Fred A. Bernstein

Photo courtesy Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition The Guggenheim Helsinki museum is proposed for a prominent waterfront site. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation won’t take no for an answer. Two years after the City Board of Helsinki rejected a proposal for a Finnish version of the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Foundation is trying again. First it revised its operating plan for the museum (reducing projected costs while increasing projected revenue). Then, with a party at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice in June, it launched an architecture competition, organized by British consultant Malcolm Reading. Now it is reveling in the news that

Ali Malkawi has very good timing. In 2013 he moved from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had taught architecture and computational simulation—a sophisticated means of predicting building performance—for more than a decade, to Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where he is a professor of Architectural Technology. A few months later, Malkawi wrote a proposal for what would be called the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, to be funded with a gift from the Evergrande Group, a Chinese company with $75 billion in assets. (Evergrande’s gift was large enough to also fund centers in mathematics and immunology.)

In November, the organization will hold its biggest meeting yet, in Barcelona. The Van Schijndel House, designed by the late Mart van Schijndel, inspired his wife Natascha Drabbe to form an organization dedicated to the preservation of important 20th century houses. In 1992, the modernist architect Mart van Schijndel designed a house in Utrecht with a number of distinctive features. When he died in 1999, his widow, Natascha Drabbe, an architectural historian and public relations executive, was determined to open the house to visitors. But she also needed to continue to live in the 1,885-square-foot building. For advice, she began

The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, as it looks today. When the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi died in 1926, his masterwork, the Sagrada Familia—the subject of a new show at the City University of New York’s Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture—consisted of a section of an apse and one heroic portal. But that so-called Nativity Facade, with details that seemed utterly original and yet already ancient, made the unfinished building world-famous. It seemed unlikely that the cathedral would be completed after Gaudi’s death. For one thing, nearly all of his drawings and models were destroyed at the onset

Image © HOK Among the nine rejected locations was one in Bronzeville, a historically black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, where HOK had developed a proposal (above). When the Barack Obama Foundation announced its choice of four possible homes for the Obama Presidential Library, eliminating nine other contenders, it didn’t say a word about who might design the building. But there may be reason for several well-known​ architects to celebrate. They include Renzo Piano, the master planner for Columbia University’s Manhattanville Campus, and Thom Mayne, a consultant to the University of Illinois at Chicago. Those schools, along with

When this magazine declared the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis “America’s leading museum of design” in 1990 [RECORD, March 1990, pages 45-47], it was paying tribute to Mildred Friedman, who died on September 3, at 85, in New York City. Photo courtesy Martin Friedman A portrait of the young Mildred Friedman. Beginning in 1969, Mildred—who went by Mickey—had been the museum’s go-to-person for anything and everything relating to design. She was best known for curating a series of prescient exhibitions on architecture and design while editing the Walker’s incisive and influential Design Quarterly. At the same time, she presided over

Image courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects A rendering of Hadid Al Wakrah Stadium in Qatar. A lawsuit brought by Zaha Hadid against The New York Review of Books and its architecture critic, Martin Filler, has prompted Filler to correct the record. In a book review published in June, Filler accused Hadid of being indifferent to the deaths of 1,000 workers during construction of her Al Wakrah Stadium in Qatar, a venue for the 2020 FIFA World Cup, based on comments the architect had made to The Guardian newspaper in February 2014. In a letter posted on the NYRB website on Monday

The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture can be as unconventional as its founder.

Abraham Thomas became the director of the Soane Museum last December.