While battles over the fate of Tod Williams Billie Tsien’s American Folk Art Museum and other public buildings make headlines, the architecture world also faces a much bigger, but far less visible, challenge: preserving private homes when families who have protected them—sometimes for four decades or more—decide to sell.
Founded in England in 1980, Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, known for sleek buildings like London's first Eurostar terminal, opened a New York office in 2001.
The exhibition "Informal Studio: Marlboro South" at Johannesburg's Goethe-Institut (through May 9) includes four five-minute films. In the heady days after the end of apartheid, the South African government promised to build millions of new houses. These houses would make “informal settlements”—communities of squatters living in deplorable conditions they are unable to change given their lack of legal ownership— a memory. But the national government has delivered two million fewer houses than promised; meanwhile the population of Gauteng, the province that includes Johannesburg, has increased 30 percent in the last 10 years. Informal settlements have not been eliminated—they’ve grown. Thorsten
The annual Cape Town conference advocates for levity in design, if not permanence. Photo courtesy Design Indaba Paula Scher and Michael Beirut at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, South Africa. South Africa's Cape Town is a city of architectural extremes, from the futuristic, 30,000-square-foot houses of the super-rich in Clifton to the corrugated metal shacks of Langa township. And it is a city of physical barriers. Prominently advertised in the Cape Times are hammer-proof, roll-down shutters that are “extremely difficult to break without the use of power tools.” Photo courtesy Design Indaba Design Indaba attendees at the Cape
Photo courtesy The Architectural League of New York "The City That Never Was" panelists included (from left to right): Javier Arpa; Robin Nagle; Iñaki Abalos; William Braham; and Christopher Marcinkoski. Have architects been spending too much time designing buildings? That was the paradoxical question at the heart of a symposium sponsored by the Architectural League of New York on the boom years of the early 21st century. The February 22 conference, called “The City that Never Was: Urbanization After The Bubble,” was about the buildings that resulted from the mismatch “between the flows of capital and the needs of the
A new exhibition at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute examines concrete construction, Soviet style. Installation view of Cold War Cool Digital on view at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn through March 20. Most people don’t think of Nikita Khrushchev, the former Soviet premier, as having changed architectural history. But those people haven’t been to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for the fascinating new show, Cold War Cool Digital. The exhibition, which runs through March 20th (in a building undamaged by last week’s destructive fire), traces the relationship between Soviet imperialism and the panelized building systems that were a hallmark of the Iron
Holl’s proposed addition to the Center in Washington, D.C., will be largely underground, with three pavilions rising to the surface in a newly created park. The scheme resembles his hugely successful addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, though here the pavilions will be made of carved Carrara marble rather than glass.