Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Click here to see today's news.
Kamin explains why "Materials matter. Oh, do they matter!" when it comes to the Obama Center: "When I asked Tsien, in the spirit of Louis Kahn, what the stone wants to be, she replied: 'maybe like the person we are trying to represent. Warm with a sense of quiet complexity.' An alluring concept. Now let's see the material evidence." -- Moore parses the stadiums readying for their 2018 World Cup close-up in Russia: "The fabulous expense of this event has gone to some place other than good architecture. The stadiums are mostly lumpy, their soaring ambitions grounded" (scroll down to #2). -- A Montana kind of day: The Tippet Rise Art Center in the Beartooth Mountains taps Kéré for a (delightful!) new pavilion - "as part of the agreement, the Tippet Rise Fund will support the construction of a new school building in Kéré's native Burkina Faso." -- Montana State University architecture students are hard at work "putting finishing touches on the first prototype" for a "village" of about 30 to 50 tiny (145-square-foot!) homes for the homeless in Bozeman, MT. -- El-Space, an initiative of The Design Trust for Public Space to activate the "forgotten spaces" under NYC's elevated highways, launches its first pilot installation underneath the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn (yay!). -- Mitchell x 2: Part 1: She parses 4 of the 9 proposals for San Francisco's Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge proposals. -- Part 2: she parses the remaining 5 proposals for the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge (nice to see all 9 gathered). -- Carpo considers "post-digital 'quitters'": "The only difference between yesterday's Postmodernists and today's Post-digitalists would be in the degree of their aversion to technology. The PoMos fought against technology; the PoDigs don't care about it." -- Fure takes issue with Carpo's take on the PoDigs that left him "a bit troubled," citing MVRDV's Glass Farm as an example: "Three details strike me as particularly post-digital about this project." -- The 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial appoints educator and curator Sepake Angiama and architect and urbanist Paulo Tavares as co-curators: "Both have research-based practices that look thoughtfully at how the built environment relates to social structures on an international scale." -- Two we couldn't resist: Rambin raises an eyebrow (rather amusingly!) at renderings of a few Texas towers that "all kinda look exactly the same. But it gets weirder - we can definitively declare that Austin has entered the Age of Contemporary Divergent Mass. Isn't that name fun to hate?" -- Having nothing to do with architecture (and swampy puns are sure to ensue): Garfield reports that the White House lawn "has developed a mysterious sinkhole - found by reporters a year to the day after a similar one developed at Mar-a-lago.

Yesterday, it was: "What do architecture critics think of the state of architecture criticism today?" Today, it's:
-- Lubell takes a deep dive into what "architects can still learn from Tom Wolfe," and his "most notorious rant" - "From Bauhaus to Our House": "What Wolfe got right is his skewering of what can be an insular, snotty, tone-deaf culture" - still, "it's important to recognize how his keen cultural antenna can still contribute to the current debates about our profession." -- Architects and educators respond to AN's round-up of critics' takes on the state of architecture criticism today ("The role of the opinion-forming, influential critic is more or less dead. Everyone is a critic now"). -- Brussat offers his own take on the critics' takes on criticism: "The truth is that architecture critics never write about the fact that most people do not like most architects or their work."

The multi-award-winning architect talks about why he avoids using exposed concrete outside of Japan, why the Metabolist movement didn't quite catch on, and Yoshio Taniguchi's buildings: "He is our Mies van der Rohe."

 
by Vladimir Belogolovsky

April 5, 2018