Few cities have embraced contemporary Architecture more – or better – than Copenhagen. Since the early 2000s, international architects, from Norman Foster to Daniel Liebskind to Zaha have all left their mark, yes, but Danish architects themselves can take much of the credit for Copenhagen’s forward-thinking design. Firms with short, hip names, like BIG and 3XN, are not just transforming Denmark – they’re on the cutting-edge of architecture itself.
Where in the world, as a young architect, would be the best country to find a job in an architecture firm?
Last week, we decided to pose this question and crowd-source our readers’ intelligence for the answer. We received almost 200 comments from ArchDaily readers and Facebook fans all over the globe about the current employment opportunities, design culture, and wages in their respective countries. With many economies experiencing crippling Recession, and recent Architecture graduates suffering most, you’ve helped us generate a vital conversation.
Find out the 9 countries that made the cut after the break. Some may just surprise you…
While many buildings try to go Green these days, few attempt to do so literally.
Last week, York Minster Abbey, one of the largest Gothic Cathedrals in Europe, was decked out with 1,500 square meters of – what else - grass.
The occasion for the makeover, the York Minster Rose Dinner to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee (which we marked with a post on Britain’s Built Legacy), hosted about 900 people to raise funds for the York Minster Fund. And with £150-a-head tickets, sold months in advance, perhaps we’ll start seeing other Gothic Cathedrals turn green too (and not just with envy).
The Chinese are well-known for their penchant for knock-offs, be it brand-name handbags or high-tech gadgets, but this time, they’ve taken it to a whole other level.
A small Unesco-protected village in Austria, Hallstatt, has been recreated, brick for brick, in the subtropical district of Guangdong, China. While Hallstatt residents were at first unhappy with this clone, most have come around to the idea (aided in large part by the influx of Chinese tourists now making their way to this small Austrian site).
As odd-ball as this cloning idea may seem, it’s highly possible that Hallstatt will only be the first of many. When you consider ever-improving 3D Printers and the increasingly-common open sharing of “physible data” (digital data that has the potential to become physical objects), it’s not so difficult to imagine that – one day – cities will be downloadable and reproducible all over the globe. Perhaps in the future, Architects will work purely in the conceptual realm, designing plans that consumers will then produce.
If that’s the case, can there be any doubt that China will lead the way?
Quite possibly the most well-loved architect of our time, Frank Lloyd Wright was known for his “organic” architecture that harmonized with its surroundings (See the AD Classic: Fallingwater House). He would have turned 145 today.
Pulitzer Prize Winning Author, Ray Bradbury, died yesterday at the age of 91, leaving behind a legacy of best-selling Science Fiction Novels, including Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, that transcended genre and spoke to our very real human experiences.
However, you are probably not aware of his passion for rethinking and reviving the American City. In 1993, Bradbury wrote a book of essays, “Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures,” including a chapter on Urban Planning, and later wrote an article titled “The Aesthetics of Lostness,” praising European cities you can get lost in. Bradbury has been quoted as saying: “When I deal with urban problems I ask: What is a city? What is the mystery of the city? What is fun about a really good city?”
Read More about the late Ray Bradbury and his views on Architecture, after the break…
‘What is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.”
It’s easy to see why British Architects get their hackles raised when it comes to Prince Charles. The oft-quoted gem above, said in reference to a proposed extension to the National Gallery in 1984, is one of hundreds of such Architectural criticisms Prince Charles has made over the years. Which wouldn’t matter of course, if, like any average Architectural layman’s opinions, his words didn’t have much weight.
His do. They’ve resulted in the intervention, squelching, and/or redesign of at least 5 major plans over the last twenty years. But let’s not write off Charles just yet.
The general wisdom is that the Olympics create billions in revenue, an incalculable amount of publicity, and an excuse to get massive urban renewal projects off the ground. Cities invest millions – and that’s just to be considered by the Olympic Council. And yet, more often than not, the Olympics engender debt, questionable planning decisions (like razing poor neighborhoods to the ground), and massive, expensive structures that end up vacant and unused when the Games end.
Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit have decided to undertake a photography project to capture post-Olympic cities – both the successes and the failures. From the auditorium turned Korean Mega-Church in L.A. to the weeded, empty venues in Athens, The Olympic City, currently fundraising on Kickstarter, will chronicle each city’s post-Olympic “rebirth or decay.”
For us, the project raises some interesting questions: What choices can cities make to make urban rebirth an inevitable Olympic consequence? Or, at the very least, how can cities avoid the fate of post-Olympic decay?
Earlier this month, The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman tackled a common narrative in the architecture and urban planning community. It goes like this: once upon a time, in the 1990s, Medellín, Colombia, was the “murder of the capital of the world.” Then thoughtful architectural planning connected the slums to the city. Crime rates plummeted and, against the odds, the city was transformed.
Well, yes and no.
What happened in Medellín is often called “Urban Acupuncture,” a way of planning that pinpoints vulnerable sectors of a city and re-energizes them through design intervention. But Kimmelman reports that while the city has made considerable strides in its commitment to long-term, urban renewal, it has prioritized huge, infrastructural change over smaller solutions that could truly address community needs.
Urban Acupuncture needn’t be expensive, wieldy, or time-consuming. But it does require a detailed understanding of the city – its points of vulnerability, ‘deserts’ of services, potential connection points – and a keen sensitivity to the community it serves.
So what does this have to do with food? Our food system presents seemingly unsurmountable difficulties. In Part II, I suggested that design could, at the very least, better our alienated relationship with food. But what if we used the principles of Urban Acupuncture to bring Agriculture to the fore of urban planning? What if we used pinpointed, productive landscapes to revitalize abandoned communities and help them access healthy foods? What if we design our cities as points of Urban “Agripuncture”?
What would our cities look like with Urban Agripuncture? Read more after the break…
“Within the boundaries of a society largely living above its own means, an unregulated banking system that plays by its own rules, and a government that idly stands by as millions of homes are being foreclosed upon, there lies an absolute truth: the direction we’re moving as a society has become unsustainable and toxic. This is the new promise of the American dream.” - Brad Ascalon
In this piece for the “Love It or Leave It” exhibition at New York’s Gallery R’Pure, going on now until June 1st, Brad Ascalon has inverted this typical Suburban symbol in order to comment upon the state of the American Dream – today, “nearly impossible for most Americans to realize.”
More Photos of Brad Ascalon’s “The Dream” after the break…
“The typical Urban Dweller today has no understanding of where or how food is produced/distributed. We have become dependent on huge, powerful, profit-minded corporations to bring huge quantities of food from industrial farms into our supermarkets – but the entire process is hidden, massively complex, and, ultimately, unsustainable.”
In Part I of this Series, I made the case that Urban Agriculture has incredible potential; unfortunately, however, in America, it has a long way to go. Our economy, our government, our technology, even our perception of what “food” is relies upon the Food System we currently have in place. Urban Agriculture could very well be the answer, but, frankly, not yet.
So where does that leave us today?
All over the world, citizens are taking the Food Revolution into their own hands, becoming urban bee-keepers, guerilla planters, rooftop gardeners, foodie activists. While community engagement and political lobbying are vital to these grassroots movements, so too could be design.
By designing our cities – our public and civic spaces, our hospitals and schools – with food in mind, we can facilitate this Revolution by making food a visible part of urban life, thus allowing us to take that crucial first step: eliminating the physical/conceptual distance between us and our food.
What does it look like to design with food in mind? More after the break…
Locals in the Brooklyn Heights community have banded together behind a common cause: honoring Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch, the much-loved, Brooklyn-raised Beastie Boy who succumbed to cancer earlier this month.
Everyday, in the city of London, 30 million meals are served. That’s millions of trucks arriving to millions of stores and restaurants in a complex, tightly scheduled orchestration of production, transportation, and distribution.
We take it for granted that this system will never fail. But what would happen if these trucks were stopped? As unrealistic as it sounds, it’s happened – and not so long ago.
In 1989, over 57% of Cuba’s caloric intake was imported from the Soviet Union. When it collapsed, Cuba became, virtually overnight, solely responsible for feeding its population – including the 2.2 million in the city of Havana. [1] What happened next is an incredible story of resilience and innovation.
As our world becomes increasingly urbanized, our farms increasingly endangered, and our reliance upon fossil fuels increasingly undesirable, the question of how we will feed billions of future city dwellers is no mere thought experiment – it’s an urgent reality.
The story of Cuba offers us an interesting question: What would our cities look like if we began to place food production/distribution as the primary focus of urban design? And what will it take to make this vision a reality?
More on how Food can shape our cities, after the break…
