Last week in New Orleans the U.S. Green Building Council fulfilled a promise it made—after hurricanes Katrina and Rita pounded the Gulf Coast in 2005—to bring the organization’s annual Greenbuild show to the Big Easy.
David Mohney has taken a one-year-leave from the University of Kentucky College of Architecture to help create the Michael Graves School at Kean University, which will have two campuses, one in New Jersey and the other in Wenzhou, China.
A project of The Missing 32%, the results of the largest known grassroots architectural survey to date were released last weekend at the sold-out Equity by Design symposium in San Francisco.
With help from a California-based architect and engineer, Rafael Viñoly's Walkie-Talkie building in London is getting a system of aluminum fins to diminish its destructive reflectivity. Image via City of London A rendering of 20 Fenchurch shows how it will look with aluminum brise soleils. The 37-story building at 20 Fenchurch Street in London was first nicknamed the Walkie-Talkie, for its shape, and then the Walkie-Scorchie, for its reflectivity. Sun bouncing off its south façade melted part of a car last year, exciting tabloid editors and sending the building’s owners searching for a fix. Image via City of London
The Domus shelter in front of Materials & Applications in Los Angeles. Every day, the earth quivers and convulses. Hardly anyone notices. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates there are 500,000 detectable earthquakes in the world each year; only 20 percent of those can be felt by human beings. In Los Angeles—in a bid to open the eyes of an endangered community—artist and engineer D.V. Rogers, along with a group of volunteers, has constructed Domus, an experimental installation that allows visitors to experience the world’s constant, pulsating seismic activity. “The idea is create a contemplative space that will help
The Kings Theatre under renovation. Shuttered for almost 40 years, the ornamental façade of the Kings Theatre—towering over the storefronts along Brooklyn, New York's busy Flatbush Avenue—stood as a sad reminder of the area’s decline, beginning in the 1970s, from a once glorious past. Now its decorative terracotta panels and sculptural flourishes are a sign of progress as the theater prepares to reopen in January 2015. The façade, however, does not come close to equaling the splendor of the newly restored interiors. Opened in 1929 as one of five Loew’s Wonder Theatres constructed in New York and New Jersey, it
Architect Judith Edelman, 91, died on October 4, in New York City where she left a profound mark, both on the built environment and as a role model for younger women architects.
Toyo Ito at the theater construction site. Displaying architecture in a gallery is always a challenge. This is especially true with a building still under construction. And even more so when that building is Taiwan’s National Taichung Theater—unarguably Tokyo architect Toyo Ito’s most ambitious project to date. Taking Ito’s structural know-how and spatial ingenuity to new limits, this extraordinary complex appears as a rectangular block. But contained within is a spectacular 3D grid of tubular voids hinted at by the hourglass-shaped cutouts that define the elevations. Expanding and contracting, the hollows accommodate the various programmatic pieces, including a 2014-seat theater,
Playful yet menacing, the fangs of a grinning dragon greet you as you enter @Large, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s extensive installation at Alcatraz, the notorious former prison in San Francisco Bay.
The Dutch architecture firm and the Philadelphia landscape architects won the unanimous support of the jury with their X-shaped, densely-programmed design. On October 15, OMA + OLIN was named the winner of the design competition for 11th Street Bridge Park, a planned linear park spanning Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia River that has been widely compared to the High Line and could open in 2018. Selected from four finalist teams, the team comprised of the Dutch architecture firm and the Philadelphia landscape architects won the unanimous support of the jury with their bold, X-shaped design—the most iconic in form, and also the
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