Featured: The Latest Architecture and News

by Steve Sanderson

This is the first in Practice 2.0, a regular series of posts guest authored by our friends at CASE (@case_inc), focusing on technology and innovation in the building industry. While we all share tremendous enthusiasm for the opportunities afforded by technology, my particular interests are on gaining better, more timely access to information and improving building performance through informed decision making. Given the proximity to Earth Day (better late than never), I’m going to start things off with a related post. You can expect future posts to focus on building simulation and evidence-based design, with an emphasis on energy, validation and standards. You can also expect to hear a lot about Passive House.

Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of seeing Ed Mazria of Architecture 2030 speak at Cooper Union. For those that don’t know, Mazria and his organization have been instrumental in raising awareness of the enormous impact of buildings on climate change. His initiative, The 2030 Challenge, has been adopted (in varying degrees) by the most influential organizations on the built environment in the United States, including: the Federal Government, US Army, State of California, AIA and ASHRAE, among others. What does that mean? It means these organizations will require (or encourage) all new construction and major renovations to be carbon neutral by the year 2030.

Sounds good right? Frankly, it sounds awesome, but when you dig deeper into how this is received by the industry, you come away with a different perspective. As a building technology consulting firm, we interact with a diverse group of stakeholders from across the industry, representing all of the organizations noted above. In conversations with these individuals about the goals set out by The 2030 Challenge, you can basically group nearly everyone into one of two groups: The Blissfully Ignorant or The Fearfully Aware.

Continuing with the video updates OFIS arhitekti have share with us, the last one showcases some very interesting details of the Lace Apartments. The video shows the very geometric shapes of the facade, that seams a constant in this office’s works.

An article in this week’s Economist about Italian business clusters—that is, where businesses in the same industry form geographic clusters—offered some interesting observations. First, that traditional business models cannot survive global competition. A strategy to deal with global competition includes innovation and building brands. In short, diversification.

This led to a question: how does one approach diversifying architecture firms so that they, too, will be more able to weather economic vicissitudes? For that, let’s turn to Paul Nakazawa. Of course, there is the more “traditional” model of diversification: “many architects have several different kinds of SEPARATE businesses, which serves to diversify dependency on one source of revenue. The time-honored diversification scheme is teaching and practice — we all know lots of people who do that gig.”

More after the break.

At 82 Frank Gehry shows no sign of slowing down. Working on 20 projects at any given time, the Pritzker Prize winning architect’s latest completed work New York by Gehry had its formal opening just last month. In this interview Gehry shares how he was inspired by ice hokey, that Gian Lorenzo Bernini is one of his greatest influences, and what he has always wanted to design.

More following the break.

This week I’d like to introduce you to some books I’ve come across while traveling the city. This first one is CLIP STAMP FOLD, an encyclopedic compendium of radical little architecture mags from the sixties and seventies. More than just clip stamp fold these were also draw cut paste scribble slash ink. This brick of a book is a portable archive and you don’t have to wear latex gloves to handle. These small, independent publications curated the contemporary and collected what may have been the disposable present. The challenged the orthodox historicism of architecture with a hippy slant. I would have stolen some images for you, but alas it was wrapped in protective hygienic cellophane.

More after the break.

Announced today, the Berlin Neues Museum designed by David Chipperfield is the recipient of this years prestigious EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award. The Neues Museum is the result of blending old and new; the original Museum was designed by Friedrich August Stüler in the mid-19th century. Substantially damaged in the Second World War reconstruction of the Museum began in 2003.

Jury Chair Mohsen Mostafavi, shared the following about the building, “The rebuilding of the Neues Museum is an extraordinary achievement. Rarely have an architect and client succeeded in undertaking a work of such historic importance and complexity; especially one that involves both preservation and new building. The project raises and addresses many aesthetic, ethical, and technical issues. It is an exemplary demonstration of what collaboration can achieve in the context of contemporary European architectural practice.”

Also announced today was the recipient of ‘The Emerging Architect Special Mention’ award, given to Ramon Bosch and Bet Capdeferro for the Collage House in Girona, Spain.

The awards will be presented in a ceremony at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona on June 20th.

More details about this announcement following the break.

Today Ryerson University announced the design of a new Student Learning Centre for their Toronto campus. Designed by Snøhetta in collaboration with Zeidler Partnership Architects of Toronto, the 155,463sqf Student Learning Centre will feature a transparent glass skin that will provide varying light qualities within the interior spaces. Sustainable practices have also been incorporated into the design with 50% of the roof intended to act as a green roof and plans for the building to be LEED Silver compliant. Construction on the building is expected to begin late this year, with a targeted completion date of Winter 2014. More about the new Student Learning Centre including renderings following the break.

Pritzker Prize winning architect Peter Zumthor’s design for the 11th Serpentine Gallery Pavilion was revealed today. A design that ‘aims to help its audience take the time to relax, to observe and then, perhaps, start to talk again – maybe not’, the materials are significant in aiding the design which emphasizes the role the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture. The Pavilion will be Zumthor’s first completed building in the UK

Zumthor shared that ‘the concept for this year’s Pavilion is the hortus conclusus, a contemplative room, a garden within a garden. The building acts as a stage, a backdrop for the interior garden of flowers and light. Through blackness and shadow one enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise and traffic and the smells of London – an interior space within which to sit, to walk, to observe the flowers. This experience will be intense and memorable, as will the materials themselves – full of memory and time.’

Stay tuned to ArchDaily for more images and news on Zumthor’s design for the Pavilion. Our previous coverage of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion can be found here, including Jean Nouvel’s Serpentine Gallery of 2010, and SANAA’s 2009 Serpentine Gallery.

We’ve told you before about “Metropol Parasol”, the Redevelopment of Plaza de la Encarnación in Sevilla, designed by J. MAYER H. Architects. March 27 marks the opening, while the final completion of the project is scheduled for April 2011. More images and complete press release after the break.

Plans for the new Glasgow School of Art building, designed by Steven Holl Architects in association with JM Architects, received approval from the Glasgow City Council’s planning committee this week. Site preparations are scheduled for this summer, and work on the new building will immediately follow with construction scheduled to take around two years. The five story building will reside directly opposite of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterful Glasgow School of Art building.

The challenges presented by the recession reveal the essence of a firm’s leadership by laying bare all the dormant weaknesses that were most likely put in place when times were good. What are these weaknesses? They are primarily related to the culture of a firm’s day-to-day operation, how its personnel are managed, classified, and compensated.

Keep reading after the break.

As we had previously reported over 130 artists recently issued a call to action to boycott the new Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum that has just begun construction on Saadiyat Island. Despite the recent intervention by the Guggenheim Foundation and Museum and changes from the Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC), the artists backed by the Human Rights Watch are continuing to threaten to withhold their work as well as refusing participation in museum events. Our previous coverage can be found here.

Yesterday the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation Director Richard Armstrong and Deputy Director and Chief Curator Nancy Spector responded to the proposed artist boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum. The letter highlights the changes that have been, the Guggenheim’s own concern with the works rights, the importance of this museum to the region, and notably the inaccurate picture that is being painted by the Human Rights Watch most recent statements.

The full letter issued from Armstrong and Spector following the break.

When Dale Morgan and Norman Silk spotted a “For Sale” sign in front of a contemporary home in the Palmer Woods neighborhood of Detroit it was just what they were looking for, so they snatched it up. Little did they know that they had just stumbled into buying a true Frank Lloyd Wright designed home, known as the Turkel House.

To answer the question you are all asking yourselves, how could they not have known, it turns out that 25 years of disrepair, long periods of vacancy and changing owners hands combined with years of deferred maintenance and overgrown vegetation can hide a FLW design quite well.

More following the break.

“Architecture is too insular.” How many times have I heard this? Too many times to count. I’ve heard it from architects and non-architects, alike. It is not necessarily insular in the strict sense. It is more the case that it appears insular because it is self-referencing and self-validating. OK, so on second thought maybe it is just insular no matter how you define it. But my definition has more to do with the inward gaze of the profession that makes it a world unto itself. Like all worlds it has a need for celebrities.

More after the break.

Already mobilizing teams in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, Architecture for Humanity has begun to initiate an immediate response to the Sendai earthquake and tsunami. Currently AFH is searching for individuals to join a coalition to update foreign nationals in Japan with the latest information regarding unfolding events (currently being done via twitter #honyaquake).

We are sharing this with you in response to the Japan earthquake earlier today. Building earthquake resistant structures is an ongoing challenge and Japan is continually designing for and sensitive to its earthquake prone location. Their research includes the E-Defense Shake Table in Japan which is one of the most prominent shaking tables associated with earthquake engineering research.

Where does your State rank among the USGBC’s Top 10? Comparing LEED-certified commercial and institutional green buildings per capita within the United States the District of Columbia turned in the highest per capita/per person ratio of 25.15 square feet. Commercial office type and for-profit organization owner type where the most common, as was Chicago and Washington DC for the most represented cities on the list.

This article was written entirely by hand in the margins of a book I’ve been trying to review for the last few months. The book is entitled Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, by Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Remember those days? Probably not.

Currently he is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at Cal Berkeley. My guess is that he is not well-known among architects—his books are comprised of dense fields of text and the only images are graphs and charts with numbers. Given the current challenges the profession is facing, I thought now would be an appropriate time to introduce him. Actually, it’s a pity his ideas—which by the way are not merely his alone—are circulating now when they could have been instrumental in preventing the current recession.

More after the break.