Today’s News - Thursday, May 5, 2016
EDITOR'S NOTE: Tomorrow will be a no-newsletter day - we'll be back Monday, May 9. And pardon today's longggg news - blame it on Jane and too many (great!) weekend diversions!
• ANN feature: San Francisco architect Geoffrey Scott Gainer takes a long, thoughtful look at "SFMOMA and us - and how Botta and Snøhetta each captured something about who we are" (with his own great pix!).
• Kamin isn't buying into the "red-herring" argument that the Lucas Museum and Chicago's "young and black and brown children" will be the losers if Friends of the Parks win the day: "This is a fight over the legal principles that govern Chicago's greatest public space, its lakefront. If Lucas bolts, so be it."
• Betsky cheers Sacramento's evolving Bridge District, inspired by the Dutch model of housing development: "I hope it will prove that some of the urban forms developed in the Netherlands might help us figure out how to make sprawl work better in this country."
• Kuma's proposed 43-story tower in Vancouver will be his first residential high-rise in North America ("scalloped scoops" to protect view corridors included).
• Calatrava is tapped to design the UAE Pavilion for Dubai Expo 2020, said to be inspired by "a falcon in flight" (he does like those bird metaphors).
• Lubbock turns to Toronto-based Diamond Schmitt for a Buddy Holly-inspired music and arts complex imbued with "the spirit of West Texas."
• We missed some well-worth-reading odes to Jane Jacobs in our round-up yesterday - do spend some time with the always eloquent Roberta Brandes Gratz, Richard Florida, and Peter Dreier.
• Winners all (and great presentations): 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards + American Academy in Rome 2016-17 Rome Prize winners + 2016 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers.
• Weekend diversions:
• Q&A with co-curators of the 5th New Zealand Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival, who scouted the world "for striking, thought-provoking films with a brilliant story and a lot of soul" (video clips included).
• Campbell cheers Safdie's "Global Citizen" at BSA Space, Boston: "Oh, the audacity. His buildings are bold, they're audacious, they seek (OMG!) to be popular" - and, no matter what you think of him, it's "an astonishing body of work."
• Q&A with Jim Jacobs on co-curating "Jane at Home," the exhibit in Toronto about his mom, Jane Jacobs (she wrote a protest song with Bob Dylan!).
• Pearson parses WOHA's "high-intensity architecture" on view at NYC's Skyscraper Museum that "challenges Americans' ideas of what it means to live in close quarters."
• "Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist" at the Jewish Museum is his first NYC exhibition in more than 20 years, and the first in the U.S. to showcase the full range of his artistic output.
• We couldn't resist eyefuls of Hou de Sousa's "Raise/Raze" that is bringing a lot of cameras to D.C.'s Dupont Underground.
• Cole minces no words about what he thinks of "Building Art" and "Goldberger, Gehry's hagiographer-in-chief" (ouch!).
• In "City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World," the writers make clear "that squares are always changing - just like the people who inhabit them."
• Welton gives thumbs-up to Kamin's "Gates of Harvard Yard" that "reveals the human elements behind the Harvard gates, and unlocks the history, tradition and beauty of the campus."
• Kamin "presents why the illustrious university's gate designs are worth investigating" - followed by an excerpt.
• Recinos has a riotous time reviewing Grant and Stein's "Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis" that focuses "on one seriously forgotten (and often hated) structure" (great pix!).
• Weingarten weighs in on Manaugh's "A Burglar's Guide to the City": "It's the dark side of Jane Jacobs's 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'" + an excerpt (if you're in NYC on Monday, come to Manaugh's Oculus Book Talk at the Center for Architecture!).
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SFMOMA and Us: How Botta and Snøhetta each captured something about who we are - as dueling outlooks on our relationship to the world. By Geoffrey Scott Gainer [images]- ArchNewsNow.com |
Mellody Hobson's argument on Lucas Museum rings false: I don't buy her argument that Friends of the Parks has "hijacked" the...debate and that the city's "young and black and brown children" will be the losers if George Lucas takes the museum elsewhere...This is a fight over the legal principles that govern Chicago's greatest public space, its lakefront...let's throw out the red-herring race card [and] tired rhetorical device of invoking the welfare of children...If Lucas bolts, so be it. By Blair Kamin- Chicago Tribune |
Sacramento's Bridge District Draws from Dutch Influences: A new development learns from the Dutch model of housing development to produce excitement and variation not found in cookie-cutter cul-de-sacs: I hope...[it] will prove that some of the urban forms developed in the Netherlands might help us figure out how to make sprawl work better in this country. By Aaron Betsky -- EDAW (now part of AECOM); Mark Dziewulski/DZ Architect; Jerry van Eyck/!melk [images]- Architect Magazine |
Kengo Kuma to design Vancouver skyscraper: ...the Alberni...will be the first residential high-rise in North America for the architect...The proposed 43-storey, 188-unit tower...is distinguished by scalloped scoops removed from each side of the tower’s profile, protecting view corridors... [image]- Canadian Architect |
Santiago Calatrava selected to design UAE Pavilion for Dubai Expo 2020: ...a design said to have been inspired by "a falcon in flight" + Foster + Partners, BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group, and Grimshaw reveal designs for 2020 Dubai Expo pavilions. [images]- Dezeen |
Diamond Schmitt Architects unveil striking vision for Buddy Holly-inspired music and arts complex: The Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences will be located in the city of Lubbock, Texas, where the singer was born...Inspired "by the spirit of West Texas"... [images]- CLAD (Community of Leisure Architects & Designers) |
The Jane Jacobs Century: ...a look back at just how and why Jacobs’ insights on cities have proved so enduring: Early in her writing career...[she] fell under the spell of the big, post-war building ideas that promised a new and better city once the old one was swept away. Then, she observed the consequences and recanted...If [she] were with us today, she would have every right to say: I told you so. By Roberta Brandes Gratz- CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities) |
Even Late in Her Career, Jane Jacobs Made Predictions That Are Coming True Today: Her widely panned last book, "Dark Age Ahead," cautioned against social and economic decay and the rise of demagogues like Donald Trump: At the very center of [her] work...lies a great concern over the darker, more pessimistic forces of standardization, top-down planning, bureaucracy, and globalization that have acted against diversity and human progress. By Richard Florida- CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities) |
Jane Jacobs’ Radical Legacy: Cities Are For People, Not Developers: Perhaps more than anyone else during the past half century, Jacobs...changed the way we think about livable cities. Indeed, it is a mark of her impact that many people influenced by her ideas have never heard of her. Her views have become part of the conventional wisdom, if not always part of the continuing practice, of city planning. By Peter Dreier- Huffington Post |
Cooper Hewitt Announces Winners of the 17th Annual National Design Awards -- Moshe Safdie (Lifetime Achievement); Make It Right; Bruce Mau; Center for Urban Pedagogy; Marlon Blackwell Architects; Geoff McFetridge; Opening Ceremony; Tellart; Studio O+A; Hargreaves Associates; Ammunition [images]- Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
American Academy in Rome announces 2016-17 Rome Prize winners + Italian Fellows -- Phu Hoang; Rachely Rotem; Robert Hutchinson; Yasmin Vobis (Architecture); Kyle deCamp; David Reinfurt (Desing); Kristi Cheramie; Jason Siebenmorgen (Landscape Architecture); Gregory Bailey; Stella Nair (Historic Preservation)- Bustler |
Winners Announced: 2016 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers: (im)permanence -- Rania Ghosn/El Hadi Jazairy/DESIGN EARTH; Juan Alfonso Garduño Jardón/G3 Arquitectos; Neyran Turan/Mete Sonmez/NEMESTUDIO; Neeraj Bhatia/The Open Workshop; Hubert Pelletier/Yves de Fontenay/Pelletier de Fontenay; Yasmin Vobis/Aaron Forrest/Ultramoderne- The Architectural League of New York |
New Zealand Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival is back for a fifth year: James Croot caught up with the festival's co-curators, Clearly & Co's Clare Buchanan and Tracey Lee..."We search the globe for striking, thought-provoking films with a brilliant story and a lot of soul." [images, videos]- Stuff (New Zealand) |
Safdie on exhibit: Oh, the audacity: [His] buildings are bold, they’re audacious, they seek (OMG!) to be popular: ...this is an astonishing body of work...It’s a grandma’s attic, the kind of place you love to wander in...Like most critical barbs, those aimed at Safdie are half-truths. [He] has created masterpieces...And he can also do things that are, well, bombastic and facile. "Global Citizen: the Architecture of Moshe Safdie" at BSA Space, Boston. By Robert Campbell- Boston Globe |
Q&A: Jim Jacobs on the exhibit about his mom, the activist-author Jane Jacobs: "Jane and Bob Dylan wrote a song together ["Listen, Robert Moses"]...Nobody recorded it." - "Jane at Home" at Urbanspace Gallery, Toronto. By Brad Wheeler- Globe and Mail (Canada) |
WOHA’s High-Intensity Architecture Now on Display at the Skyscraper Museum: "Garden City | Mega City" looks at 12 high-rise projects...and challenges Americans’ ideas of what it means to live in close quarters...WOHA designs with exuberance...The installation...underscores the lush and energetic nature of the work. By Clifford A. Pearson [images]- Architectural Record |
"Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist" Opens May 6 at the Jewish Museum: ...the first New York City exhibition to focus on Burle Marx in more than two decades, and the first exhibition in the United States to showcase the full range of his artistic output...[his] global influence and legacy will also be examined... -- SAS/Solomonoff Architecture Studio- Broadway World |
"Raise/Raze" Is About To Bring A Lot Of Cameras To Dupont Underground: ...opening of Dupont Underground to the public... -- Hou de Sousa [images]- DCist (Washington, DC) |
All that’s Gehrish: On Paul Goldberger’s "Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry": ...two major failures of his book: an absence of clear-eyed critical judgment and blatant cheerleading for Gehry...That Gehry may be modeling his story for his biographer seems to have escaped Goldberger. By Bruce Cole- The New Criterion |
From Tahrir To Tiananmen, City Squares Can't Escape Their History: "City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World" edited by Catie Marron...if there's one thing that the writers in this book make clear, it's that squares are always changing - just like the people who inhabit them. -- Michael Kimmelman; Evan Osnos; Jehane Noujaim- NPR / National Public Radio |
"Gates of Harvard Yard" by Blair Kamin: ...25 gates handsomely frame the perimeter of the Harvard campus. So what did their designers have in mind? Kamin and his co-authors reached into the university’s archives to research and reveal the human elements behind the Harvard gates...The story of each unlocks the history, tradition and beauty of the campus. By J. Michael Welton -- McKim, Mead & White- Huffington Post |
Blair Kamin opens up the "Gates of Harvard Yard": Kamin presents why the illustrious university's gate designs are worth investigating in an exclusive for Archinect, followed by an excerpted piece from the book.- Archinect |
L.A.'s Iconic, Hated Dingbat Apartment Is an Endangered Species: Thurman Grant and Joshua G. Stein decided to focus on one seriously forgotten (and often hated) structure..."Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis" reflects on the importance of the dingbat ...even while some naysayers might call it a blight on the architectural beauty of the city. By Eva Recinos [images]- LA Weekly |
Hail to the thief: Geoff Manaugh’s "A Burglar’s Guide to the City" examines how burglars use the urban environment: ...where architecture and crime intersect. It’s the dark side of urbanist Jane Jacobs’s "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," depicting the city and its environs as incubator for uncivil activity...the “forgotten” architecture of daily life that thieves study and of which they take advantage. By Marc Weingarten- Guardian (UK) |
Committing Crime Is Just Another Way To Use A City: For criminals, architecture is the ultimate abettor, writes Geoff Manaugh in "A Burglar's Guide to the City." [excerpt]- Fast Company / Co.Design |
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Venice Biennale Curator Series: "Diminished Capacity" is the debut appearance of Nigeria...intends to analyze a historical transition moment in Africa with the ambition to rewrite history...Q&A with Camilla Boemio, pavilion curator...[re:] her ambitions for this momentous occasion. By Robert Martin [images] |
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