United States

+ 6

This Archtober, join over one hundred architects and design professionals in making an impact in their local communities through AFHny’s annual city-wide service day.

Participants will work alongside some of the region’s leading community­-focused organizations through hands-on painting, planting, and rebuilding projects, all of which will improve New York's neighborhoods on both physical and social levels.

License can bind and it can liberate. A fantasy of disciplinary finitude, a professional architectural license bestows liability and autonomy in equal measure. In an abstract sense, to take license is to disregard established limits, to undermine the very idea of a closed and comprehensive disciplinarity that sustains licensure.

If licentiousness is derived from license, how do architects leverage this polemical condition to balance - or not - responsibility and invention? How does architecture's periphery change when license ceases to be a telos/terminus? What kind of authorities, criteria, and protocols emerge to determine whether an architect is fit to practice?

Barcelona-based Vilalta Studio has unveiled the designs for the Ebenezer Chapel, a granite excavated chapel in Raleigh, North Carolina. Upon completion, the chapel will be excavated 15 meters below ground in a sloped forest terrain next to Richland Creek, and will be built completely from the natural granite on the site.

From the lowest point of the site at the creek, a continuous ramp will slope down around the chapel, and into the foyer, as the main entrance to the space, all of which provides natural light and ventilation in addition to chapel access.

The J. Irwin Miller Symposium, “A Constructed World,” from October 1-3, 2015 is convened by Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis in conjunction with the exhibition, “City of 7 Billion,” at the Yale School of Architecture. The symposium brings together leading voices across multiple disciplines, with the keynote by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and closing address by Hashim Sarkis, and includes: Lucia Allais, Pierre Bélanger, Phillip Bernstein, Benjamin Bratton, Nicholas de Monchaux, Keller Easterling, Ariane Lourie Harrison, Tim Ingold, Clara Irazábal, Adrian Lahoud, Adam Lowe, Aihwa Ong, John Palmesino, Neil Brenner, William Rankin, Todd Reisz, Elihu Rubin, Kathryn Sullivan, Dana Tomlin, Annabel Wharton, Mark Wigley, Mark Williams and Liam Young.

An award-winning anthropological case study by designer Stephen Fan, SUB URBANISMS explores the controversial conversion of suburban single-family homes into multi-family communities by immigrant Chinese casino workers in Connecticut. Addressing the norms, cultural values, and public policies that determine how most Americans live, the exhibition juxtaposes immigrant cultural beliefs and pragmatism with suburban American social, aesthetic, and financial codes. With a regional focus and global reach, it also provides insight into the long-term effects of 9/11 on the New York Chinatown service industry as a significant factor behind the influx of Chinese labor seeking employment at the region's casinos, and the formation of this satellite suburban Chinatown. With creative implications for the future of housing design and habitation in response to cultural, social, and ecological challenges, SUB URBANISMS offers a powerful inquiry into the ways in which culture shapes our lives and homes.

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For their most ambitious exhibition to date – artist duo DABSMYLA presents Before and Further, a 4,000 square foot installation takeover of a stand-alone 1930 built Spanish Revival workplace building, located on the Modernica factory property. DABSMYLA have fully transformed its interior and exterior with their newest paintings, sculptures, installations and exclusive furnishings from limited-edition fiberglass shell chairs and hand painted ceramics to custom-built lighting installations, all designed and created exclusively for their collaboration with Modernica. The already rich history of this building and Modernica create a fitting compliment for DABSMYLA’s spectacular experience. This long awaited solo show will be the follow up to their tremendous work in designing the logo and set of the 2015 MTV Movie Awards. This exhibition closes their already very busy year, which includes an enormous private showcase in New York City and having painted numerous murals worldwide.

2015/2016 Hyde Lecture Series opens another exciting chapter for the design disciplines as speakers take a fresh, in-depth look at What’s Next.

The College of Architecture’s Hyde Lecture Series is a long-standing, endowed public program. Each year the College hosts compelling speakers in the fields of architecture, interior design, landscape architecture and planning that enrich the ongoing dialog around agendas which are paramount to the design disciplines and our graduates.

+ 15

The AIA|DC Emerging Architects Committee (AIA|DC EAC) has partnered with Price Modern, a national furniture solutions dealer, to announce its inaugural RE-Form Competition. RE-Form aims to bridge the boundaries of the design industry and promote a multidisciplinary dialogue towards design solutions. Through an industry-wide design competition, RE-Form helps widen the definition of design work creative professionals do throughout the country. The design competition launches nationally through AIA|DC EAC’s online platforms on August 31st 2015, with entries due on October 19th 2015. Award winners will be announced at a gala reception at Washington, D.C.’s District Architecture Center (DAC) on November 12, 2015. Winning entries will be showcased at DAC’s gallery space and online via Architect Magazine.

Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships between Architecture and Site (Routledge 2015), the first book by architecture's Edgar A. Tafel Assistant Professor Caroline O'Donnell, explores architecture's relationship with site and its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment.

Metals in Construction magazine has launched a competition for architects, engineers, students, designers, and others from all over the world to submit their vision for recladding 200 Park Avenue, built a half-century ago as the world’s largest corporate structure, the Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building).

The mandate is to reimagine this New York City icon with a resource-conserving, eco-friendly enclosure—one that creates a highly efficient envelope with the lightness and transparency sought by today’s office workforce while preserving and enhancing the aesthetic of its heritage. Entrants may now register on the competition's official website. The deadline for final submission is February 1, 2016.

DesignPhiladelphia, a signature event of the Philadelphia Center for Architecture, is the oldest design event of its kind in the country and annually showcases the work of over 400 practicing architects, designers, and creative professionals. This year’s Festival kicks off on the evening of October 7, and events run from October 8-16. Experience design in unexpected ways through approximately 100 exhibitions, workshops, demonstrations, tours, talks, and events held in venues across the city. Learn about wide-ranging topics, including architecture, urban planning, landscape, graphic, multi-media, product, furniture design, fashion, and the like.

In this survey exhibition, architectural historian Kerri Culhane documents and explores Poy Gum Lee’s (1900-1968) nearly 50-year long career in both China and New York and examines Lee’s modernist influence in New York Chinatown. This project will result in the first-ever comprehensive list of Lee’s projects in New York. Lee’s hand is visible in the major civic architecture of Chinatown post 1945, which blends stylistically Chinese details with modern technologies and materials. Lee was the architectural consultant for the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association’s building on Mott Street (1959) and the On Leong Tong Merchant’s Association at Mott & Canal Street (1948-50) – the most prominent Chinese modern building in Chinatown. Among his highly visible commissions, Lee designed the Chinese-American WWII Monument in Kimlau Square (1962), a modernist take on a traditional Chinese pailou, or ceremonial gate; the Lee Family Association (ca. 1950); and the Pagoda Theatre (1963, demolished).

The 2016 Berkeley Prize is now open. Open to all undergraduate architecture students, the essay competition "strives to show architects-in-training that the smallest act of building has global implications: that design can and does play a major role in the social, cultural, and psychological life of both the individual and society at large." This year's competition theme is "Sheltering Those in Need: Architects Confront Homelessness." All initial submissions are due November 1, 2015. Essay semifinalists will be given the opportunity to apply for a travel fellowship. All the details, here.

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Design Miami/ is the global forum for design. Each fair brings together the most influential collectors, gallerists, designers, curators and critics from around the world in celebration of design culture and commerce. Occurring alongside the Art Basel fairs in Miami, USA each December and Basel, Switzerland each June, Design Miami/ has become the premier venue for collecting, exhibiting, discussing and creating collectible design.