Image Courtesy Dorothy Alexander Ada Louise Huxtable at her New York apartment on March 7, 1974. Everyone has a favorite quote from the architecture critic par excellence, Ada Louise Huxtable. A pithy one dates to 1973: “The let-them-eat-travertine perfectionism of SOM superstar Gordon Bunshaft is seldom less belligerently antihuman these days,” she wrote in the New York Times about an office building in New York. Huxtable, who died of cancer on January 7 at 91, brought architecture criticism visibility and influence at a crucial time. In the boom years after World War II, the banality of commercial Modernism, the demolition
CODA's "Party Wall" wins MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program competition. CODA's winning proposal calls for a large wall clad in scrap wood from the skateboard-making process. Ithaca, New York-based firm CODA has won this year's competition to design a temporary installation for P.S.1, the Museum of Modern Art-affiliated contemporary art space in New York City. In the proposal, the firm (helmed by Caroline O'Donnell) calls for erecting a large wall clad in panels made from scrap wood cast-off during the skateboard-making process. Woven together, they will hang on an armature that straddles the former school building's courtyard. A series of archways
At a time when the notion of omniscient master architects is seen by many critics as passé, a day-long design conference in San Francisco suggested that the concept remains in vogue with the wider public.
Construction of K'12 facilities continues to suffer from the poor fiscal condition of state and local governments. It will take time for the market to rebound despite the continued need for new schools and renovations. Source: McGraw-Hill Dodge Analytics Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].
This story originally appear on ENR.com. Industry merger and acquisition activity grew 14% to about 200 deals nationwide last year but was relatively flat in the tristate region, says Mick Morrissey, managing principal at A/E/C management consulting firm Morrissey Goodale, in Newton, Massachusetts. Even so, many buyers continued to view the tristate region as a good place to spend their merger and acquisition dollars. "New York tends to be a harder place [for an outside firm] to get into. That said, it tends to be one of the most popular states" for deals, Morrissey says. "That's because it is a
This article originally appeared on BuildingGreen.com. Three new surveys indicate that green building remains strong despite the uncertain global economy, with designers and builders anticipating an increasing number of green projects. McGraw-Hill Construction (MHC) has released two reports: “2012 World Green Building Trends” surveyed building-related firms in 62 countries, while “2013 Dodge Construction Green Outlook” focused on the expectations of U.S. firms. Turner Construction’s “Green Building Market Barometer” surveyed 718 executives of U.S. firms. The reports indicate increasing demand for green building, with 81 percent of U.S. executives believing that the public expects them to institutionalize sustainability, according to the
The 600,000-square-foot project will break ground in the new city of Tianjin, China, in spring 2013. At a December lecture at New York City's Cooper Union, Steven Holl spoke about the swiftness with which his Tianjin Ecocity Ecology and Planning Museums were designed and approved—as opposed to the 15-year gestation period for his Knut Hamsun Center in Hamarøy, Norway. He sketched the ecology museums on August 31, 2012, the designs were approved on November 2, and construction of the 600,000-square-foot project is set to begin this spring, said Holl. The museums, which the architect said are visually dependent on each
In honor of what would have been Ada Louise Huxtable's 100th birthday on Sunday March 14, RECORD is sharing the tributes paid when she died in January 2013.
Experts call for a hazards-reduction program for floods. Image courtesy Architecture Research Office / Guy Nordenson Lower Manhattan with proposed barrier islands, from the influential study On the Water: Palisade Bay (2009). For those of us involved in the 2010 exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the question we’ve been asked most frequently since Superstorm Sandy is “Could things have been different?” The honest answer is mostly no. The barrier islands and reefs proposed in the Rising Currents show were there to break the waves in storms to form a