In honor of International Women’s Day celebrated on March 8, it’s important to reflect upon and acknowledge the progress that women across all design professions have made over the last several years. From more women being appointed to leadership roles in prominent academic institutions around the world, Jeanne Gang being named to Time 100’s Most Influential People in 2019, the all-female team of Counterspace being awarded the design of the Serpentine Pavilion in London, and the first female practice winning the prestigious Pritzker Prize only a few days ago, more women in architecture are gaining the recognition that they deserve in this traditionally male-dominated profession.
Which is more male: a stadium or a nursery? Hannah Rozenberg, a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art, says that it’s the former—and she has an algorithm to prove it.
Videos
Mashhad C.E.O Headquarters. Image Courtesy of NEXT Office
In this interview by Parametric Architecture, NEXT Office's founder, Iranian architect Alireza Taghaboni, talks about his approach to design, describing how he reinterprets the principles of traditional Iranian architecture and translates the cultural and climatic context into his work. The interview covers the conceptual thinking behind several projects, as the architect discusses dichotomies such as mass-void, introversion-extroversion as being the recurrent themes of his designs.
Expected to open in autumn 2022, construction works began on Santander’s landmark new workplace in Milton Keynes. The campus entitled Unity Place, designed by LOM architecture and design, is a hub for digital banking innovation, bringing together, in one space, the 6,000 employees of Santander.
Atelier Vincent Hecht has released a series of recent photographs that document the construction status of Frank Gehry's Luma Arles Tower in the south of France. The twisting tower opening this spring will include artist studios, workshops, seminar rooms, and research facilities.
Courtesy of The School of Architecture at Taliesin
The Board of Directors for The School of Architecture at Taliesin (SoAT) has decided to reverse its January 25 vote and keep the school open. Last month, it was announced that the school would be closing after 88 years. The SoAT Board has stated that they have secured additional funding and have long-term operating viability.
As walls and slabs, furniture may delimit and define a space. However, opposite to constructive elements, which distinguish the rooms in a more permanent way, furniture may create useful boundaries between one space and another in an easily adaptable way.
Grimshaw and Little Diversified Architectural Consulting (Little) have been selected to design a new Arts Complex for Santa Monica College (SMC) in California. Aiming to create an iconic landmark building along Pico Boulevard, the complex will be made to celebrate the college's Art Department as part of the broader Santa Monica community.
In the middle of February, we were invited to visit Ljubljana and attend the Matchmaking Conference organized by Future Architecture Platform -- an organization, coordinated by Ljubljana's Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), that provides young talents with the opportunity to share their ideas -- practical or conceptual -- and meet fellow emerging architects. The three-day event gathered 25 teams from all over the world to present their projects and discuss potential collaborations.
We always appreciate the people behind great initiatives in architecture, and try to never miss the chance to share their profiles and thoughts with our readers. Future Architecture Platform is no exception -- the Leader of the great team of architects, curators, publishers, and educators, Director of MAO and architecture critic, Matevž Čelik told us about the ideas driving the Platform, challenges that emerging architects face these days, and the future of architectural education and profession.
Henry N. Cobb, FAIA, Founding Partner of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects, has passed away at 93, in his home in Manhattan, as confirmed by Ian Bader, a partner at their architecture firm, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.
PAU or Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a multi-disciplinary design and planning firm founded by Vishaan Chakrabarti, created a revitalization plan for Sunnyside Yard in western Queens, New York. Envisioning a more equitable and sustainable future, the 180-acre human-centered carbon-neutral master plan reflects the community’s needs.
Venice Biennale 2020, curated by Hashim Sarkis, has been postponed and will be held from August 29th through November 29th, as announced on the event's official website.
via Cities for Play. Designing Child Friendly High Density Neighbourhoods
'Cities for Play' is a project whose main objective is to inspire architects and urban planners to create stimulating, respectful, and accessible cities for children.
Natalia Krysiak, its creator, is an Australian architect who believes that children's needs should be placed at the center of urban design to ensure resilient and sustainable communities. In 2017, she produced 'Cities for Play,' studying examples of cities that are concerned with providing environments that are capable of promoting the health and well-being – physical and emotional – of children through a focus on play and "active mobility” in public spaces.
Pritzker Prize 2020 Laureates, Irish architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara are known for their powerful yet delicate approaches. In this exclusive video for ArchDaily, Martha Thorne, executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and Dean of IE School of Architecture and Design, shares some of the reasons why Grafton Architects has won the Pritzker Prize 2020.
I met with Juan Alberto Andrade and Cuqui Rodríguez from the JAG Studio in Ecuador during their conference for the sixth edition of EARQ (PUCE-SI). The young couple dedicate themselves to documenting and writing about Ecuadorian architecture. By covering the now famous works of Al Borde, Daniel Moreno Flores, Natura Futura, Rama Estudio, among others, the couple have become the unofficial emissaries of their country.
We sat down with the couple for World Photography Day where they shared, not only their start in and work in photography, but the role of photography in contemporary architecture.
The British Council has announced that curators Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler will represent the UK at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2020. Selected from a shortlist of nine proposals, the winning project entitled “The Garden of Privatised Delights”, explores the creeping epidemic of privatized public spaces across cities in the UK.
John Ronan (b. 1963, Grand Rapids, Michigan) is known for his sensual atmospheric buildings that tend to unfold layer by layer their spatial complexity, as one moves through them. His focus is on the use of materiality in ways that reinvent architecture. Ronan holds a Master of Architecture degree with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1991) and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan (1985). He has been teaching architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology since 1992. John Ronan Architects was established in Chicago in 1999, the year Ronan won the Townhouse Revisited Competition sponsored by the Graham Foundation. In 2006, the firm was featured in the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices and the Young Chicago exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2007, the architect was selected to build the prestigious Poetry Foundation in Chicago, out of a pool of 50 international contenders. His monograph Explorations: The Architecture of John Ronan was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010. In 2016, the firm was named one of seven international finalists for the Obama Presidential Library. The following interview is a condensed version of our conversation at the architect’s studio in Chicago.
“When you read Love in the Time of Cholera you come to realize the magic realism of South America.” Yvonne Farrell, Shelley McNamara and I were in a corner of the Barbican Centre’s sprawling, shallow atrium talking about the subject of their most recent accolade, the Royal Institute of British Architects inaugural International Prize, awarded that previous evening. That same night the two Irish architects, who founded their practice in Dublin in the 1970s, also delivered a lecture on the Universidad de Ingeniería and Tecnologia (UTEC)—their “modern-day Machu Picchu” in Lima—to a packed audience in London’s Portland Place.
The Hungarian Pavilion at the 2020 Venice Biennale will feature the work of twelve design studios that will reconsider twelve iconic modernist buildings in Budapest. For the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the pavilion's curator Dániel Kovács wants to explore the value and heritage of architectural modernism to reconcile past and future architecture.
Architectural rendering and visualization have become crucial tools in the art of communication. From client presentations to internal design reviews, showing your 3D models in lifelike, beautiful environments can convey both practical information about the project’s development, as well as the feeling and experience of a space.
Space Saloon and Designers on Holiday have announced DeSaturated, a week-long interdisciplinary community-in-residence design festival in California's Cuyama Valley. Following the success of the first two iterations, LANDING and FIELDWORKS, the team is returning to California once more. The community-in-residence program will bring together designers, artists and researchers to address issues of water scarcity.