The Illinois School of Architecture, one of the oldest and largest schools of architecture in the United States, is proud to announce the launch of its new website.
Since the initiation of its architectural curriculum in 1867, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has consistently broken new ground in the education of architects. Like the School’s founder Nathan Ricker, we look beyond current fashion, striving to leverage technical virtuosity in the service of performative design, aesthetic expression, and service to society.
From the window of an airplane it's all too plain that apartheid has been deeply written into the South African landscape. Even the smallest town appears as two distinct towns. One features a spacious grid of tree-lined streets and comfortable houses surrounded by lawns. The other, its shriveled twin, some distance away but connected by a well-traveled road, consists of a much tighter grid of dirt roads lined with shacks. Trees are a rarity, lawns non-existent. This doubling pattern appears no matter the size of the population: here, the white town; over there, the black township. -- Lisa Findley, “Red & Gold: A Tale of Two Apartheid Museums.”
There are few systems of government that relied so heavily upon the delineations of space than the Apartheid government of South Africa (1948-1994). Aggressively wielding theories of Modernism and racial superiority, South Africa’s urban planners didn’t just enforce Apartheid, they embedded it into every city - making it a daily, degrading experience for South Africa’s marginalized citizens.
When Nelson Mandela and his party, the African National Congress, were democratically elected to power in 1994, they recognized that one of the most important ways of diminishing Apartheid’s legacy would be spatial: to integrate the white towns and the black townships, and revive those “shriveled twin[s].”
As we remember Mandela - undoubtedly the most important man in South Africa’s history - and ponder his legacy, we must also consider his spatial legacy. It is in the physical, spatial dimensions of South Africa’s towns and cities that we can truly see Apartheid’s endurance, and consider: to what extent have Mandela’s words of reconciliation and righteous integration, truly been given form?
The progressive digitalization of social and economical relationships is transforming lots of huge factories into useless empty boxes waiting for re-functionalization and new purpose. Nute Partecipazioni ltd deals with revamping and enhancing valuable but disused industrial buildings. Such firm owns a disused factory in Quarto Inferiore (Granarolo, Bologna). Nute’s CEO is currently aiming to transform the disused 15.000 m2 industrial park into a space for leisure time, culture and arts.
What kind of architecture could be proposed in order to host cultural and entertainment activities?
This is a chance to rethink a disused industrial place and transform it in a lively space for culture, art and public relationships. Wide and versatile open spaces are meant to provide local citizens and tourists a modern cultural / leisure time activities centre.
This call focuses on temporality and spatial custom-tailoring. Nowadays modern technology is capable of boosting communication and information. This feature shall lead designers to propose flexible system made of dynamic / modular / equipped spaces. More information after the break.
Wunderkammer / Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Image Courtesy of Yale University Press
Thanks to our friends at Yale University Press, one of our readers has the opportunity to win a copy of the newly released book Wunderkammer by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.
Piazza Matteotti (watercolor) / Pier Carlo Bontempi and Leon Krier
Italian architect Pier Carlo Bontempi has been selected as the 12th recipient of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame. Lauded for his “lifelong contribution to the human city and classical tradition,” Bontempi has dedicated much of his work in the “search for common ground between the classical and the modern; the two most powerful architectural ideas of our century,” as jury member Demetri Porphyrios described.
In this article, which originally appeared on Australian Design Review as "Reframing Concrete in Nepal," Aleksandr Bierig describes how New York-based MOS Architects, a firm better known for its experimental work, is designing an orphanage for a small community in Nepal.
Strangely enough it has become almost unremarkable that an office such as New York-based MOS Architects would find itself designing an orphanage for a small community in Nepal. Now under construction in Jorpati, eight kilometres north-east of the capital, Kathmandu, is the Lali Gurans Orphanage and Learning Centre, which finds itself at the intersection of any number of tangential trends: the rise of international aid and non-governmental organisations, the seeming annihilation of space by global communications networks and the latent desire of architects to use their designs to effect appreciable social change. Emphasizing simple construction techniques and sustainable design features, the building hopes to serve as a model for the surrounding communities, as an educational and environmental hub, the provider of social services for Nepalese women and as a home for some 50 children.
MOS Architects, founded in 2003 by US architects Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample, is not a practice known for its involvement in humanitarian projects. Its work is often experimental and, at times, willfully strange. Alongside its architecture, MOS makes films, teaches studios, designs furniture and gives lectures on its work. It was after one lecture in Denver, Colorado in 2009 that Christopher Gish approached Meredith and Sample to ask if they would be interested in designing an orphanage.
Still rebuilding after the catastrophic tsunami of 2011, Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, and other notable Japanese architects, have teamed up on the "Home for All" project to provide community-focused housing to disaster-stricken communities. While the architect-driven initiative seems to be a success, Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times asks in this exquisitely well-written article: are a set of "starchitects" the right team for the job? (Spoiler: Yes)
https://www.archdaily.com/453967/reconstructing-space-reconstructing-community-in-japanKatherine Allen
DOCOMOMO US invites submissions for the first annual Modernism in America Awards. The awards celebrate the documentation, preservation and re-use of modern buildings, structures and landscapes built in the United States or on U.S. territory. The Awards recognize those building owners, design teams, advocacy and preservation organizations that have made significant efforts to retain, restore and advocate for the aesthetic and cultural value of such places.
This competition is a call for methods and forms that inspire hope and dreams through new technology, creative logic, and aesthetic intuition. Its purpose is to encourage the development of new design methods for better architecture and better cities (and, broadly, better design in general), and to recognize groups and individuals who have taken up this challenge.
Had Hansel and Gretel stumbled across one of these sugary structures, they may have taken off in the opposite direction. Dark, gloomy, and foreboding, the confectionary architecture would have made quite the impression on Jack Skellington, however. The project, by food artist Caitlin Levin and photographer Henry Hargreaves, is clearly indebted to the gothic mise-en-scène of the latter’s expressionistic underworld, a dreary, but whimsical land where one might half expect to find a twisted (gumball) doppelganger of the Tate Modern or Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI.
Find out more about the process behind this sweet project after the break
Santiago, Chile took the top spot on the list. Image via Plataforma Urbana
In this article for Fast Company, Boyd Cohen counts down the top 8 smart cities in Latin America. Using publicly available data and his own comprehensive framework to evaluate how smart a city is, he has generated a list which even he admits features a couple of surprises in the top spots. To see the list and discover what each city has achieved to deserve its ranking, you can read the full article here.
For his thesis project, Javier Lloret turned a building into a giant, solvable Rubik's Cube. Making use of the media facade of the Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, he projected the world's most famous handheld puzzle onto a huge scale - inviting passers-by to solve the puzzle. In the process, Lloret transformed the nearby area, showing that (when used correctly) technology can make the urban environment more fun.
DawnTown, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting architecture in Miami, is announcing an open call for portfolios to their new competition: DAWNTOWN DESIGN/BUILD 2.
The Institute without Boundaries (IwB) is seeking curriculum partners for Connecting Divided Places, a project that investigates social, economic, environmental, and cultural divisions in cities. They are calling out to municipalities, not-for-profit organizations, and companies interested in working with them to address the wicked problems dividing their cities and regions. They are looking for organizations interested in collaborating on design solutions that make for more balanced, healthier, and resilient city-regions of the future. They want to know what challenges your city is facing.
In Joshua Tree, California, artist Phillip K Smith III has completed Lucid Stead: an optical illusion/installation that modifies an abandoned 70-year-old homestead with mirrors in order to make it appear transparent. The cabin was also fitted with LED lighting to “extract the distilled experience of how light changes over time — how a mountain can be blue, red, brown, white, purple, and black all in one day.” As Smith stated, the project is about light, shadow, and tapping into the quiet of the desert. Check out more images and a video of the cabin after the break!
In this interesting report in the Ottawa Citizen, Maria Cook exposes the plan to renovate the Arthur Erickson-designed Bank of Canada Building in Ottawa. The existing building, which features a public atrium complete with a tropical garden, is being extensively remodeled to improve security and building performance, although arguably at great cost to the design. Cook exposes how the bank turned down a prestigious design award in 2011 as it was already at that point privately considering the changes, and explains how its privileged position - related to the government but not controlled by it - effectively means that the bank has nobody it has to answer to who might stop these plans. You can read the full article here.
White Arkitekter’s winning proposal for New York’s “Resilient Rockaway” competition.
The Rockefeller Foundation has named the first group of cities selected in the “100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge.” Each city has been chosen for demonstrating “a commitment to building their own capacities to prepare for, withstand, and bounce back rapidly from shocks and stresses.” More than 1,000 registrations and nearly 400 formal applications from cities around the world were submitted. After careful review of each city's challenges, these 33 where chosen:
The American Institute of Architects New York State (AIANYS) has announced a new competition celebrating design and professional excellence in publicly funded buildings in New York State. The Excelsior Awards will provide a model for future state-funded building design and professional practice and advocacy.
Building Trust International is very pleased to announce their 5th Design Competition. The challenge is to design a health facility that can easily be relocated. This could be in response to a natural disaster, or to inoculate and educate in areas with specific medical emergencies or outbreaks, it will also help aid agencies that don't have the funds or means to purchase land, offering short term leasing opportunities.
Herzog & de Meuron just celebrated the grand opening of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), alongside the commence of the Art Basel in Miami Beach. Located on a waterfront site overlooking the Biscayne Bay, near the MacArthur Causeway, the three-story museum’s low-profile seems to almost disappear into its surroundings - a pleasant contrast to the ornate and often form-based architecture that is typically found throughout the city. This lack of form, as Jacques Herzog described, is all about “permeability.”
“Miami is known for its iconic art deco district – in fact art deco was about decorated boxes with no great relationship and exchange between inside and outside,” Herzog continued. “The greatest thing, however, that makes Miami so extraordinary is its amazing climate, lush vegetation and cultural diversity. How can these assets be fully exploited and translated into architecture? That’s the way we tried to go with our design for the new art museum in Miami.”
Continue reading for a sneak peak inside the Museum...
As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Arup’s New York office, we’ve spent the past few months talking with people inside the firm and beyond about the future of the city. We asked them to come up with blue-sky ideas about the New York of 2050 without worrying too much about financial or political feasibility. Circumstances can change a great deal over almost four decades, after all, and tomorrow’s constraints might look very different than today’s. We then worked with graphic designerJosh Levi to synthesize and visualize the results — view the large version here. Our main goal: to spark conversations about long-term priorities for the city and possible ways to achieve them.
What would you add to the list? How would you change it?
Detroit's I-375. Via Flickr CC User. Used under Creative Commons
According to John Gallagher of the Detroit Free Press, Detroit may soon be removing one of its downtown freeways, the I-375, and converting the trench-like road into a more pedestrian friendly surface level street. The change could be a boon to residents of nearby areas such as Lafayette Park and Eastern Market, which were cut off when the road was built in 1964, and follows a wider trend of cities removing freeways in order to regenerate downtown areas. The city government is currently working with major stakeholders to investigate the potential effects of the change, with a proposal due for summer 2014. You can read the full article here.
Eight international teams have been shortlisted to design a 100-meter tall Observation and Broadcast Tower for the historic city of Çanakkale. The competition, now in its second stage, has required each team to develop their schematic designs before submitting them to the jury in February.
As stated by the competition brief, “competitors are strongly recommended to consider the technological requirements of the broadcasting tower and recreational potentials of a public entity with equal emphasis.” Once complete, the forested hilltop site will be transformed into a public destination, offering exhibition spaces, recreational facilities and observation decks, in addition to an “iconic antenna tower.”
