Odile Decq and Thom Mayne Watching the presentations at this year’s Monterey Design Conference in northern California, attendees got a multiple-image portrait of architecture in the early 21st century. Elegant buildings with refined details alternated with exuberant installations that relied on digital know-how and student labor. Snapshots from Arkansas, Minnesota, and California appeared between reports from France, Japan, and Brazil. And a tribal elder told stories of working with Louis Kahn, as newer members of the profession listened raptly. More than 600 people gathered at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove at the end of September for the event,
A video at the New York City gallery traces the 60-year diaspora of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret’s Chandigarh furniture. ProvenanceAmie Siegel2013HD video40 min 30 sec. installation view, Simon Preston, New York The protagonist of multimedia artist Amie Siegel’s new video Provenance, on view at the Simon Preston Gallery in New York City through this Sunday, is a chair. Not any chair, mind you, but one designed by renowned modernist architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. And not even a chair, really, but a design aesthetic—an iconic wooden teepee—that captivates in much the same way Hollywood royalty might. Which helps makes
A Maggie's Centre, designed by Snøhetta, opened in Aberdeen, Scotland, on September 23. Architecture can’t cure cancer, but good design has the power to heal. That’s the philosophy behind Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres, a network of drop-in facilities in Great Britain. The centers—17 and growing—are named for writer and landscape architect Maggie Keswick Jencks, who died of breast cancer in 1995. Married to the influential American architecture critic and landscape architect Charles Jencks, Maggie spent the last two years of her life conceiving a warm, inviting place where cancer patients could spend time learning how to cope with their disease
Image courtesy Center for Architecture Archtober, a festival celebrating architecture and design through the month of October, kicks off Tuesday in New York City for its third year. Archtober has expanded programming with 53 participating organizations and more than 150 events including design tours, panel discussions, films, exhibitions, and soirées. One year after Hurricane Sandy blew through the Atlantic Seaboard, many of this year’s events will focus on resiliency. Highlights October 1: Practical Utopias: Global Urbanism in Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo, a new exhibition at AIA New York’s Center for Architecture opens, exploring the construction boom across
A rendering of the new glass atrium that will mark the entrance to the hospital-turned-hotel. In Buffalo, a hospital by some of the best-known designers of the 19th century, left for dead in the 20th, is being revived as a boutique hotel. The landmarked Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, by Henry Hobson Richardson along with Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, is adding an 88-room hotel and conference center, as well as fresh landscaping, as the Rust Belt city bets that its architectural heritage can attract tourists. The redesign, led by Deborah Berke Partners and finalized last month, will
Zaha Hadid Architects Serpentine Sackler Gallery London Zaha Hadid Architects’ first permanent structure in London—a restaurant building made from tensile fabric, steel, and glass—has something of the appearance of a carnival tent.
The building houses two charter schools with interiors designed by the Princeton-based KSS Architects. There was a lot of fanfare—school band included—and brilliant blue skies on Wednesday as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Mayor Cory Booker cut the ribbon to celebrate the opening of Newark native Richard Meier’s first project in his hometown. The first phase of an ambitious 14-block, mixed-use development called Teachers Village, for which Richard Meier & Partners Architects (RMPA) developed the master plan, the building houses two charter schools with interiors designed by the Princeton-based KSS Architects, and includes a gymnasium and fitness center that
The Tent London and Super Brands London exhibitions during the London Design Festival were co-located at the Old Truman Brewery venue in Shoreditch. London’s annual design festival, which wrapped up a nine day run on Sunday, included over 300 events, exhibitions, and installations held across the capital. Now in its 11th year, the festival has expanded from a focus on furniture and product design to a platform for various disciplines, including sculpture, fashion, and graphic design. Here, we present some highlights from around the city, including special shows at the Victoria and Albert Museum and new product designs from the
A rendering—the only one released so far—of Foster + Partners' 19-story luxury condominium tower overlooking the Hudson River. Norman Foster hasn’t had great luck in Manhattan—his public library plan seems to have gone off the rails, in part due to the lackluster renderings his firm released last year.
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