AIA New York has announced the winners of their 2017 AIA New York Design Awards, highlighting the best new projects located in the Empire State or completed by AIA NY registered architects across categories of architecture, projects, interior design and urban planning.
Within the four categories, winning projects have been granted either an “Honor” or “Merit” distinction. Each project has been chosen for its “design quality, response to its context and community, program resolution, innovation, thoughtfulness, and technique.” The winners scale in scale from temporary exhibitions to large-scale urban interventions.
This year 22 of the 35 winners were New York City-located projects, including the grand prize winner, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s striking Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University’s medical campus. Continue reading to see the full list of winners.
On Thursday, December 22nd, an email arrived in the inboxes of ArchDaily’s editors that made us sit up, shake off our holiday-induced lethargy, and take notice. MASS Design Group’s Year in Review email might initially have blended in with the many other holiday wishes and 2016 recaps we receive at that time of year—it recapped such highlights as Michael Murphy’s TED Talk in February or the launch of the first African Design Center—but it had one thing that we hadn’t seen from other firm’s years-in-review: detailed statistics about the firm’s achievements that year.
In recent decades, certain aspects of architecture have become increasingly open to scientific analysis, most notably when it comes to a building’s environmental impact. It’s no surprise, therefore, to see MASS Design Group’s claims that their work uses 74% less embodied carbon than typical building projects, or that 78% of their materials are sourced within 100 kilometers, but alongside these were some more unusual metrics: since it was founded, the firm has invested 88% of construction costs regionally, created 15,765 jobs, and in 2016 alone, their work served a total of 64,580 users. These numbers suggest a way of thinking about architecture that few have attempted before—a way that, if widely adopted, could fundamentally change the way architecture is practiced and evaluated. We spoke to MASS co-founder Alan Ricks to find out how these statistics are calculated, and what purpose they serve.
Of all its bells and whistles, the focal point of Herzog and de Meuron’s latest successful endeavor, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, is arguably the central auditorium, as explored in this new article by WIRED. An incredible example of the possibilities of parametric design, the hall is comprised of 10,000 individual acoustic panels that line the walls, ceilings, railings and balconies. Each of the panels consists of one million “cells” of varying dimensions, created to help define the sound within the space.
https://www.archdaily.com/805567/the-parametric-process-behind-the-hamburg-elbphilharmonies-auditoriumOsman Bari
After two weeks of nominations and voting, last week we announced the 16 winners of the 2017 Building of the Year Awards. In addition to providing inspiration, information, and tools for architecture lovers from around the world, ArchDaily seeks to offer a platform for the many diverse and global voices in the architecture community. In this year's Building of the Year Awards that range of voices was once again on display, with 75,000 voters from around the world offering their selections to ultimately select 16 winners from over 3,000 published projects.
Behind each of those projects are years of research, design, and labor. In the spirit of the world's most democratic architecture award, we share the stories behind the 16 buildings that won over our global readership with their urban interventions, humanitarianism, playfulness, and grandeur.
In the latest video from architecture vlogging favorites#donotsettle, the infectiously energetic duo of Wahyu Pratomo and Kris Provoost team up to take us inside Herzog & de Meuron's newly-completed Elphilharmonie in Hamburg. Filmed during the music venue's "family day," part of its three-week-long opening festival, #donotsettle gives us an engaging look into the building's many spaces—cleverly accompanied by an annotated cross-section of the building which allows us to track their progress through the project's labyrinthine interior.
The Architectural Review (AR) has announced the shortlist of 9 female architects in the running for its 2016 Woman Architect of the Year and the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture awards. This year’s candidates come from a wide range of backgrounds, operating in UK, Mexico, France, the USA and Canada, and have been lauded by the AR for their “projects demonstrating exceptional design and awareness of geographical and political contexts.”
Our modern day, image-obsessed culture has got us consuming a large quantity of architecture through photographs, as opposed to physical, spatial experiences. The advantages of architectural photography are great; it allows people to obtain a visual understanding of buildings they may never get the opportunity to visit in their lifetime, creating a valuable resource that allows us to expand our architectural vocabulary. However, one must stay critical towards the disadvantages of photography when it comes to architecture. Jeremy Till, author of “Architecture Depends,” summarizes this in his chapter “Out Of Time”: “The photograph allows us to forget what has come before (the pain of extended labor to achieve the delivery of the fully formed building) and what is to come after (the affront of time as dirt, users, change, and weather move in). It freezes time or, rather, freezes out time. Architectural photography ‘lifts the building out of time, out of breath,’ and in this provides solace for architects who can dream for a moment that architecture is a stable power existing over and above the tides of time.”
The following tips aim to not only improve the visual strength of your architectural photography, but also the stories that they can tell—going beyond the individual images in order to communicate buildings’ relationships with their contexts, space and time.
2016 was a defining year for ArchDaily. The change and uncertainty around the globe which emerged during the past year allowed us to double down on our mission to provide information, knowledge, and tools to architects, leveling the access to architectural knowledge and enabling a more diverse, equitable profession. As part of this, we now have a renewed focus on data-driven decisions and crowdsourcing architecture's understanding of its own work. The flagship of this crowdsourcing effort has always been our annual Building of the Year awards.
Now, for the 8th consecutive year, we are tasking our readers with the responsibility of recognizing and rewarding the projects that are making an impact in the profession, with ArchDaily's 2017 Building of the Year Awards. By voting, you are part of an unbiased, distributed network of jurors and peers that has elevated the most relevant projects over the past seven years. Over the next two weeks, your collective intelligence will filter over 3,000 projects down to just 16 stand-outs—the best in each category on ArchDaily.
Continuing in her firm’s tradition of blurring the lines between architecture, art and environment, Elizabeth Diller, founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is producing an opera for the High Line. Dubbed the “Mile Long Opera,” the production will be set along New York’s new favorite attraction, which was designed by DS+R with James Corner and Piet Oudolf and opened to the public in 2009.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) have named 18 architectural and interior projects as recipients of the 2017 Institute Honor Awards, the profession’s highest recognition for excellence in design.
According to the AIA, “the 2017 Architecture program celebrates the best contemporary architecture regardless of budget, size, style, or type. These stunning projects show the world the range of outstanding work architects create and highlight the many ways buildings and spaces can improve our lives.”
The awarded projects were selected from nearly 700 submissions. The winners will be honored at the 2017 AIA National Convention in Orlando.
In a meeting yesterday, The Board of La Biennale di Venezia appointed Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects as curators of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in 2018. This marks the second time that the Venice Architecture Biennale will be directed by women, after Kazuyo Sejima's role as director for the 2010 Biennale.
German magazine Der Spiegel has conducted an interview with Zhang Xin, billionaire real estate mogul and founder of SOHO China—the company behind such well-known buildings as Zaha Hadid Architects' Galaxy SOHO and Wangjing SOHO. In the interview, Xin discusses the Chinese economy, her changing business model, digitalization, the symbolic value of buildings, and more. Learn more about Xin’s take on success and change in China by reading the full interview here.
Observing the architectural landscape today it’s clear that the type of work which is currently ascendant, particularly among young practices, is very different to what came before the financial crisis of 2008. But what, exactly, does that architectural landscape look like? In an essay titled “Well into the 21st Century” in the latest issue of El Croquis, Alejandro Zaera-Polo outlined a 21st-century taxonomy of architecture, attempting to define and categorize the various new forms of practice that have grown in popularity in the years since—and as a political response to—the economic crisis.
The categories defined by Zaera-Polo encompass seven broad political positions: The “Activists,” who reject architecture’s dependence on market forces by operating largely outside the market, with a focus on community building projects, direct engagement with construction, and non-conventional funding strategies; then there are the “Populists,” whose work is calibrated to reconnect with the populace thanks to a media-friendly, diagrammatic approach to architectural form; next are the “New Historicists,” whose riposte to the “end of history” hailed by neoliberalism is an embrace of historically-informed design; the “Skeptics,” whose existential response to the collapse of the system is in part a return to postmodern critical discourse and in part an exploration of contingency and playfulness through an architecture of artificial materials and bright colors; the “Material Fundamentalists,” who returned to a tactile and virtuoso use of materials in response to the visual spectacle of pre-crash architecture; practitioners of “Austerity Chic,” a kind of architectural “normcore” (to borrow a term from fashion) which focuses primarily on the production process, and resulting performance, of architecture; and finally the “Techno-Critical,” a group of practices largely producing speculative architecture, whose work builds upon but also remains critical of the data-driven parametricism of their predecessors.
As a follow-up to that essay, Zaera-Polo and Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal set out to apply the newly-defined categories to the emerging practices of today with a nuanced “political compass” diagram. They invited practices to respond to their categorization in order to unveil the complex interdependencies and self-image of these political stances. For the first time, here ArchDaily publishes the results of that exercise.
[In New York] there’s this math problem: 1.8 million small households and only one million suitable apartments. – Mimi Hoang, principal of nArchitects
Last year, nArchitectsreleased a trailer that teased the development of their winning adAPT NYC entry, Carmel Place (formerly known as My Micro NY). The competition sought to address the need for small household apartments in New York City. Now in a newly released video, the full story of the city’s tallest modular tower comes together in smooth timelapse to a dainty piano soundtrack.
.jpg?1484657568 "Waterloo Lane / Grafton Architects. Image © Ros Kavanagh")
