on their list of the state’s most endangered historic places, preservationists Wednesday confirmed an ongoing sea change in their field: The sleek modern buildings of the 1960s, which once gleamed with newness and bespoke the technological confidence of the post-war era, are now considered old—and as threatened as Victorian houses. [Chicago Tribune]
May 1st, 2008 at 9:57 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
New Urbanists Point the Way Forward: Perhaps the New Urbanists should cherish their outsider status. A gifted crew of architects and planners, they have changed the conversation about urban planning in the United States. They reject conventional postwar developers’ essentially quantitative, two-dimensional, single-use-oriented blueprints for residential subdivisions and office parks in favor of a qualitative, three-dimensional, mixed-use approach to designing neighborhoods and towns that generally involves reliance on traditional architectural styles. [City Journal]
A grand park plan? Not really: The park’s 16-acre site poses all sorts of infrastructural and topographical challenges. It is also a terrible spot for a self-consciously “central” and “civic” park — even in a city where those terms can be defined in fluid and nontraditional ways. [LA Times]
April 28th, 2008 at 10:19 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
