Thursday, July 10, 2014
EDITOR'S NOTE: Just a reminder that we're on our summer schedule now, and not posting on Fridays and Mondays. We'll be back Tuesday, July 15.
Click here to see today's news:
Lynn Richards offers an in-depth look at 10 steps "for creative reinvention" to "rescale" suburbs into "vibrant, walkable, thriving places built for people" (with some prime examples). -- Hume calls for flexibility and adaptability: "A growing city like Toronto prospers only when it has the capacity to reinvent itself quickly and constantly" - wanting things to stay the same is not an option anymore. -- Florida crunches the numbers to find out which are the U.S.'s leading design cities, and comes up with some surprising results when it comes to architects: "Seattle tops the list" (NYC is only 10th, and L.A. is 20th!). -- Hawthorne reports that, beyond Zumthor's "relentlessly horizontal" museum design, LACMA has a towering plan for a hotel and condo skyscraper (that could also house Gehry's archives, and possibly the A+D Museum). -- Kamin and Harris report that a Chinese developer has high hopes to build Chicago's 3rd-tallest skyscraper, "but it is easier to announce a supertall tower than build one"; adding to the intrigue is a did-she-or-didn't-she question: is the design by Gang (rendering is certainly intriguing). -- Wainwright gives (mostly) thumbs-up to RSH+P's British Museum's extension: "What Foster did for front-of-house amid great fanfare, Rogers has done for the back, almost in secret" (and "the staff can barely conceal their excitement about their new toys"). -- Foges is entranced by the "gravity-defying form" of Odile Decq's GL Events HQ in Lyon, France: "The building slips easily between two identities, the somber and the sensuous." -- Cincinnati's Urban Design Review Board, on the other hand, is "less than enthusiastic" about the design of GE's planned HQ on a high-profile spot near the city's riverfront: "If I peel off the GE sign, it could be anybody else"; but, sayeth the company: "GE is not willing to pay for an iconic building." -- Q&A with the Serpentine's Radic re: his "boulder-strewn winery" south of Santiago, Chile - and why he's into rocks. -- Weekend diversions: -- Wainwright, Woodman, McGrath, and Ferro all weigh in with thoughtful takes on Louis Kahn ("the man who spoke to bricks") and the retrospective at London's Design Museum - all well worth reading + Otobo's walk-through of Four Freedoms Park. -- Capps and Green manage to survive the BIG Maze at the National Building Museum: "Chalk it up as a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again" (though "mazes are the ultimate babysitters") + For those who aren't fans of enclosed spaces, "gird yourself for an anxiety-riddled time" ('til you find yourself at the exit); though Silverstein has a grand time, as does Kolson Hurley. -- Down Under, "Hot Modernism: Building Modern Queensland 1945-75" reveals the period's architectural community as "a hotbed of ideas which continue to resonate with people now" + It was "a time that can be best described as 'hot' - hot in design, hot in color, and hot in debate." -- At NYC's Skyscraper Museum, "Times Square, 1984" shows a time when its future "was in limbo - caught between a series of false starts at clean-slate urban renewal - and an emerging philosophy of urbanism that favored history, preservationist values, electric signs and semiotics, and delirious diversity." -- Larman is totally taken by Wilkinson's "Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made" that is "challenging, witty and authoritative" and "takes the reader on wild and unexpected tangents. It's rare to encounter an accessible book of this intellectual density." -- Green cheers Beatley's "Blue Urbanism": "Too many cities don't understand their connections to oceans."
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