In July 2012, Dominique Perrault Architecture won a competition to transform France's biggest post office into a mixed-use municipal and commercial facility. The Poste Centrale du Louvre (Central Post Office of the Louvre) in Paris was built between 1880 and 1888. For French architect Dominique Perrault, 2014 is off to an impressive start. Last month, he inaugurated two new projects—DC Tower 1 in Vienna and a Grand Theater for the small town of Albi in southern France. At the same time that his Paris-based firm is designing tall buildings and large developments throughout Europe and Asia, he’s taken on several
Surrounded by history but bereft of innovative work from the past four decades, Cuban architects hope for the future. National School of Ballet (1961-5), by Vittorio Garatti. Making a living as an architect is tough anywhere. But in Cuba it is essentially impossible. Although Raúl Castro has loosened state control of the economy a bit, the private sector still barely exists. All legally-sanctioned construction is done by the government. And everyone agrees that a government salary doesn’t cover anyone’s monthly expenses. Cubans, though, are resourceful and somehow find ways to make ends meet. Over coffee at the Habana Libre Hotel
An artist's rendering of possibilities for the planned 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C. A Washington, D.C., nonprofit will launch a national design competition tomorrow to turn the remains of a highway bridge that spans the Anacostia River into a public park. The proposed 11th Street Bridge Park would connect the Washington Navy Yard, where there has been a recent explosion of growth and development, and the Anacostia neighborhood to the east. Built on top of piers left over from the bridge, it will cost about $25 million. The bridge as it looks today. The competition is being organized
Caret 6, by architect Kory Bieg of OTA+ and his UTSOA design studio, was inspired by the lines of ribbed Gothic vaults and made of thousands of diamond-shaped, CNC-fabricated pieces of sheet steel. Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival—a week or so of music, film, and interactive events that draws thousands of visitors—has experienced ever-expanding scope creep since its small, loud beginnings in 1987. This year, architects got in the game, engaging the high-energy crowds with two noteworthy installations and one pop-up. One, Waller Wall, was installed on the outdoor terrace of SXSW Create—a portion of the SXSW Interactive festival
The public building market has been hampered by the poor fiscal condition of federal, state, and local governments. Even though the economy has begun to improve, this sector’s short-term outlook remains weak. Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].
The artist Iván Navarro takes an anachronistic piece of New York’s skyline and turns it into one of his perception-confounding, selfie-ready installations. They are as much a symbol of New York City as the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, but far more humble. The wooden water towers that dot the city’s rooflines seem like relics from an older era, and yet they still provide water to thousands of buildings, doing their job well enough that centuries of technological advances have failed to render them entirely obsolete. For his exhibition This Land Is Your Land, Chilean-born, Brooklyn-based artist Iván Navarro planted
TELOS: The Fantastic World of Eugene Tssui premieres at the first Los Angeles edition of the Archtiecture and Design Film Festival.Budding avant-garde architects, especially those hoping to change the profession, would be well-advised to catch the world premiere of TELOS: The Fantastic World of Eugene Tssui (2014) at the Los Angeles edition of the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) this week. Named after the Greek word for “final purpose,” the documentary follows architect Eugene Tssui, 59, as he champions a fantastical, organic style of architecture that would be more suited to the world created in James Cameron’s Avatar than
The large, enclosing, rectangular frames in a new set move to generate a spatial dynamic on stage. Act Two: The Linden Trees, from Massenet’s Werther, Metropolitan Opera. Most of those thronging to the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Massenet’s Werther this winter have gone to hear tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s mellifluous singing as the protagonist and the plush sounds of mezzo-soprano Sophie Koch as Charlotte. But some operagoers might also have appreciated the choreographic performance and efficiency of the set, which mechanically slides and shifts in different directions within the shallow space of the three-dimensional stage. In recent years the Met
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