Since 2007, Jade Doskow has been photographing the remains of World's Fair Sites: once iconic spots that displayed the ambitions/ideals of their eras, now, often forgotten and left to decay. Now, for the 50th anniversary of the 1964 World's Fair in New York (in just a few weeks time), Doskow has a new goal: to shoot all the iconic North American fair sites - from Seattle's Space Needle to San Francisco's Treasure Island. To do so, she's launched a Kickstarter campaign:LOST UTOPIAS. See more of Doskow's stunning images, and find out how to support her Kickstarter campaign, after the break...
UPDATE: "WIA" has now reached its goal. A group of women fed up with the state of architecture today have started a campaign to transform the profession, to "redefine the ideas of success and compensation within our discipline [..., to create] healthful trends both within the academy and profession with real life/work balance [..., and] create more women leaders within the discipline." As they put it: "We want an approach appropriate to this century." The campaign, run by Nina Freedman, the Director of Projects for Shigeru Ban Architects, and Lori Brown, an architect, author and associate professor at Syracuse University, needs to earn only a few hundred dollars more to reach their $7,000 dollar goal. However, only 35 hours remain - if you're interested in learning more, check out their video here.
Nikos Salingaros is unafraid of a controversial statement. A professor of Mathematics and Urban theory, he has been using his scientific approach to study architecture and urban environments for years, and has come to a conclusion: Modernism is just about the worst thing that happened to architecture.
As Salingaros explains, not only is it impossible to have any "Green" architecture within a modernist framework, but, moreover, Modernism encourages us to deny our biologically-evolved senses and embrace an unnatural, inhuman built world - and why? Because there's a whole lot of money and power behind those "modernist boxes." As Salingaros puts it:
Architectural Education ever since the Bauhaus, and continuing to the present day without interruption, teaches students to interpret built forms according to very peculiar abstract criteria, and not through their own biologically-evolved senses and cognitive intelligence. This is radical training in sensory denial: desensitizing people so that their interpretation of the world can be defined by others with an agenda.
I interviewed Salingaros to get to the bottom of his theories and understand his anti-Modern crusade. Read it all, including Salingaros' incendiary takes on Architecture education, sustainability, and urban planning, after the break...
OMA, BIG and their partnering developers have until later today to decide whether they want to alter their plans for the Miami Beach Convention Center or walk away from the competition entirely.
The traumatizing terror attacks of July 22, 2011 in Norway - including the bombing in Oslo and the massacre on Utøya Island - resulted in 158 persons injured and 77 dead. Those behind the re-design of Utøya Island decided (somewhat controversially) that the island should, in order to "reduce the impact of the massacre," remain a vibrant summer camp rather than become a memorial.
TechCrunch reported today that GoldieBlox, the startup that created “GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine," a girl-oriented alternative to LEGO, has struck its first nationwide distribution deal with Toys ‘R’ Us. Responding on twitter, the Harvard GSD (@HarvardGSDExecED) asked its followers: could GoldieBlox be one of the answers to encouraging women to enter the architecture and engineering professions? The response from Tabitha Ponte (@tcpg) became an interesting exchange - check it out, after the break...
Courtesy of Elizabeth Richter Chu for AIA President, Facebook Page
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) reports that it has elected Elizabeth Richter Chu, the CEO of Richter Architects in Corpus Christi, Texas, to serve as the 2014 AIA first vice president/president-elect and 2015 AIA president. James Easton Rains, Jr., FAIA, and Thomas V. Vonier, FAIA, will each serve as vice president from 2014 through 2015; James P. Grounds, AIA, will be the Institute’s Treasurer.
Frank Gehry recently sat down with Foreign Policy’s Benjamin Pauker for a candid interview covering everything from his distaste for Dubai (it’s “on steroids [...] like every cruddy city in the world”), his dislike for cold, minimalist architecture (“I need a place where I can come home and take my shoes off”); and, oddly enough, his approval of benevolent dictators - albeit with taste, of course. As Gehry put it: “It's really hard to get consensus, to have a tastemaker. There is no Robert Moses anymore. Michael Bloomberg wants to be one. In fact, he promised he would build 10 more of my buildings in New York, but, you know, he hasn't yet. Architecture's difficult … [sigh].” Read the full interview here.
Every year, students at Yale design and build a single-family home in a low-income neighborhood. Called the Vlock Building Project, it’s one of the longest-standing and most admired public-interest design-build programs in the US. Unfortunately, it’s under threat. A/N reports professor Paul Brouard was assaulted and robbed on-site in Mid-May (he has since recovered). Despite the desires of dept. head Robert A.M. Stern, Yale University demanded the project be abandoned and re-located to an approved neighborhood. Did Yale make the right decision? Let us know what you think after the break.
Architecture emerges with every "occupy" movement or protest. From whatever meager resources at hand, occupiers create structures to fulfill very specific purposes - from makeshift tents for sleeping, to instant podiums for speaking, or perhaps even a swing to kill the time. Unfortunately, these architectures are, by their very nature, fleeting: often disappearing instantly the moment the occupation ends.
Antoni Gaudí (1852 -1926), the Catalán architect best known for his imaginative style, inspired by the curves and shapes found in nature, and - of course - for his inimitable masterpiece, the unfinished Sagrada Familia, would have turned 161 today.
Image by Tom Morris, March 2012, based on the 'We Can Do It!' poster created by J. Howard Miller in 1942 for the U.S. War Production Coordinating Committee, as part of the homefront mobilization campaign during World War II. [Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, via Design Observer
Today, KCRW's Design & Architecture will air a podcast on the topic of "Forgetting Women Architects." The show will feature ArchDaily columnist Guy Horton's interview with Denise Scott Brown as well as a conversation based on Despina Stratigakos' fantastic article for Design Observer, "Unforgetting Women Architects: From the Pritzker to Wikipedia." In the article, Stratigakos describes how women continue to be edited out of architecture history and calls for us to "unforget" them by including their stories in online resources such as wikipedia. You can listen to the podcast here.
Starting this Saturday, the public will finally be able to admire the winner of this year's Young Architects Program -Party Wall - at the MoMA PS1 courtyard in Long Island City. Every Saturday this summer through September 7, Party Wall will be the multi-functional backdrop (at once wall, water feature, shading and seating storage device) for Warm Up 2013, an outdoor music series.
We spoke with Party Wall's designer, Caroline O'Donnell, principal of CODA, just this morning; she told us that although much has been made of Party Wall's ingenious material (skateboarding scraps) and multi-functionality, it's most important feature is it's referentiality to the urban language of Long Island City.As O'Donnell told us: "we started to understand the relationship between the wall and the other languages—Long Island City, the billboards, the graffiti. We realized we had entered into a dialogue with a bigger urban context."In fact, the wall itself is a legible sign - written in the shadow it forms.
Read our interview with O'Donnell on Party Wall's ingenious design, after the break...
Phase 1 of the new Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, the largest public works project in the history of Los Angeles, has been completed. The new airport, designed by Fentress Architects to be a LEED-certified landmark for the city, will feature a flowing, ocean-inspired roofline, a three-story,150,000-square-foot Great Hall, and one of the most advanced multimedia Integrated Environmental Media Systems (IEMS) in the world. The $1.5 billion project has been funded solely from LAX’s operating revenues, without public funds.
In the 20th century, it was going to be the site of the world's tallest skyscraper, but it became the world's largest hotel. In 2006, the hotel was replaced with a fence, the largest advertising space in all of Europe, enclosing acres of undeveloped, highly valuable land. In 2014, it will become Moscow's first - and most important - park in over 50 years.
Featuring fantastic quotes from SHoP Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Tod Williams Billie Tsien, & WORKac, Justin Davidson's latest in New York Magazine gets behind the scenes of the working architectural relationship, in all its "beauty & complexity." According to Davidson, these husband-wife teams are serving to upset ”two enduring fallacies: that men build as women help, and that the noblest kind of architect is a Napoleon of the blueprint, dispatching orders for others to carry out.”
