This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Popular Choice Award in the Kindergartens, Primary, & High Schools category. See the full list of winners here.

Here at Architizer HQ, we are always thrilled when we come across a project that goes the extra mile while giving a little bit back. Well, the UNO Elementary School Soccer Academy, designed by JGMA in Chicago, does that—and much more. The project, which has won an A+ Popular Choice Award, is a model of community development and a stellar example of architecture’s potential to change the world.

Located in Gage Park, a predominately Hispanic area in Chicago’s Southwest Side, the UNO school aims to support the students and residents in the neighborhood through a strong curriculum supplemented by the culturally embraced sport of soccer, community outreach programs, and innovative design. “The project is the epitome of education based development,” says JGMA President Juan Gabriel Moreno. “If you start with education, everything else grows around it.” Read more.

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Project: Park Pavilion

Architect: Moneo Brock Studio

Location: Cuenca, Spain

This astounding park pavilion in the historic city of Cuenca acts as a catalyst for rehabilitating the abandoned surrounding natural landscape. The crowning jewel of a larger urban project that includes the construction of performance spaces, an ice-skating rink, bars and restaurants in a cluster of historic buildings, the park pavilion functions as a venue for the city’s annual fair and weekly market. Composed of 23 pentagonal modules of glass and steel and linked by a structural network, the crystalline pavilion glitters in sunlight, and is sure to capture the eye of any onlooker. By blending material allure with a fragmented layout, the design speaks of a neglected history now infused with a reinvigorated future.

Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

This project was chosen as a Special Mention in the Architizer A+ Awards

Photos: courtesy of Moneo Brock Studio

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Project: Childminders Centre

Architect: TallerDe2 Arquitectos

Location: Selb, Germany

The Childminders Centre is the first of four buildings currently under construction whose goal is to encourage urban renewal in the shrinking city of Selb by attracting a younger population. Bold colors and a domestic scale resemble the stripes in the urban fabric, which can be replicated to fit into vacant lots and fill in patchy city blocks. Inside the centre is a daycare facility self-managed by a local mothers association. Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Photos: Fernando Alda 

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Huxtable in the 1960s, photographed by her husband, the industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable.

Ada Louise Huxtable, America’s first newspaper architecture critic and a pioneer of the form, died yesterday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She was 91.

Huxtable (born Ada Louise Landman in 1921) was a Fulbright and Guggenheim fellow and, in the years after World War II, an assistant curator of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1963, the New York Times appointed her its first full-time architecture critic, the post she held when she won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1970.

From her platform at the Times, Huxtable fought urban renewal—”urbicide” was her term—and advocated for the preservation of public space and historic structures, from neighborhood houses on up to the original Penn Station. “Ada Louise Huxtable has been more than just the most important pioneer of architectural criticism in newspapers in our time: she has been the most important figure in communicating the urgency of some kind of belief in the values of the man-made environment in our time, too,” Huxtable’s successor at the Times, the critic Paul Goldberger, said in a 1996 lecture at the City University of New York. “She has made people pay attention. She has made people care. She has made architecture matter in our culture in a way that it did not before her time.” Continue.

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Imagine if New York and Hong Kong were tropical islands packed with sustainable skyscrapers, public parks, and green spaces. Well, one island city is already $30 billion deep into a sustainable makeover: that would be Iskandar, a 2,217 square kilometer development at the southern-most tip of Malaysia. And thanks to a number of investments, innovative technology and design, and a visionary plan from the country’s government, Iskandar could be the blueprint for every future green city to come. Read more!

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The Game of Urban Renewal by Flavio Trevisan

Toronto-based artist Flavio Trevisan debuted his board game The Game of Urban Renewal at an art gallery, moving the pieces once a week while playing all of the various characters involved. The game, which can go on infinitely with any number of players, simulates the fate of Toronto’s Regent Park neighborhood, an intense locus of the city’s urban renewal efforts since 1947.

In the game, players can assume one of the following roles: City Councilor, Developer, Community Activist, City Planning Employee, Man-On-The-Street, Academic Urban Theorist, Resident of Existing Development to be Demolished, Mayor, Random Federal Politician, Skyscraper Enthusiast, or Garbage Man. They take turns spinning the ‘Decision Engine Wheel’ which gives them license to place various types of development (condominium, office, commercial, park, etc.) on the board. Sometimes, players are given the option to bulldoze development, in which case they can use the ‘Tabula Rasa Rake’ to sweep any amount of placed development from the board. As all of this happens, the city evolves.

The most interesting part of this game might be the bulldoze option, as this simulates many actual urban renewal schemes of the 1950’s and 60’s. Entire neighborhoods were demolished to make way for concrete towers and interstate highways (see images below), planning decisions that North American cities are trying to undo today. The game forces players to make drastic decisions for their city’s future, and subtly cautions against the heavy-handed approach.

True urban renewal has consequences

Planners are still trying to undue damage caused by urban renewal (dead urban spaces)–note: we love Boston City Hall

Images of Boston from Cyburbia

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Istanbul’s population has grown to 16 million. Image: skyscrapercity user manon

In 1999, an earthquake struck the Turkish cities of İzmit, Adapazarı, and Yalova, killing 17,000 people in collapsed buildings. In 2011, an earthquake struck the city of Erciş, killing 600, again in their collapsed apartments. In order to prevent more fatalities in future earthquakes, the government of Turkey has proposed a new law that would make all of the country’s residential buildings earthquake-proof in twenty years, just in time for the 100^th anniversary of Turkish independence in 2023.

The law would have seismic inspectors going door to door for the next two years testing the soundness of Turkey’s 20 million residential structures. Officials estimate that perhaps up to 6.5 million of these would have to be demolished or modified, and their residents relocated. While this law will disrupt the daily lives of millions of people, it is tremendously necessary. Scientists believe that Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, is long overdue for a major seismic event, one that could put hundreds of thousands of its 16 million residents in danger of losing their lives. The effort will pay special attention to the massive illegal settlements which sprawl on the edges of Turkey’s cities, often built with whatever materials are at hand, as well as the millions of structures built in defiance of building codes. Because of this law, Turkey’s cities and buildings will change tremendously, hopefully for the better.

Aftermath of the 1999 Izmit earthquake. Image: Carnegie Science Center

Aftermath of the 2011 Ercis earthquake. Image: Huffington Post

[via ANSAmed]

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Starship Enterprise and downtown Las Vegas Skyline; All renderings: Gary Goddard Entertainment Group

Did someone say the “Star Trek effect”? Struggling after its tourist base defected to the Strip in the early 1990s, downtown Las Vegas schemed for ideas to lure back visitors to its businesses, casinos, and hotels. Investors narrowed their list of regeneration proposals to two, the “Fremont Street Experience“, which would eventually be built, and a full-scale replica of the Starship Enterprise, to be anchored in the heart of the city. Had it been built, one wonders whether the structure could have recovered the displaced tourist economy–thus predating the Guggenheim Bilbao by five years in originating the (now debunked) idea that a signature building is capable of catalyzing urban renewal–or just stand empty, like the Brobdingnagian plaything it is? Twenty years hence, that question remains unanswered, yet only now has the man behind the project, Gary Goddard, spoken openly about its demise.

In a lengthy, impassioned blog post, Goddard  discusses the difficulties he faced in trying to get the project  built. As he tells it, the USS Enterprise actually came very close to being realized, only to be blocked at the last minute by Stan Jaffe, CEO of Paramount Studios, which owns the licensing for the Star Trek films. Goddard writes that he and his team had fought hard to win the project’s approval from the Mayor, the district’s redevelopment committee, and affiliated interest groups. Yet, the final decision lay with Jaffe, who took one look at the presentation boards before rejecting “one of the greatest ideas of all time.” As Goddard vividly recounts, “We were in the room.  Financing was there.  Land was there. Everyone involved wanted it to happen. And one person entered the room and killed it.” Tear.

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All images via.

Architecture and fashion have many overlaps, both as industries with extraordinarily wide spectrums of high- and lowbrow and as media composed of historically dynamic relationships between interior and exterior, function and expression. While numerous projects have paired architecture and fashion together as harmonious, cross-pollinating art forms—and many a dramatically oversized couture piece has been described as “architectural”—few works of architecture have been so directly conflated with fashion. This undertaking currently belongs to a little hotel in Amsterdam. Continue.

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Go ahead and file this under “things that may work in Europe and are unlikely to succeed in big, bad US metropolises,” but, this story on correcting illegal bicycle parking in Copenhagen is making us dizzy with swoon.

The so-called “charm offensive” started last year with the goal of making citizens use the bike racks around Copenhagen’s Metro stations instead of locking them up any old piece of vertical infrastructure. So here’s what happens if you park your bike illegally: City workers will move it over to the bike racks. “Instead of finger-wagging, they will then oil your chain, pump your tires and leave a little note on your bicycle asking to kindly use the bike racks in the future.”

Yes!!!

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