A large cruise ship emerges out of the Giudecca Canal in Venice, behind the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, 2009. The World Monuments Fund (WMF) has released the 2014 World Monuments Watch, its biennial list of cultural heritage sites at risk of damage or loss. This year’s list includes 67 sites in 41 countries, shortlisted from 248 nominations. The type and scale of selections are equally expansive; they range from all of Syria to the gas lamps of Berlin. Despite such breadth, WMF president Bonnie Burnham, in introducing the 2014 class at a Tuesday press conference in Manhattan, said that
World Building of the Year Friday, the World Architecture Festival 2013 wrapped up in Singapore after three packed days of awards, lectures, critiques, and exhibitions. For the festival’s sixth year, more than 2,100 architects and designers from 68 different countries convened at Marina Bay Sands Resort where awards were given to projects across 29 different categories. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki by Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp in collaboration with Archimedia nabbed World Building of the Year, the festival’s top honor. Cox Rayner Architects received Future Project of the Year award for their National Maritime Museum in Tianjin, China, and Taylor
This article first appeared on ENR.com. Cindy Regnier, manager of the world's first research laboratory for full-scale performance mock-ups of integrated green-building systems, is canvassing the globe to find partners and research sponsors for the facility, called FLEXLAB. Regnier is bent on doing her part to create a new paradigm for energy conservation in buildings. And she is using the lab as a springboard. She seems to be succeeding. The $15.7-million FLEXLAB, which stands for "Facility for Low-Energy Experiments in Buildings," is still under construction on the campus of the U.S. Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
Odile Decq and Thom Mayne Watching the presentations at this year’s Monterey Design Conference in northern California, attendees got a multiple-image portrait of architecture in the early 21st century. Elegant buildings with refined details alternated with exuberant installations that relied on digital know-how and student labor. Snapshots from Arkansas, Minnesota, and California appeared between reports from France, Japan, and Brazil. And a tribal elder told stories of working with Louis Kahn, as newer members of the profession listened raptly. More than 600 people gathered at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove at the end of September for the event,
A video at the New York City gallery traces the 60-year diaspora of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret’s Chandigarh furniture. ProvenanceAmie Siegel2013HD video40 min 30 sec. installation view, Simon Preston, New York The protagonist of multimedia artist Amie Siegel’s new video Provenance, on view at the Simon Preston Gallery in New York City through this Sunday, is a chair. Not any chair, mind you, but one designed by renowned modernist architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. And not even a chair, really, but a design aesthetic—an iconic wooden teepee—that captivates in much the same way Hollywood royalty might. Which helps makes
A Maggie's Centre, designed by Snøhetta, opened in Aberdeen, Scotland, on September 23. Architecture can’t cure cancer, but good design has the power to heal. That’s the philosophy behind Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres, a network of drop-in facilities in Great Britain. The centers—17 and growing—are named for writer and landscape architect Maggie Keswick Jencks, who died of breast cancer in 1995. Married to the influential American architecture critic and landscape architect Charles Jencks, Maggie spent the last two years of her life conceiving a warm, inviting place where cancer patients could spend time learning how to cope with their disease
Image courtesy Center for Architecture Archtober, a festival celebrating architecture and design through the month of October, kicks off Tuesday in New York City for its third year. Archtober has expanded programming with 53 participating organizations and more than 150 events including design tours, panel discussions, films, exhibitions, and soirées. One year after Hurricane Sandy blew through the Atlantic Seaboard, many of this year’s events will focus on resiliency. Highlights October 1: Practical Utopias: Global Urbanism in Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo, a new exhibition at AIA New York’s Center for Architecture opens, exploring the construction boom across
A rendering of the new glass atrium that will mark the entrance to the hospital-turned-hotel. In Buffalo, a hospital by some of the best-known designers of the 19th century, left for dead in the 20th, is being revived as a boutique hotel. The landmarked Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, by Henry Hobson Richardson along with Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, is adding an 88-room hotel and conference center, as well as fresh landscaping, as the Rust Belt city bets that its architectural heritage can attract tourists. The redesign, led by Deborah Berke Partners and finalized last month, will
Zaha Hadid Architects Serpentine Sackler Gallery London Zaha Hadid Architects’ first permanent structure in London—a restaurant building made from tensile fabric, steel, and glass—has something of the appearance of a carnival tent.