“We build what developers won’t build: family-sized units,” says Sarah Letts, the executive director of the Community Corporation of Santa Monica (CCSM), standing on the outdoor terrace on the top floor of 2802 Pico Housing—a recently opened 100-percent-affordable housing project by the nonprofit developer. The family-oriented design by Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners provides ten three-bedroom and 23 two-bedroom rental units—all at 25 to 30 percent of market rate. Read More …
Mextropoli, the First International Festival on Architecture and the City, organized by Arquine and directed by Andrea Griborio, takes place in Mexico City March 22-26, 2014.
Panel Discussion: Habla ciudad: la crítica
Iker Gil (Chicago), Andrés Jaque (Madrid), Ethel Baraona Pohl (Barcelona), Mimi Zeiger (Los Angeles)
Habla ciudad: la crítica
Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Time: 5 pm – 6:30 pm
Location: Plaza de la Santa Veracruz
City in a City: A Decade of Urban Thinking by Steven Holl Architects opened at LA’s MAK Center for Art + Architecture in late January. Do not be fooled by the title. The exhibition is not about any particular city. Instead, it profiles a suite of projects by Holl’s office across China. The urban thinking in question, then, plays out in the scale of these built works and proposals, which express themselves over huge swaths of landscape and dazzle with their square footage. Consider the numbers:
2,383,797
7,035,000
215,280
1,296,459
3,500 Read More …
Architecture, especially at its most conceptual, is murky territory. It takes a risk for the public to wade in. The field is routinely blasted for using alienating jargon or offering up sci-fi designs that produce head scratching. Three exhibitions on view right now across the southland celebrate experimental design, while making it accessible to a broad audience. Each show — Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB); Materials & Applications: Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful, Projects 2002 – 2013 at Cal State Long Beach University Art Museum; and Blindspot Initiative at the Keystone Gallery in Los Angeles–provoke a collaborative dialog about architecture and its allied disciplines: art, design, fabrication, and digital technologies. While the installations run the gamut from the scrappy to the institutional, when taken together these shows reveal a rich and diverse community united by an ethos to question both the academic and professional boundaries that surround architecture. Read More …
When Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s outgoing Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, took the podium at an October workshop for Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, he warmly welcomed the participants, who had gathered at the Museum from around the globe. On hand to embark on a yearlong study exploring potential architectures of global urbanism were architects and researchers from Boston and Brazil, New York and Nigeria, as well as from Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, India, France, Turkey, and Hong Kong, all of whom had been selected by architecture curator Pedro Gadanho. Read More …
This year, the Van Alen Institute in New York celebrates its 120th anniversary. It’s hard to believe that an organization that was founded in 1894 as the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects would find itself in 2014 with a taxi-yellow bookshop on West 22nd Street, the drive to keep reinventing itself, and a new leader with a global vision. Read More …
Curator
Joakim Dahlqvist is an architect, designer, illustrator and digital artist. This exhibition presents a collection of Dahlqvist’s illustrations that teeter on the edge between reality and fantasy. Defying the sublime tendencies of architectural rendering, he represents imagined objects with an analytical coolness. Cast with an artificial fluorescent glow, these artifacts and environments tease with the pleasure of their verisimilitude. However, with a droll touch worthy of Jacques Tati, they offer a surreal joy that transcends the digital model. Read More …
The Tokyo architect takes us behind the scenes of the Tamedia headquarters in Zurich, a modern mid rise employing ancient Japanese joinery construction.
Having explored material in every format – from his cardboard tube emergency shelters to his Centre Pompidou-Metz, with its glulam timber roof – the Tokyo architect and his firm now turns their attention to miyadaiku and sukiya-daiku, the Japanese carpentry techniques of tea houses and temples, which use no nails, screws or other hardware. This sophisticated joinery is the main feature of the 10,120-square-metre Zurich head-quarters of Tamedia, a major publisher of newspapers, magazines and online media. Azure contributor Mimi Zeiger spoke with Ban about what makes this style of wood construction both innovative and sustainable. Read More …
Syracuse Architecture
Lecture
Slocum Auditorium
Syracuse University
The recent flurry of critical missives and tweets over MoMA’s decision to demolish the next-door American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, has got me thinking about Harley Earl. The square-shouldered vice president and head of design at General Motors introduced stylised curves, chrome, and sex appeal into an industry driven by function. His most significant contribution to American culture, however, may be not the tail fin but planned obsolescence. Read More …