It was a good news/bad news day in Sarasota, Florida. A couple of dozen protesters stood outside the former Sarasota High School, where part of a concrete canopy designed by Paul Rudolph in 1960 was scheduled to be demolished. But just a few blocks away, officials had gathered to christen the new Center for Architecture Sarasota, one of a growing number of such institutions around the country, and one of the most propitious. Sarasota has a rich architectural history; in the '50s and '60s it was one of the hotbeds (along with Palm Springs, California, and New Canaan, Connecticut) of
Architects from the global firm NBBJ have designed what they call a “No Shadow Tower” for a site along the Thames River in London. The hypothetical scheme, developed in response to a call for ideas from the architecture think tank New London Architecture (NLA), offers one way to lessen the impact of tall buildings on the urban fabric surrounding them.
Makkah Royal Clock Tower, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, SL Rasch. Twentieth-century New York showed the world that skyscrapers can be more than just tall buildings. Now Manhattan’s dazzling crowns are inspiring a "worldwide surge of signature tops,” says Carol Willis, the director of Manhattan’s Skyscraper Museum and an expert on buildings of 100 stories or more. Indeed, with more than a dozen such “supertalls” rising in Asia and the Middle East, the sky is getting quite a few new baubles. Will any of them be as exciting as the pinnacles of the Chrysler and Empire State Building? The intriguing exhibition
This Jordan-based architect is monitoring the ISIS-led destruction of historic sites and spearheading efforts to stop it. In a video that provoked outrage as it made its way across the Internet in February, men in military clothing ransacked Iraq’s Mosul Museum, toppling statues of ancient rulers from their pedestals before pounding the figures—some replicas but others original—with sledge- hammers.
SelgasCano, the Madrid-based firm known for its buildings wrapped in polychromatic plastic, today unveiled its design for this year’s Serpentine Pavilion in London.
A new film series at BAM offers a rare view of a country in transition. Cuba: Golden '60sThe First Charge of the Machete, 1969. A gentleman, nattily attired in a slim suit and sunglasses, saunters through his bustling urban environment with cosmopolitan ennui en route to his achingly modern apartment. It’s an image we’d expect to find in a 1960s Italian film, with actor Marcello Mastroianni gliding through scenes directed by Antonioni or Fellini. But when it appears in a post-Revolution Cuban film, like Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 masterpiece Memories of Underdevelopment? That’s unexpected. It’s a view of Havana and
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