Image (c) MVRDV.

MVRDV has completed a new project in Lyon: Le Monolithe is 1/5 of a mixed-use housing and retail block that also boasts work from Pierre Gautier, Manuelle Gautrand, ECDM and Erik van Egeraat. Particularly notable is Le Monolithe’s facade of aluminum shutters, upon which can be read the first article in the European Constitution. [via Design Boom]

Blair Kamin over at the Chicago Tribune rounded up the year’s best architecture last Friday (our favorite of his favorites being  Harboe Architects’ restoration of Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott building), and now has done the same for the worst: the Chicago Spire’s tragicomic hole being the most ludicrous (pics after the jump). [via Cityscapes]

Bonus: Presumably you heard something about the Metrodome collapse this weekend, owing to heavy snowfall blanketing the Midwest. For visual proof of structural engineering that doesn’t hold (frozen) water, check out this clip from Fox Sports, after the jump.

West 71st Street in New York is a rollercoaster of a street, both for its varied topography and wildly opposing architectural styles. The New York Times has an interactive feature charting the street’s ‘row houses gone wild,’ from ‘bunker’-style buildings to a 1930s speakeasy. [via New York Times]

The epic debacle of “Europe’s tallest building” continues: the proposed Gazprom headquarters, sited controversially in the center of St. Petersburg’s landmarked skyline, will now be relocated to another site. This “mutual” decision between the gas giant and the Russian government makes the future of the RMJM-designed monument uncertain. [via BD Online]

Geoff Manaugh points us towards this great post about touring the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s gold vaults. Essential reading for urban anthropologists and explorers – one remarkable detail amidst the ubiquity of iBanking is that gold bought and sold between entities is still exchanged manually, by hand, deep within the building. [via BLDGBLOG and Friends of the Pleistocene]

Image of the Chicago Spire’s beginnings, via Cityscapes.

The Lyon mixed-use block where MVRDV’s Le Monolithe was just completed.

RMJM’s proposed Gazprom tower.

A piece of the restored Carson Pirie Scott & Co Building, image via Cityscapes.

by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

posted in daily brew

tagged chicago spire, daily brew, Louis Sullivan, mvrdv, rmjm

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