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Today’s News - Wednesday, January 22, 2020

●  OMA's Reinier de Graaf explains how "the emotional and economic impacts of cities are closely connected, but this is lost in a proliferation of meaningless phrases like 'healthy placemaking' and 'human-centric design' - what ails do panacea like [these] even aim to cure?"

●  Norman Day takes a deep dive into "unbuilding" and "reverse building" (and some techniques being developed) as high-rises "reach their use-by date" - instead of being "reduced to dust and mud by destruction."

●  Hugo Chan, of Cracknell & Lonergan Architects, says that, too often, "our discussions around sustainable architecture are grounded in the new - new materials, new technologies, new systems" - adaptive reuse broadens our understanding of sustainability - "reminding architects that the past holds a plethora of potential to suit present needs and concerns."

●  Dow Jones Architects' Biba Dow minces no words: "The profession's failure to embrace retrofits is a macho hangover of Modernism," and too often, she senses "a professional arrogance" and "condescension towards practice that engages with existing buildings."

●  Welton brings us a stylish adaptive reuse in Rotterdam, where a long-vacant 1950s newspaper office building has been given "new life" as a 78-room boutique hotel - the designers were "careful not to repeat the 1950s," but took "their cues from that forward-looking time period, now long gone."

●  A proposed adaptive reuse project we couldn't resist: a proposal to turn a Grade II-listed Victorian gas holder in London into alligator park as part of a housing development (reptile experts would be involved).

●  Kim delves into "what the Hudson Yards wall kerfuffle says about the problem with private developers building public spaces. It was a public design fail that took all of five days to get resolved" (Kayden, Gratz, and others weigh in).

●  Wainwright hangs out at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel, a "gaudy $1.5bn colossus in the Florida swamps" that "takes the roadside architecture of the Las Vegas strip to the ultimate extreme" - but also "stands proudly as a huge guitar-shaped middle finger up to the white man who tried to eradicate their entire race" (an al fresco shower on the balcony of Beyoncé Suite penthouse included - great read - and video of crazy light show!).

●  OMA returns to the Denver Art Museum, this time to design galleries as part of the phased reopening of the newly renovated Gio Ponti-designed Martin Building (formerly North Building).

●  Pressman ponders whether we should be "excited" about a new terminal at Reagan National Airport that means "no more rain-soaked runs to and from the shuttle bus. While the design is sleek, well planned, and beautifully detailed - it will look more like the lobby of a large hotel than the audacious architectural statement it could have been. What if..."

●  Snug Architects' Wall of Answered Prayer, "a 50-meter-tall Möbius strip made from a million bricks, wins the RIBA competition for a national prayer landmark on the outskirts of Birmingham (pix of finalists' designs, too).

●  Morgan cheers Union Studio's Tiverton Public Library in Rhode Island that says, "Please Touch": It's "neo-traditional aesthetic might border on the cute" but it's actually "a good balance of nostalgia, fancy, and functionalism."

●  Ravenscroft reports on Bjarke Ingels meeting Brazil's right-wing president to "change the face of tourism in Brazil" that has drawn criticism from architects and critics, including Woodman, Griffiths, and Goldberger (and miles of critical comments!).

●  Q&A with Liz Diller, who offers "intriguing and personal insight into the current issues facing architecture": "Architecture has a danger of becoming obsolete."

●  ICYMI: ANN feature: Building Abundance #6 by Edward McGraw: Q&A with Binghamton University President Dr. Harvey Stenger: "We have the solutions to climate change and they can be implemented right now" - his hopeful prognosis for the climate crisis.

Winners all:

●  Pakistan's first female architect Yasmeen Lari wins the Jane Drew Prize, and Spanish-American critic Beatriz Colomina wins the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize in the 2020 AJ/AR W Awards (formerly Women in Architecture Awards).

●  Impressive shortlists for the W Awards 2020 Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture and the inaugural MJ Long Prize for Excellence in Practice.

●  Winners of the Paris Affordable Housing Challenge are all students!

●  Winners of the Archhive Books' Portable Reading Rooms competition hail from Italy, Brazil, and China.

  


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