Situation Terminal Can anyone design a nice airport?: But recently Asian countries, and some European ones, have been approaching the problem with a bit more imagination. The best new airports in the world right now are in Beijing, where Norman Foster’s Terminal 3 has just opened, and on the outskirts of Madrid, where Terminal 4 at Barajas, designed by Richard Rogers Partnership, has been in operation since 2006. Foster has achieved what no other architect has been able to: he has rethought the airport from scratch and made it work. [New Yorker]
Mile-High Skyscrapers and Floating Cities That Never Were: With the space age entering its crassly commercial phase and science fiction dominated by gritty dystopian visions, you could be forgiven for giving up on the future. But not everyone has. With Dubai’s 800-meter-tall Burj Dubai skyscraper almost complete, starry-eyed visions of tomorrow’s cities are more popular than they’ve been in 50 years. Here’s a collection of promised skylines we never got to see — and a few that may yet come to be — as seen from the imagined eyes of those who live there. [Wired]
Where a 75-Story Tower Blends Right In: Nouvel’s design for a condo and hotel resting on three floors of new galleries for the Museum of Modern Art is an ecstatic reproach to Manhattan’s regularity. It would be to the skyline what Broadway is to the street grid: an indispensable violation and a zagging flourish. [NY Mag]
April 18th, 2008 at 9:56 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
Get Me Rewrite: A New Monument to Press Freedom: How many mediocre buildings can one city absorb? And what if these buildings are meant to affirm our highest values? Those questions come to mind as I ponder the Newseum, the latest reason to lament the state of contemporary architecture in this city. Rising on a prominent site along Pennsylvania Avenue, it joins a spate of new memorials and museums that have been reshaping the historic center of Washington during the current Bush administration. [NYT]
In design, the temporary is so contemporary: Architecture has entered another of its periodic bouts of fascination with impermanence. Maybe it’s the anxiety produced by doomsday predictions about the state of the environment and, lately, the economy. Maybe it’s the quicksilver quality of digital culture, closer in character to sand or water than bricks and mortar. Whatever the source, architects are playing up the idea of temporariness, and even finding solace in it, to a degree not seen since the 1960s and ’70s, when several experimental design teams explored what Peter Cook, a member of London’s Archigram, called “expendability” and “throwaway architecture.” [LA Times]
Sydney Opera House serenades architect: He has never actually laid eyes on the finished product, but the creator of the Sydney Opera House has been serenaded in Australia on his 90th birthday. Danish architect Jorn Utzon started work on the Opera House in 1957 but quit the project in 1966 because of budget blow-outs and bitter disputes with the New South Wales government over his artistic vision. [Telegraph]
April 11th, 2008 at 11:41 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
Industrial Revolution, Take Two: Why can’t a building be as eco-friendly as a tree? What if the concept of waste didn’t exist? Having collaborated with such giants as Google, nasa, Ford, and Wal-Mart with his “Cradle to Cradle” philosophy, architect William McDonough wants to usher in a new Industrial Revolution. No sacrifices necessary, just smart design. [Vanity Fair]
Design revolution is famed critic’s beat: At age 87, Huxtable — Pulitzer Prize winner, former New York Times architecture critic, author of books such as “Kicked a Building Lately?” and now kicking buildings for The Wall Street Journal — is the grande dame of American architecture criticism, revered for her incisive observations and zinger prose. [Chicago Tribune]
Museums sprout ‘green’ architecture: A wave of energy-efficient architecture – and ecofriendly retrofits – is sweeping through public showcases. [CSM]
April 9th, 2008 at 10:04 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
In Village, a Proposal That Erases History: Over the last few years the growing clout of developers has gradually chipped away at the city’s resolve to protect its architectural legacy. The agency most responsible for defending that legacy, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, has sometimes been accused of putting developers’ interests above the well-being of the city’s inhabitants. A proposal before the commission to tear down several buildings in the Greenwich Village Historic District is shaping up as a crucial test of whether those critics are right. [NYT]
Creating Central Park: Frederick Law Olmsted once said, of the area that would become Central Park, that it would have been hard for New York City’s leaders to choose a piece of land that possessed fewer of the “desirable characteristics of a park, or upon which more time, labor, and expense would be required to establish them.” [NY Sun]
French Architect Wins Pritzker Prize: Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for such wildly diverse projects as the muscular Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the exotically louvered Arab World Institute in Paris, has received architecture’s top honor, the Pritzker Prize. [NYT]
SANAA’s Supernatural Designs: Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the two principals of the Japanese architectural firm SANAA, and the architects responsible for the recently opened New Museum on the Bowery, have devoted their career to the relentless re-examination of what the rest of us are apt to take for granted. Most importantly perhaps, as we now see in a show at the New Museum — “SANAA Works: 1998–2008″ — they have consecrated, indeed sacrificed, themselves to this spirit of design, to a life in which one’s appearance and appurtenances define who one is and take on the tone and attributes of a secular religion. [NY Sun]
April 1st, 2008 at 11:19 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
A Japanese architect who reaches for the sky: At a time when urban planners in the West frown on hulking high-rises as forbidding, Mori presents a new Asian urban sensibility, where architecture reflects soaring economic ambition, leading to mighty projects that dwarf the individual. [IHT]
Profit and Public Good Clash in Grand Plans: Given current economic realities, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s selection on Wednesday of a team led by Tishman Speyer to develop the West Side railyards seems like a wishful fantasy. Yet even if the project takes decades to realize, it is a damning indictment of large-scale development in New York. [NYT]
The Architecture of Edward Hopper: Exploring the painter’s buildings, from his famous diner to his cottage on Cape Cod. [Slate]
Frank Gehry’s timber and glass ‘street’ to be built in Hyde Park: He said: “The pavilion is designed as a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the existing gallery. Inside the pavilion, glass canopies are hung from the wooden structure to protect the interior from wind and rain and provide for shade during sunny days. [Times]
March 27th, 2008 at 10:31 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
Nazi architect son’s plan for Berlin: The son of Hitler’s favourite architect Albert Speer, who was famous for drawing up grandiose plans for a Nazi capital, has submitted his own design to redevelop a large plot of land in central Berlin. Albert Speer junior is one of the world’s leading architects and urban planners, and has come up with a scheme to renovate a dilapidated sports complex in the heart of the German capital. [Telegraph]
Nice Tower! Who’s Your Architect?: With the financial markets in an ominous roil, the realization of this boomlet is far from guaranteed. But even if only a few more are completed, the final effect of these buildings could be the greatest transformation in the city’s physical identity since the 1960s. Bold and formally elaborate — some would say showy — they reflect a mix of attitudes and styles that the city has never seen. They also reveal an unmistakable shift in the appetites and aspirations of an elite group of New Yorkers for whom an apartment’s architectural pedigree has become a new form of status symbol. [NYT]
What Will Be Left of Gehry’s Vision for Brooklyn?: The growing possibility that much of the multibillion-dollar Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn will be scrapped because of a lack of financing may be a bitter pill for its developer, Forest City Ratner. But it’s also a painful setback for urban planning in New York. [NYT]
Neo-Mod Idiom On the High Line: Even before its completion, Chelsea’s High Line Park is having as catalytic an effect on its neighborhood as Central Park has had, over the past 150 years, on the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan. [NY Sun]
March 24th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
The glass neighbour that poses a challenge to St Paul’s: One of the country’s best-loved landmarks, St Paul’s Cathedral, is to have a stark, modernist neighbour designed by controversial Scottish architect John McAslan, who has been called ‘that steel and glass man’ by the Prince of Wales. [Guardian]
Our right to see the trees: Parks and squares aren’t a luxury, but an essential feature of the urban infrastructure [Guardian]
Architecture of Vito Acconci: The 68-year-old poet-artist-architect has built only a handful of structures since officially declaring himself an architect in the late 1980s, yet he has probably done more to shake up the field with his theories and fantastical renderings than most architects do with bricks and mortar. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
March 17th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
New Exhibit Explores Hitler’s ‘Germania’: Hitler was confident of winning World War II and planned to give Berlin a monumental makeover by 1950. A group in Berlin has collected records about his ‘Germania’ vision — and plans to lead tours through what’s left of the old construction site. [Spiegel]
Cities on the edge of chaos: It is one of the most seismic changes the world has ever seen. Across the globe there is an unstoppable march to the cities, powered by new economic realities. But what kind of lives are we creating? And will citizens - and cities - cope with the fierce pressures of this new urban age? Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum and author of a major new report, asks if the city of the future will be a vision of hell or a force for civilised living? [Guardian]
March 11th, 2008 at 11:13 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
Designed for one of the biggest developers in the United Arab Emirates, Nakheel, Mr. Koolhaas’s master plan for the proposed 1.5-billion-square-foot Waterfront City in Dubai would simulate the density of Manhattan on an artificial island just off the Persian Gulf. A mix of nondescript towers and occasional bold architectural statements, it would establish Dubai as a center of urban experimentation as well as one of the world’s fastest growing metropolises. The mixed-use project, startling in scale, is a carefully considered critique not just of the generic city but of a potentially greater evil: the growing use of high-end architecture as a tool for self-promotion. To Mr. Koolhaas this strategy, which many architects refer to as the Bilbao syndrome, reduces cities to theme parks of architectural tchotchkes that mask an underlying homogeneity. [NYT]
The main stadium for this year’s Beijing Olympics is, quite simply, stunning. Here is an adventure in steel and concrete, a building - despite its age-old purpose - like no other. [CSM]
In Los Angeles, an architectural marvel is the new town square. The Broad Contemporary Art Museum eschews gift shops and restaurants in favor of dynamic galleries devoted wholly to art. [CSM]
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:07 am
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
Suburbia is almost all right. That’s the guiding idea, anyway, behind “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” at the Walker Art Center through Aug. 17. Echoing the populism of Robert Venturi’s hugely influential declaration in his 1966 book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” that “Main Street is almost all right,” the exhibition sets out to convince the museum’s sophisticated, largely urban audience that the American suburbs are more dynamic and endearingly odd than they ever would have guessed. [LA Times]
With the possible exception of certain underwater adventures and outer-space stories, pretty much every movie relies on architectural symbolism, finding in the house where the hero lives, the saloon he drinks in or the city streets he caroms through in his getaway car some useful ways to sharpen its thematic message. This year’s Oscar nominees for best picture, though, exploit that symbolism to an unusually effective degree. [LA Times]
If you want to know what Gotham’s twenty-first-century skyscrapers ought to look like, go over to 15 Central Park West and gaze at the brilliant apartment building Robert A. M. Stern is just completing. [City Journal]
February 25th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
This article is filed under Architecture, Blog.
