History Museum of Lugo, in Spain

Here at Architizer we love our museums. But in the summer, with the sun and warm weather beckoning us outside, spending time inside a crowded gallery starts to feel like a chore. The solution? Outdoor (or mostly outdoor) museums! We’ve rounded up six sculpture parks, abstract structures, and buildings that blend and highlight their landscape combine the best art and architecture with the splendor of the great outdoors. See them below.

more

Smoky Hill Weapons Range Target: Tires, September 30, 1990. Photo © Terry Evans, Courtesy of the Artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

After spending eight years photographing Kansas’ (tiny but still hanging-in-there) virgin prairie, Terry Evans felt stuck. ”It wasn’t that I was bored [with it],” says the artist. “It was just that I had photographed it to the limits of my vision.” But then she came across an image that made her see the Great Plains in a completely new way. The photo in question, of an abandoned atomic bomb test site in the Pacific, reminded Evans of an aerial view of the Konza Prairie, near her home. And with that she grabbed her camera, climbed into a four-seat Cessna 172, and took to the sky.

The resulting photographs, taken between 1990 and 1994, are on view in “The Inhabited Prairie,” which runs through July 3 at the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York City. The exhibition presents a complex, often contradictory view of the American Heartland, and of our relationship to it. “I wanted to show all the layers of the prairie,” Evans tells Architizer, “how time and history and human development is embedded into the land. And to do that I really needed to look at it from above.” See more photos below.

more

Who doesn’t love novelty architecture? Ice cream parlors that look like milk bottles, OJ stands that resemble oranges, a film development lab shaped like a point-and-shoot camera, or—in the case of Arrested Development—a banana stand that looks like, well, a giant banana. In their seminal 1977 book Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown coined a name for these literal, often kitschy structures that dotted much of the Western US landscape: “ducks,” after the famous Long Island duck that greets vacationers on the way to the Hamptons. (It once did sell actual ducks and duck eggs.)

So in honor of Arrested Development Week and our very favorite (if fictional) architectural duck, we’ve compiled a list of 15 of these zany novelty structures, from the classic to the obscure.

more

Robert Hammond and Joshua David, co-founders of Friends of the High Line, accept their Architizer award.

Architizer Honorees Robert Hammond and Joshua David aren’t architects. They don’t have design degrees or urban planning experience. But that didn’t stop them from banding together to save an old elevated railway track in Manhattan’s West Side from oblivion. Little did they know that their passion project would end up not only creating one of New York City’s most beloved public parks, but revitalizing an entire neighborhood.

That project: the High Line, of course, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Robert and Joshua founded Friends of the High Line after a community meeting about the abandoned structure in 1999. Which made them a natural pick for our first Architizer Advocacy Award. Not only does their story illustrate the transformative power of architecture and design, but it also proves that anyone—not just architects, planners, and the like—can participate in it.

more

Hitting the A+ Awards Red Carpet tonight are (clockwise from top left): MoMA’s Paola Antonelli, David van der Leer, Elizabeth Diller, and Yves Behar

Our first gala for the Architizer A+ Awards starts in … a matter of hours! And we’re putting the finishing touches to make sure we look all pretty and polished for our guests, who are, needless to say, pretty distinguished. So, who’s gonna be on the red carpet tonight (you know, besides the President of Georgia)? From architect giant Juergen Mayer H. to intrepid photographer Iwan Baan, here’s just a sampling of the many glamorous names attending our fete!

more

Architects know how to party. Seriously! In preparation for our A+ Gala on Thursday, we’ve looked at some notorious architecture bashes throughout history, and—let’s just say we have a lot to live up to! From a country happening with a special performance by the Velvet Underground to a Bauhaus party featuring a tinfoil slide, here are some historic architecture fetes we wish we could have attended! 

more

Johnny Rotten’s spikes have nothing on JDS Architects’ VM House. Photo of John Lydon, 1976, by Ray Stevenson/Rex USA

Studded leather jackets and spiked colors are back, thanks to the Metropolitan Museum’s highly publicized “Punk: Chaos to Couture” show, which opens tomorrow in New York City. And while we know that punk constitutes much more than just stapling some metal accouterments onto your shirt and calling it a day, well, we were so inspired by the exhibition’s spinous fashions that we decided to their architectural equivalents. So cue up some Sex Pistols and click through to see some seriously spiky, badass buildings.

more

Nouvel’s Torre Agbar in Barcelona (left) and his new line of shoes. Photos: via Oobject and Co.Design

Jean Nouvel has taken a break from drafting (and re-drafting) MoMA’s controversial new Tower Verre to launch a line of … leather moonboots? Yes, Nouvel is the latest architect to dabble in shoe design, launching his Pure Capsule Collection recently during Milan Design Week. So how do his monochrome booties match up to Zaha’s scale-y sandals, or Gehry’s spiffy spats? Click through for our comprehensive ranking of starchitect-designed shoes, from the fab to the fug.

more

This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Jury Award in the pop-up category. See the full list of winners here.

We dare anyone to stroll into the exuberantly designed Louis Vuitton – Yayoi Kusama pop-up in London and not walk out of there with a smile. (The fact you can’t afford any of the designer duds sitting inside somehow doesn’t diminish its giddy pleasures.) Filled with the Japanese artist’s signature polka dots—and her surrealist sensibility—this red-and-white pumpkin-shaped store, located in Selfridges London, won the hearts of the A+ Awards jurors, snagging the prize for best pop-up. Read more!

more

This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Popular Choice Award in the pop-ups category. See the full list of winners here.

We’re totally nerding out over this A+-winning pop-up, which combines our love for adaptive re-use, architectural ruins, and … books! For a week last fall, Studio 8 1/2 converted a 16th-century Turkish bath, or hammam, in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, into a contemporary art library, bringing international acclaim to this largely forgotten monument.

8 1/2 designed the |CON|Temporary Library for the Urban Dreams Festival, a month-long celebration organized by the Center for Contemporary Art of Plovdiv and the association Art Today. Art Today had asked Studio 8 1/2 to come up with a design that would showcase the Center’s archive in the hammam’s main hall.

“The main inspiration for us was actually the building itself,” says Studio 8 1/2 owner Vladislav Kostadinov. (The structure, built over an ancient Roman bath, was used as a communal bath by both men and women until the 1990s, when it was abandoned.) “The surrounding space, the centuries of historical layers on the walls, the sun looking from the small windows on the top,” Kostadinov elaborates, “even the smell and taste of it.” Read more.

more