A cultural foundation brings designers to Dhaka and announces a new institute for architecture, landscapes, and settlements. A view of the old city of Dhaka near the Buriganga River. Political unrest and sporadic violence on highways and roads in Bangladesh provided the backdrop to a three-day architectural conference in the country’s capital, Dhaka, in mid-January. Organized by the Bengal Foundation, a private trust dedicated to promoting the arts in Bangladesh, the event brought together speakers such as Fumihiko Maki, William J.R. Curtis, and Ken Yeang to examine how notions of “place” and “presence” shape the built environment. Other participants included
Love them or hate them, design competitions elicit strong emotions from architects and design professionals. But very little hard data exists to guide the people who enter them or those who organize them. “Some designers complain about competition organizers who write vague briefs, don’t respect intellectual property, and make everyone work for free,” says Van Alen Institute (VAI) competitions director Jerome Chou, adding, “But designers also tell us competitions offer opportunities to take on interesting challenges, to experiment, and to work in new sectors.” Over the course of its 120-year history, VAI has organized hundreds of competitions and, as Chou
Photo courtesy IBI Group Gruzen Samton Jordan Gruzen in 2010. On Tuesday, January 27, 2015, Jordan L. Gruzen, FAIA, died in New York City after a brief bout with bladder cancer. He was 80 years old. Gruzen, along with his long-time colleague and partner Peter Samton, designed schools, universities, housing complexes, and civic and religious buildings that staunchly upheld the principles of modernist architecture with a well-tailored, straightforward use of materials. Their firm, named IBI Group-Gruzen Samton following a merger in 2009, has imparted its stamp on New York and the surrounding metropolitan area over more than four decades.
Some home improvement television shows can be as dull as, well, watching paint dry. Throw in a Grammy-award winning rapper, tattoos, expletives, and a little design mojo, however, and you have Framework, a new reality TV series on Spike.
Brouhaha over development near Grand Central Terminal could be an object lesson for other cities. Image courtesy KPF Looking north from 42nd Street up Vanderbilt Avenue, One Vanderbilt is on the left and Grand Central is on the right. Grand Central Terminal, now polished and celebrated, has suffered many indignities since its 1913 opening on 42nd Street and Park Avenue. The two most notorious: having the monolithic 59-story Pan Am (now MetLife) Building wedged between it and the distinctive 1929 New York Central (now Helmsley) Building just one block north, in the early 1960s; and Donald Trump’s late ‘70s transformation
A new documentary celebrates the British architect’s creative partnerships and their results. Behind many of David Adjaye’s buildings—belying their seemingly impenetrable exteriors—is a host of collaborators. A new documentary directed by German filmmaker Oliver Hardt explores these relationships and how the resulting synergy informs the architect’s work.David Adjaye—Collaborations, the director’s second film about the architect, was created for a mid-career retrospective, David Adjaye: Form, Heft, Material, opening at Munich’s Haus der Kunst January 30. The documentary was commissioned by the museum and the Art institute of Chicago in collaboration with Adjaye Associates.“David’s buildings do have this kind of presence wherever
Chris Hemsworth stars as Nicholas Hathaway in Blackhat, from director/producer Michael Mann. The movie is set within the world of global cybercrime, from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta. Beyond plot devices, Hollywood has never had much use for cities as real locations. They're loud, crowded, unpredictable—all of which is anathema to a micromanaged industry. A few filmmakers have embraced the urban cacophony with gusto, though. Jules Dassin shot The Naked City (1948) verite style on the streets of New York, as did William Friedkin 23 years later when making The French Connection. But they were only
After a highly publicized five-month battle, the dust has finally settled on the lawsuit that Zaha Hadid filed against New York Review of Books (NYRB) and critic Martin Filler.
In December, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) declined to adopt a rule forbidding AIA members to design specific buildings whose purposes involve human-rights violations (as defined by international laws), such as executions or prolonged solitary confinement. The proposed amendment was submitted to the AIA on August 1, 2014, having been drafted by Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), a San Francisco–based 501(c)3 organization, with the help of human-rights lawyers. The amendment would have stipulated that AIA members “shall not design spaces intended for execution or for torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, including prolonged solitary confinement.”
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