Theaster Gates will present the 10th annual Lewis Mumford Lecture at The City College of New York on May 1. Theaster Gates is a performance artist, potter, object maker, educator, urban planner, and innovator, and he has become a catalyst for renewal on Chicago’s South Side by putting his background to use in a unique way. His Dorchester Projects transformed abandoned houses into small cultural centers. He partnered with the University of Chicago, where he is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts, to create the Arts Incubator for artists-in-residence in a neglected building. And he’s now working on
Fred Schwartz, visiting his 9/11 memorial in New Jersey in June 2011. Frederic Schwartz, who died on April 28 after struggling with cancer, wasn’t so much an architect as a public citizen who used architecture as a tool to improve lives. Other tools included empathy and patience. His best-known project in New York was the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a project he inherited from his former employers, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, after public officials tinkered with their design so many times they felt unable to continue. Schwartz picked up where they left off, focusing not so much on
It's still early in 2014, but already several important modernist buildings have fallen. Perhaps the most notable is Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Women's Hospital (1975), a cloverleaf-shaped tower that, with other Goldberg variations (including the twin-corncob Marina City complex of 1959-1964), helped define Chicago in a period when the city, under the influence of Mies, was going from gritty to griddy. A beloved oddity, Prentice was as important to Chicago as Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim is to New York, and now it's almost gone. (These photos were taken on a Sunday, April 20.) Northwestern University, which owns the property, has announced
This article first appeared on GreenSource. While most 19th century manufacturing hubs were known for their poor working conditions, the Pullman District on Chicago’s South Side was the country’s first model industrial town designed to provide a safer and healthier environment for the Pullman sleeping company’s workers. Over a century later, Method, the green cleaning products brand, is now carrying on the District’s progressive legacy with the construction of its new 150,000-square-foot sustainable factory. The company asked William McDonough + Partners to design its sprawling building, spanning roughly five acres on a brownfield site where the original Pullman lumberyard once stood.
For the first time since it was completed in 1950, Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin, opens for tours next month. Visitors will see firsthand its functional shortcomings along with its spectacular innovations. Both the Research Tower (1950) and the company’s Wright-designed Administration Building (1939) are now on the National Register of Historic Places. Any list of the greatest buildings of the 20th century would have to include Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower, the 15-story companion to his equally spectacular administration building in Racine, Wisconsin. On May 2, the company will begin offering tours
Well-known U.S.-based architects have taken issue with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Britain’s leading architectural association, for its political stand against its Israeli counterpart. According to the Architects’ Journal, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Meier, and Rick Bell, the executive director of AIA New York, have spoken out against the RIBA’s decision to seek the suspension of the Israeli association from the International Union of Architects (UIA) “until it acts to resist projects on illegally-occupied land and observes international law and accords.” The motion was presented to the RIBA council on March 19 by the association’s past president, Angela Brady.
Fifty years ago this month, an architectural wonderland opened in Queens, New York—the 1964-65 World’s Fair that Robert Moses created to bring millions of visitors to Flushing Meadows and raise money to build a permanent park there.
Image courtesy Svigals + Partners Svigals + Partners' proposed scheme for a new elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Dubbed "Main Street," this design is "like two arms embracing the children as they come in," says Barry Svigals. It’s one thing for an architect to design a new school, quite another when that school is on the site of one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history. On December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. The school has since been razed. In September, the town’s Public
With several large projects about to open and others in the pipeline—such as housing at London's Battersea Power Station site—Frank Gehry has his hands full. Frank Gehry and Foster + Partners unveiled their designs for residential buildings that will be part of London’s redeveloped Battersea Power Station site. Gehry's buildings are in the foreground. If you’re wondering when architects will get the respect they deserve, the answer may be: never. By some measures, Frank Gehry, 85, is having a good year, with several large projects about to open and others in the pipeline. But nothing comes easy. After 10 years
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