Dublin-based Grafton Architects, who last year were awarded the Jane Drew Prize, have seen off competition from the likes of Herzog & de Meuron and David Chipperfield Architects to win the contest to design the London School of Economics’ (LSE) £100 million ($144 million) Paul Marshall Building. The new center will house the academic departments of Accounting, Finance and Management and research centres, including the Marshall Institute, with teaching facilities as well as new multipurpose sports and arts facilities. Grafton Architects are reportedly "absolutely delighted to be given this opportunity to build in this unique location in Lincoln's Inn Fields, across from the wonderful Sir John Soane’s Museum, for a visionary client such as LSE."
Qatar Museums has announced a shortlist of eight finalists that will move on to the third and final stage of the Art Mill International Design Competition in Doha. On a site extending into the Arabian Sea that was only recently occupied by Qatar Flour Mills, Art Mill will integrate gallery and exhibition space with facilities for education, events, conservation, art handling, and research. Joining the Museum of Islamic Art designed by I.M. Pei, and the still under-construction National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel, in the words of the competition brief, “Art Mill will and extend and intensify the cultural quarter being developed in Doha.”
Rendering of Atrium Modifications. Image via YIMBY
The Ford Foundation has received Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) approval for renovations to its building at 320 E 43rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, reports New York Yimby. Constructed from 1963 to 1967, with a design by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo and an atrium garden by Dan Kiley, the building became an instant architectural mecca and was made an individual and interior landmark in 1997. The proposed renovations, designed by Gensler, seek to restore a half century of alterations to the building’s appearance, in addition to subtle changes to adhere to adhere to fire and accessibility codes.
By next Fall, the architecture students of Washington University in St. Louis will no longer be allowed to use Styrene on their projects. The university's newspaper, Student Life reports that the commonly used white plastic material was deemed in 2014 by the National Research Council's National Toxicology Program as "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen." Thus the Sam Fox School of Design is taking its own measures to protect their student's health. A number of other schools and cities have already banned Styrene since the NRC's ruling.
At last year's Moscow Urban Forum, Charles Renfro discussed Diller Scofidio + Renfro's design for Zaryadye Park in Moscow. Located in the heart of the city, the park employs Wild Urbanist principles, which seek to emulate Russia's diverse landscapes – tundra, steppe, forest, and wetland – against a backdrop of architectural landmarks that includes the Kremlin, Red Square, and St. Basil’s Cathedral.
ingenhoven architects has released its design for the Toranomon Project, a new business and lifestyle development that will include a 175,000-square-meter office tower and a 122,000-square-meter residential tower, which will become Tokyo’s highest residential building at approximately 220 meters tall.
Located in the Toranomon area of Tokyo, the project will be built around the existing Toranomon Hills Mori Tower, with respect for the existing structure, but with its own identity as a set of nodes in the larger urban green network.
As recently as a century ago the idea of viewing the world from above was little more than a fantasy: the airplane was still in its infancy, with rocketry and satellites still decades into the future. Those who could not take to the air had no recourse but drawing in order to represent their world from an aerial perspective. This limitation is difficult to imagine today when access to plan photography is never further than the nearest Internet connection. Anyone with a smartphone has, in essence, the entire world in their pocket.
Zaha Hadid Architects has 36 projects underway in 21 countries, and four of them will be completed this year. The Salerno Maritime Terminal will open later this month, the Port House, Antwerp, in September, the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (KAPSARC) in Riyadh, in October, and the Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum in London, in December.
In spite of the untimely death of the practice’s namesake last month, the firm has pledged to continue with its slate of projects, stating, “Zaha is in the DNA of Zaha Hadid Architects. She continues to drive and inspire us every day, and we work on as Zaha taught us – with curiosity, integrity, passion and determination.”
Terra Award, the first international prize for contemporary earthen architectures, has released a shortlist of 40 projects competing for awards in nine categories. The finalists selected span five continents and 67 countries. Each entry was evaluated on a range of topics including: architectural quality and landscape integration, environmental approach and energy performance, creativity and innovation, technical performance, local economy and social intensity, and showcasing of skills. Project materials range from light clay to cob, poured earth, wattle and daub, compressed earth block (CEB), adobe, rammed earth, and others.
Hou de Sousa (Nancy Hou and Josh de Sousa) have recently won two competitions for temporary installations in Washington DC and New York, both using salvaged materials. The first, Raise/Raze, is the winning proposal for DC’s Dupont Underground, an abandoned trolley station repurposed as a contemporary arts and culture space. The project reuses the balls from Snarkitecture’s “The Beach” installation at the National Building Museum for a new environment-generating initiative, which opens on April 30.
As winners of the 2016 Folly Competition held by the Architectural League of New York, Hou de Sousa will also soon build a pavilion in Socrates Sculpture Park, in Queens. A simple wooden canopy, the structure is a multi-purpose space made of standard dimensional lumber, but has been accentuated with shingles of scrap wood found on-site. Known as Sticks, the pavilion will open to the public on July 9.
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has announced the winners of the 2016 Publication Awards and SAH Award for Film & Video as part of their annual International Conference Awards ceremony in Pasadena, California.
Awarded annually, the SAH Publication awards honor excellence in "architectural history, landscape history, and historic preservation scholarship," alongside outstanding architectural exhibition catalogs. Eligible publications must have been published in the two years immediately preceding the award, with nominations for the 2017 Publication Awards and SAH Award for Film & Video opening on June 1, 2016
Learn more about the winning publications after the break.
Coachella, the annual music festival that takes place in California's Colorado Desert, is a spectacle on numerous levels, but it is the associated visual artists, architects, sculptors, and designers that are an often overlooked element of event's success. Below are the best architectural installations of Coachella 2016.
In an interview with the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), Bjarke Ingels reflects on the design of skyscrapers, noting how "sculpture is fine, but if its arbitrary it's not as interesting." Architects, Ingels argues, have the problem of "skilled incompetence:" the notion that they "already know the answer before [they've] even heard the question." This prevents them "from questioning the question, or having the question rephrased, or elaborating on the question, or even listening for the question – because [they] already know the answer."
In a new film by NOWNESS, Dutch photographer Iwan Baan explains his process for photographing MAD architects’ Harbin Opera House in the northern region of China. The short documentary describes the power of architectural photography and how Baan aims to capture the present moment of a place, instead of creating a timeless scene.
At the end of 2015, OMA’s first major commission, the Netherlands Dance Theater (NDT) was swiftly demolished. The once-praised building was reduced to dust and debris within a few months, without drawing much attention from the architecture world. Koolhaas had heard rumors about the demolition of the NDT over the last decade, but did not expect the lack of public outcry. “There was almost nothing, almost zero,” he said.
Using the NDT as a case study, Metropolis Magazine takes a look at how the early works of our most lauded architects are treated when they are no longer fit for purpose, and asks how we decide on the role preservation plays in the architectural profession. Is the demolition of the NDT a sign of lack of respect for OMA? Or is it a more general sign of our current era of rapidly changing styles and a need for larger buildings? Read the full story by Metropolis Magazine, here.
Several new renderings have been released of Robert A.M. Stern Architects’ TriBeCa condos at 70 Vestry Street, according to New York YIMBY. Located next to the West Side Highway in TriBeCa in New York, the 14-story building will contain 46 condos and over 153,000 square feet of residential space, with each apartment ranging from 1,700 to 7,000 square feet.
Clockwise from top left: Rosemary Park, Rebecca G. Barnes, Amity Kurt, Patricia Galván, Farida Abu-Bakare and Claire Weisz, women who responded to the survey. Image via The New York Times
Gender inequality in the architecture profession has continued to be a cause for concern, with a recent survey from the AIA showing that women feel that little to no progress has been made with overcoming gender obstacles. Following the recent passing of Zaha Hadid, a powerful pioneer and role model for female designers, The New York Times launched an online survey asking women in architecture about their experiences in the profession. Read some of the excerpts from the two hundred responses they received after the break.
"Part of war and conflict has always been the collateral damage. Buildings have fallen in the path of military objectives, but, [...] in this war, buildings aren't destroyed because they're in the way of a target. The buildings are the target." As the narrator of The Destruction of Memory so eloquently explains, the destruction of culture—of buildings, books, and art—is often not an accidental consequence of conflict. As we can see by the actions of ISIS in Iraq and Syria today, the destruction of cultural artifacts is part and parcel of a conscientious strategy to target and destroy the collective memory, history, and identity of a people.
Kengo Kuma and Associates has completed its 10,440 square meter Wuxi Vanke arts and shopping complex, a renovated red brick cotton mill in Wuxi, China, featuring an aluminum-clad extension.
Located along the shore of the Golden Horn in Fatih, Turkey, the Bulgarian Church of St. Stephen is no ordinary basilica. Unlike most churches of its time, St. Stephen’s is constructed entirely out of cast iron, explains Atlas Obscura in their article "Bulgarian Iron Church." This method of construction was cost-effective and efficient for the time, but never became popular.
Following the death of Zaha Hadid on March 31st of this year Section D, Monocle 24's weekly review of design, architecture and craft, hones in on the role of women in architecture and design. They discuss why, despite an almost 50:50 gender split in undergraduate architecture courses, women are still grossly underrepresented at senior levels within the profession by featuring conversations with two leading female architects, Angela Brady OBE and Amanda Levete. The episode also looks back over the lives of some of architecture's overlooked heroines.
OMA's first building in Manhattan will be a condo project at 122 East 23rd Street, built in collaboration with Toll Brothers City Living. Designed by OMA's New York principal Shohei Shigematsu, the residential tower culminates a decade leading the office and several previous attempts to realize a project in the region.
