Former ArchDaily's Managing Editor. BA in Architecture from Newcastle University, and interested in how overlooked elements of architectural culture —from the media to competitions to procurement processes can alter the designs we end up with.
Thanks to a group called Friends of the Flyover, Liverpool has become the latest city with aspirations to build its own High Line-style elevated parkway. The group have raised over £40,000 on the civic crowdfunding website Spacehive to conduct a feasibility study on the elevated Churchill Flyover, with the aim of creating a park, events space and cycle route. Liverpool Council currently has plans to demolish the flyover at a cost of £4 million - however they are said to be open to the proposal by Friends of the Flyover, who hope to show that they can deliver a better solution for around half the cost. You can read the full story on the Independent.
The results of the 2014 European Prize for Urban Public Space have been announced. The prize organized by the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) rewards both the designers and the facilitators (such as councils or community groups) that have contributed to the best urban interventions of the year. The award is given for ingenuity and social impact, regardless of the scale of intervention, meaning that small, relatively unknown practices can rub shoulders with some of the best-known practices in Europe.
See the 2 Joint Winners and 4 Special Mentions after the break
View of the first phase of the development. Image Courtesy of HTA Design
Developer Notting Hill Housing Trust have selected HTA Design to lead the regeneration of London's infamous Aylesbury Estate. HTA will work on the masterplan for the entire site, and have also been selected as the lead architects for the first stage of the , working alongside Hawkins Brown and Mae Architects.
The £1.5 billion redevelopment will see the iconic post-war estate torn down and reconstructed in stages over the next 20 years, with different architects working on the detail design for each stage. In total the masterplan provides for 4,200 homes, a significant increase over the 2,704 in the existing estate.
The owners of the Montréal-Mirabel International Airport have confirmed that, after a decade lying vacant, it will finally demolish the airport's sleek black terminal building. When it was completed in 1975, Mirabel was the world's largest airport, but it quickly became unpopular with airlines as it was simply too far from Montréal, and was re-purposed as a testing site and cargo airport. Now, with the terminal building requiring $15 million in emergency repairs, owner Aéroports de Montréal have announced that it is "irreparably obsolete" and are seeking tenders for its demolition. You can read the full story at CBC News.
In recent years, Mies van der Rohe's famous glass-walled Farnsworth House has been under a grave threat from flooding by the Fox River which runs right past it. In the past 18 years, the house has been flooded three times, causing thousands of dollars worth of damage, and now its owners the National Trust for Historic Preservation are considering plans for a permanent solution - among which is a plan to install hydraulic stilts which would lift the entire house out of harm's way in the event of a flood.
Celebrating the 65th anniversary of Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House, artist Fujiko Nakaya has created the building's first ever site-specific art installation. The installation, titled "Veil", will shroud the glass house in fog for 10 minutes every hour, creating a dialogue with Johnson's design intentions by breaking the visual connection between inside and out, and covering the building's sharp, clean lines with misty indeterminacy. At the same time it will make literal Johnson's ideal of an architecture that vanishes.
Read after the break for more information and images
Transport for London today announced TateHindle as the winners of the competition to transform their London Underground Headquarters into a residential building. The building, designed by Charles Holden and completed in 1929, was once the tallest office block in London and has been home to Transport for London ever since. However, TfL say the building at 55 Broadway is "no longer fit for purpose", and will move out in 2015 when TateHindle will begin the renovation. You can read the full story on the Architects' Journal.
The RIBA has found that many UK practices rely too heavily on a single sector, or even a single client, putting them at risk should work in that sector suddenly dry up. These statistics are among the findings of the RIBA's annual Business Benchmarking Survey, the only mandatory survey of all chartered practices in the UK.
The benchmarking survey estimates that a maximum of 40% of a practice's income can safely come from a single sector, but it found that 60% of practices with 20-50 staff and 54% of practices with over 50 staff failed to meet this rule of thumb. Furthermore the survey found that 90% of practices with fewer than 20 staff relied on just a single client for over 40% of their income.
Read on after the break for more results of the RIBA Business Benchmarking Survey
A rival to Steven Holl Architects' design for the Maggie's Centre at St Barts Hospital in London has received planning permission. The alternative scheme was commissioned by a group called “Friends of the Great Hall and Archive”, who believe the proposal by Steven Holl Architects would threaten the 18th century, Grade I* listed Great Hall. The newly approved scheme, designed by Hopkins Architects, proposes a different site for the new cancer care centre.
After their initial scheme was rejected, Steven Holl Architects' revised design was submitted for planning approval last week, with a decision expected in the summer.
The Art Fund recently announced the six museums on the UK's 2014 Museum of the Year shortlist, its annual award for the outstanding museum of the year. The award celebrates every aspect of what makes a museum successful, but this year the list was highlighted by crucial work by architects, including renovations of the Tate Britain and the Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft, as well as the newly-constructed Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth. The winner from the six museums will receive a £100,000 prize, and will be announced on July 9th.
Read on after the break for the complete shortlist
Chief Architect of Moscow Sergei Kuznetsov yesterday announced MVRDV as the winners in the competition for the refurbishment of the Serp & Molot (Hammer & Sickle) factory in Eastern Moscow. The design by MVRDV is respectful of the history of the 19th-century steel factory, reinterpreting the existing fabric of the site into 1.8 million square meters of mixed-use space, including housing, offices, retail, schools and a local hospital.
Read on after the break for more project description
They also used this data to find a number of correlations between sprawl and poor quality of life, finding that people living in sprawling cities have higher living costs, shorter life expectancies, increased risk of obesity and diabetes, and lower economic mobility than those in dense cities.
Read on after the break to see the list of the 10 most dense and 10 most sprawling US cities
In response to this criticism, I spoke to Rodrigo Nino, the founder of Prodigy Network, the company behind 17 John, who offered to counter my argument. Read on after the break for his take on the benefits of tapping into the 'wisdom of crowds.'
The entry by Team Render for Homs, Syria. Image Courtesy of Render (Marwa Al-Sabouni & Khaled Komee)
A universal problem facing cities worldwide today is mass social housing. This issue manifests differently in different places: in some cases, housing built on modernist principles has proven unsustainable and socially problematic; in others, the challenge is to replace informal construction with safe, universal housing schemes -- without repeating the mistakes of modernism.
To address these issues, UN Habitat launched a student competition in September to provide designs for local, specific social housing solutions for cities around the globe. We've collected the winners in the overall competition, as well as some of our favorites from the 6 regional and 38 national winners, after the break.
In a compelling opinion piece on the Guardian, Lloyd Alter argues that our current obsession with increasing the density of our cities - mostly by building ever-taller skyscrapers - might be severely misguided. Alter believes that, without tall buildings, cities can achieve a "Goldilocks Density" - just dense enough to support lively streets, but not so dense that they become inhabitable. You can read the full article here.
In this fascinating post for Salon, Thomas Frank holds nothing back on the topic of so-called "McMansions". Charting their history from the 1980s to today, he reveals the economics and government policies which made them possible, concluding that they are not just a symptom of the inequality in modern US society, but the very cause of it: "Everything we do seems designed to make this thing possible... This stupendous, staring banality is the final outcome for which we have sacrificed everything else." You can read the full article here.
In a fascinating article for the Guardian, Owen Hatherley visits Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kiev, the public square at the heart of the Ukranian revolution that ironically was designed under Stalin as a Baron Hausmann-style weapon against uprisings. Hatherley examines how elements of the public space were utilized by protesters, and how different areas of the square are now hosting a variety of political factions. You can read the full article here.
.jpg?1399029392&format=webp&width=640&height=580)
