Photo © Christine Kim Gere Kavanaugh In Los Angeles, June is the month for design. Coinciding with Dwell on Design (June 20-22) at the Los Angeles Convention Center, the Los Angeles Design Festival (LADF) celebrates local and international talent with a series of events. Last year, LADF introduced the Julia Morgan Icon Award, intended to recognize a bold woman and her outstanding contributions to the design industry. This year’s recipient is Gere Kavanaugh, one of California’s pioneer female designers. Kavanaugh earned her BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art and was one of the first women to receive an MFA

Photo courtesy Architecture for Humanity Architecture for Humanity is currently supporting reconstruction efforts in the earthquake and tsunami-ravaged areas of Japan. AFH's Ishinomaki, Japan, office has completed 16 projects, including a new school building, above, for a kindergarten that was destroyed in the March 2011 tsunami. Eric Cesal is the new executive director of Architecture for Humanity (AFH), the nonprofit’s board of directors announced today. A longtime volunteer, Cesal joined AFH full-time in 2010 to start the Haiti Rebuilding Center in Port-au-Prince. Since 2012 he has led the organization’s global post-disaster rebuilding efforts from its headquarters in San Francisco. Cesal

Photo © David Cooper Lynn Richards officially takes over as president of the Congress for the New Urbanism on July 1. On June 4, when the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) begins its annual meeting in Buffalo, a new president, Lynn Richards, will greet its members. Richards spent 14 years working for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington before moving to the Chicago-based nonprofit. (She officially takes over from former Milwaukee mayor John O. Norquist on July 1.) Richards, 47, arrives at the CNU on the heels of a withering critique by author Witold Rybczynski, who wrote on his

Marc Norman has been the director of UPSTATE: A Center for Design, Research, and Real Estate at the Syracuse University School of Architecture since 2012. The program was created by former dean Mark Robbins to, in Norman’s words, “tie faculty and students to real-world projects in the city and the region.” Norman studied political economics at Berkeley and urban planning at UCLA and spent four years as a project manager for Skid Row Housing Trust, a community development corporation in Los Angeles, before moving to New York. There, he worked for Lehman Brothers, financing affordable housing, and for Deutsche Bank,

The Czech artist discusses her installation “The Architecture of Sleep” at the Frieze Art Fair. Performers precariously snooze in artist Eva Kotátková's installation The Architecture of Sleep at the Frieze New York art fair last weekend. The annual Frieze New York art fair took place last weekend, and as usual, conditions inside the quarter-mile-long tent that houses the event felt a bit overstimulating. Inside the brightly lit belly of the temporary structure, a snaking white form designed by Brooklyn firm SO–IL, visitors bounced among 190 booths where dealers presented work in eye-catching installations arranged to command maximum attention from collectors.

Istallation view of Binet's work on view in Ammann//Gallery's booth at Collective 2. The second edition of the Collective design fair takes place this weekend in Manhattan. This year, the fair—founded by architect Steven Learner—has set up shop in the atrium at the McKim, Mead & White-designed Farley Post Office in Manhattan and added 19 additional galleries to its roster. One of the newcomers, German dealer Gabrielle Ammann, is offering work by Zaha Hadid, Wolfs + Jung, Satyendra Pakhalé, and several others—including an impressive table by Studio Nucleo—but among the highlights of her booth are 10 prints by architectural photographer

Theaster Gates will present the 10th annual Lewis Mumford Lecture at The City College of New York on May 1. Theaster Gates is a performance artist, potter, object maker, educator, urban planner, and innovator, and he has become a catalyst for renewal on Chicago’s South Side by putting his background to use in a unique way. His Dorchester Projects transformed abandoned houses into small cultural centers. He partnered with the University of Chicago, where he is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts, to create the Arts Incubator for artists-in-residence in a neglected building. And he’s now working on

In July 2012, Dominique Perrault Architecture won a competition to transform France's biggest post office into a mixed-use municipal and commercial facility. The Poste Centrale du Louvre (Central Post Office of the Louvre) in Paris was built between 1880 and 1888. For French architect Dominique Perrault, 2014 is off to an impressive start. Last month, he inaugurated two new projects—DC Tower 1 in Vienna and a Grand Theater for the small town of Albi in southern France. At the same time that his Paris-based firm is designing tall buildings and large developments throughout Europe and Asia, he’s taken on several

Photo © Iwan Baan The Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center, by Zaha Hadid Architects, in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The artist Iván Navarro takes an anachronistic piece of New York’s skyline and turns it into one of his perception-confounding, selfie-ready installations. They are as much a symbol of New York City as the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, but far more humble. The wooden water towers that dot the city’s rooflines seem like relics from an older era, and yet they still provide water to thousands of buildings, doing their job well enough that centuries of technological advances have failed to render them entirely obsolete. For his exhibition This Land Is Your Land, Chilean-born, Brooklyn-based artist Iván Navarro planted