Neither Venice nor architecture is particularly known for its nightlife, but the opening days of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale offered ample excuses for loosening one’s collar. Former OMA architect Ole Scheeren's floating "Archipelago" hosted a screening of a film about, well, Ole Scheeren. A torrential downpour on Sunday didn’t keep a diehard crowd away from the Venice home of Washington lobbyists and art collectors Heather and Anthony Podesta, where Henry Urbach was being toasted as the new director of the Glass House, Philip Johnson’s former estate in New Canaan, Connecticut. “Please eat,” the hostess vigorously implored guests including architects
Two architects boldly take digital fabrication technology where it has never gone before. Visualization by Behnaz Farahi and Connor Wingfield A rendering of robotic construction underway on the moon's surface. Far-flung building sites usually present design challenges, but for their latest project, Los Angeles-based architects Anders Carlson and Neil Leach are working with conditions that include solar wind, radiation, and a literal lack of atmosphere. Along with fellow USC professors Behrokh Khoshnevis (Engineering) and Madhu Thangavelu (Astronautics), the duo recently won a highly competitive NASA research award to develop robotic construction technologies for inhospitable extraterrestrial environments, such as the Moon
Aric Chen digs through the multiple layers of David Chipperfield's Common Ground exhibition in our first post from Venice Anupama Kundoo's Feel the Ground. Wall House: One to One at the Arsenale Despite beginning and ending with gusts of rain, yesterday’s first day of previews at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale mostly cast a sweltering sun over Common Ground, the main exhibition at the Arsenale. At first reckoning, the theme, chosen by exhibition director and UK architect David Chipperfield, doesn’t sound all that different from Kazuyo Seijima’s intriguingly prosaic People Meet in Architecture from 2010. But while Seijima’s Biennale will
This article originally appeared in the Chinese edition of Architectural Record. Image courtesy Woods Bagot China Southern Airlines, the largest carrier in Asia, plans to build not just a new corporate campus, but an entire small city as its headquarters on the outskirts of Guangzhou. Named China Southern Airport City, the project is scheduled to begin rising on a 988-acre site about four miles from Guangzhou’s Baiyun International Airport as early as the end of this year. The international architecture practice Woods Bagot is designing the master plan, after winning a competition that included Paul Andreu and Zaha Hadid. The
This article originally appeared in the Chinese edition of Architectural Record. Image courtesy Trahan Architects Victor “Trey” Trahan may be the best-known architect in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (130 kilometers northwest of New Orleans), where his firm has built cultural, academic, and religious buildings of unusual clarity and grace. But an architect, he says, “has to go where the work is.” So last year, Trahan sent one of his employees to establish a small office in Shenyang—a "second-tier" city in northeast China, but one that is very large compared to cities in the United States and is 40 times bigger than
Zaha Hadid's proposed aerodynamic, scrolling form. According to multiple sources, Jean Nouvel has been selected to design a mega-sized new building for the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) in Beijing. If reports are true, the Pritzker Prize–winning French architect has beat out Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid to snag the highly coveted commission. One well-placed source (who, like others, asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the record) says all three architects were informed of the decision on July 18. The source added that an official announcement will not come until November, after
This story originally appeared on ENR.com. This design concept by FXFOWLE and Cooper Carry for Atlanta's new intermodal center provides for a single building encompassing one block with three bus levels. A $1-billion intermodal center being developed in Atlanta via a public-private partnership received a boost from the White House recently that could help accelerate the project by as much as a year, officials say. The Georgia Dept. of Transportation is leading the FXFOWLE and Cooper Carry-designed MultiModal Passenger Terminal (MMPT) project as part of its P3 program, backed by MARTA, the Atlanta Regional Commission, the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority,
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