August 29, 2012
The National Building Museum announced this evening that Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, will receive the 14th Vincent Scully Prize. Goldberger, an author of several books, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair; he formerly wrote for The New Yorker and The New York Times. Read more.
August 16, 2012
Readers, here’s your chance to cash in on those random architectural facts swirling around in your head (so no Google searching allowed!).
We’re giving away three new copies of “Kevin Roche: Architecture As Environment,” a handsome, 268-page hardcover book that chronicles the career of the Pritzker Prize-winning architect. The tome was produced in conjunction with an exhibition that opened last year at Yale, moved on to the Museum of the City of New York, and is now on view at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.
To enter our giveaway, answer this question: A convention center designed by Kevin Roche opened in 2010 in what city?
Send the name of the city, along with your name and mailing address, to: editorial@architizer.com. Deadline is next Monday, August 20, at 11:59 p.m. EST. We’ll toss all entries into a hat and pick three winners. Have at it!
Kevin Roche inserting the curtain wall into a scale model of the Ford Foundation Headquarters; Photo courtesy Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.
Ford Foundation Headquarters (1968), New York City; Photo © Ezra Stoller/Esto.
College Life Insurance Company Headquarters (1971), Indianapolis, Indiana; Photo courtesy Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.
Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1979), New York City; Photo courtesy Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.
August 8, 2012
Architizer is thrilled to announce the latest addition to our growing team, Jenna M. McKnight as Editor in Chief. Jenna is an accomplished journalist with more than a decade of professional experience, most recently serving as News Director for Architectural Record, where she oversaw all print and online news coverage for the 120-year-old publication.
OK – Architizer isn’t quite three years old yet, but we are for sure ready for the strong leadership and spectacular expertise that Jenna brings to the table. Over the next few months Jenna will be working with our excellent staff to expand our content and make sure that we are giving our readers what they want — the latest and greatest from the world’s most creative architects and designers.
Welcome, Jenna!
July 18, 2012
Zaha Hadid’s Olympic Aquatics Center.
We’re down to just eight days until the London Olympics, excitement over our favorite sport–swimming!–is reaching fever pitch. Can Michael Phelps defend his titles? Will 17-year-old Lia Neal make a name for herself as the team’s second-ever African American swimmer?
Even if you’re not a fan of the sport, the aquatic events at the Olympics are fun to watch, because host cities tend to pull out all the stops when it comes to designing the venues. Remember Beijing’s Watercube? This year’s aquatics center was designed by Iraqi-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid, and it’s a doozy: sculptural concrete, an undulated, dysmorphic ceiling, and alien-like diving boards.
As far as we’re concerned, there’s a lot for both swim fans and architecture fans to be excited about. That’s why we’re holding a pool party with our friends Duravit next week. On wednesday evening, we’ll celebrate the Olympics with swim footage, Olympic trivia, and all-American summer treats! Duravit president Tim Schroeder will lead the evening’s festivities, which’ll take place in their appropriately-blue-themed Duravit showroom in Midtown.
We hope you’ll come out and join us on Wednesday. In the event you can’t make it, though, get into the aquatic spirit with eleven remarkable pool designs, after the jump!
July 6, 2012
The inscription on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, fitted with new bronze replicas. Photo via The Chicago Tribune.
As architect Michael Meredith once said in a preface to Log, “Most other people walk by and live in buildings, but don’t think about them — not like we [architects] do. They have other things on their minds. They only seem to care when it doesn’t work or when they stub their toe on it.” In other words, reverence for architecture occupies, at most, .00000001% of our so-called collective consciousness. This is perhaps why 56 of the 72 bronze letters were stripped from the façade of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park in September 2010 and likely sold as scrap metal for a scant $10, according to The Chicago Tribune. The recently completed restoration, meanwhile, racked up a $42,000 bill.
May 18, 2012
Image via DutchArtEvents.
Dutch art duo Haas & Hahn has a shtick that sticks: the pair, comprised of Jeroen Koolhaas (yes, a direct descendent of Rem) and Dre Urhahn, is known for their colorful mural makeovers, which have most famously turned the slums of Rio de Janeiro into vibrant tributes to ROYGBIV. But what happens when the Favela Painters leave the favelas? Well, they head to Philadelphia.
According to KnightArts, the duo has relocated to North Philly for a yearlong artists’ residency, and, with paintbrushes in hand, they are to convert a “visually inconsistent” corridor on Germantown Avenue into a unified spectacle. Though their patented approach has drawn some criticism (a coat of paint seems almost literally like a cute Band-Aid slapped on more pervasive urban woes), the Germantown revival seems at a more appropriate scale—and in a more appropriate site in general—for Haas and Hahn’s noble artistry. Koolhaas and Urhahn have begun the early part of their one-year tenure hosting barbecues, visiting local businesses, and studying the routines and goings-on of a neighborhood with which they are admittedly unfamiliar. “We feel respectful and defensive of the neighborhood,” Urhahn told KnightArts. “They are wary of people coming in. They want to see positive change.” The aura of site-specificity is certainly there.
Designs have been set, and the painting process, powered by the volunteered assistance of Philadelphia locals, will span from May into the fall of this year.
Image via ArtInfo.
April 17, 2012
A neighborhood-watch sign stands near the gated community in Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Photo via The Christian Science Moniker.
A recent article in The Boston Globe made an interesting observation about the shooting of Trayvon Martin this past February, speculating that part of the tragedy was rooted in poor urban planning: “Less than 1.2 percent of the population in Sanford walks to work, and the subdivision where the killing took place is designed for driving, so something as human as walking is odd behavior,” wrote Zach Youngerman for the Globe.
On February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Martin was walking home from the nearest convenience store to the house of his father’s girlfriend, located inside a gated community. Martin was reportedly shot by community watch coordinator George Zimmerman in front of the community clubhouse, where the seeming act of trespassing was likely a desperate and resourceful search for a sidewalk.
According to the Globe, the Retreat at Twin Lakes gated community is largely lacking in conventional sidewalks and other forms of pedestrian thoroughfare. Where Martin entered the subdivision where he was fatally shot, he would have encountered a rare stretch of sidewalk, a safer, and less disruptive means of arriving at his destination than the option of crossing the 30-foot street from the corner where he was. As Youngerman wrote, “On [Martin’s] mile walk to the nearest convenience store, the sidewalk ends twice and becomes a no-man’s-land of grassy highway shoulder. IF Martin were trespassing, he had no choice but to do so.”
Numerous design scenarios may have prevented the incident. Aside from more pedestrian-friendly planning, the neighborhood in Sanford, Florida could afford denser residential areas: houses sitting closer to the property line and residences with front porches instead of long driveways may make the Retreat feel a lot less ‘private,’ perhaps deterring Zimmerman from feeling alone, threatened, and fearfully accountable for Martin’s actions. A more local convenience store or café within the neighborhood may have prevented the encounter altogether. Unfortunately, Martin and Zimmerman met in an environment designed explicitly to be sheltered, a place built to project such an image of security that even the most unassuming actions spur insecurity.
April 13, 2012
We launched Architizer two years ago with the express idea of using the internet to change how architects do business. Looks like we are nailing it!
Last week, we reached 10,000 registered firms on Architizer. Though sometimes I wish we were the type of company to lean back and pop champagne corks, that is sooooooooooo not us. After two years, 10,000 firms, 37,000 projects and nearly 500,000 Facebook fans, there’s still work to be done in increasing the awareness and visibility of architecture.
We are planning even more competitions to get firms work and to link architecture with cultural movements, like we did with the Pop Up Chapel. Our new jobs page is growing to become a leading resource for architecture employment throughout the world. Projects on Architizer are being picked up in places like the New York Times, Gizmodo, Fast Company, NotCot, and we have great content sharing deals with places like Huffington Post, The Atlantic Cities, and Flavorwire. Oh! Did we mention that our iPad app, with more than 100,000 downloads, is featured in every single Apple store in the USA? Yeah. Even Apple likes us!
All of this would not have been possible without the wild support and enthusiasm of the architecture and design community. When we launched at Storefront for Art and Architecture and 400 people showed up on a cold NYC night, we had a feeling that people were ready for a revolution. Every day, we are blown away by the openness and excitement we encounter from deisgn professionals all over the world.
There are super exciting things coming from Architizer in the coming months, so stay tuned, message me on Architizer to tell me what you think of the job we are doing, and let us know if you think there is something we can improve. Together we can change an entire profession and make everyone realize that they are a fan of architecture.
By the way! We wanted to craft a video introduction to Architizer that shows just how diverse our site is, so we asked six of our friends and colleagues to sit down and discuss Architizer and its impact on their work. Check it out above, along with our newly remodeled About Us page. You’ll see:
April 9, 2012
In 2010, LEGO released the first models of its Architecture series, encouraging children (and adults) to look at a pile of plastic bricks and see the Empire State Building, Fallingwater and the John Hancock Center, among other landmarks of high design. The series seemed to bridge a fairly obvious gap, playing with the idea that spatial toys like Legos might promote advanced spatial thinking—which, in turn, could breed a generation of Frank Lloyd Wrights. But few could probably have guessed that a childhood penchant for colored building blocks could inspire sharper business tactics.
Tim Herrick, global chief engineer at General Motors, and Dennis Pastor, executive director of performance excellence for WellStar Health Systems, were frustrated with the limits of two-dimensional data representation. Both executives found that flat line graphs and pie charts seemed ill suited for their respective lines of work: “We came to the conclusion that our processes were three dimensional but our reports were only two dimensional. We needed to see them 3-D,” Pastor told Co.Design. The solution came in the form of a familiar modular toy: LEGOs. Pastor and Herrick created a prototype Lego board, the same board now used to observe problem resolution tracking at GM.
GM uses different colored and different sized blocks to denote the areas of vehicles and the severity of the problems, respectively. The board not only provides a more comprehensive look at the data, but it also promotes transparency within the company, encouraging teams within GM to come together and update the status of the board collectively. As Mark Wilson wrote for Co.Design, “By mapping real world problems to an icon of our youth, each challenge must be approached with an inherent playfulness.” The game-like system might prompt employees to generate strategies to change the shape and color of the board. When results can be as palpable as a set of LEGOs, it’s hard not to feel the possibility of change.
[All images via Co.Design]
April 9, 2012
In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, a monumental celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. More than a nationalist commemoration, the Chicago World’s Fair was a large-scale survey of the state of American architecture, a bold statement assuring European visitors that America was an emerging global force. The event filled 400 acres of fairgrounds with temporary pavilions in the form of Beaux Arts buildings and infrastructure, touting neoclassical symmetry and splendor with structures designed to last no more than the six-month run of the Exposition. In essence, a transient, faux-marble Rome was erected and dismantled in Chicago within months, only to be remembered in photos and personal accounts—some more famously by the architect Adolf Loos.
As ephemeral as the Chicago World’s Fair was at the end of the nineteenth century, it cannot compare to what is currently taking shape at the Sand Museum in Tottori, Japan. Sand sculptors have taken residency at the world’s first ever sand museum to construct scaled down replicas of London’s architecture and massive tokens of British paraphernalia in honor of the 2012 Olympic Games. Photos on Design You Trust and The Daily News show a uniformly brown model of Westminster Abbey sitting above a high relief, larger-than-life sculptural tribute to England’s monarchy. Shovels, spray bottles and plastic buckets abound, as dedicated sculptors painstakingly mold and carve tiers of British row houses. The elaborate sand castles will be ready for the public on April 14, and—beating the 1893 World Expo by a few months—will run all the way through January 2013.
[Photos via Design You Trust and The Daily News]
