Architecture News

RSS

After a spike prompted by a 2009 federal stimulus package, construction of government buildings continues to drop. This year starts are expected to decline further, to $8.4 billion. Source: McGraw-Hill Dodge Analytics Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].

Photo by Ezra Stoller © Esto Franzen's own home—in Rye, New York—was featured in the inaugural Record Houses issue in May of 1956. Ulrich Joseph Franzen, a prominent New York architect in the latter part of the 20th century, died after a brief illness on October 6 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of 91. After studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the mid-1940s when Walter Gropius was its chair of architecture, Franzen became part of a cohort that would disseminate the Modernist vocabulary of the Bauhaus founder in the U.S. during the boom period

Waller Creek Design Competition, CMG and Public Architecture A competition jury in Austin is considering four very different design approaches to transform a 1.5-mile stretch of derelict urban parkland. The finalists’ conceptual plans for the riparian linear park, which meanders through the downtown, represent the middle phase of an international competition targeting the blighted banks of Waller Creek. An announcement is expected on October 18 to name the winning team of landscape architects partnered with an architecture firm. The selected team’s design will be the capstone for a massive public works project expected to spur dramatic redevelopment of 15 blocks

Mumbai firm CRIT’s proposal looks beyond their city’s existing infrastructure. The Urban Future Award finalists go on view today in Istanbul. The winner of the €100,000 prize will be announced on October 18. At least since Jane Jacobs took on Robert Moses’s plan for a freeway through Greenwich Village, the car has played the villain in urbanist narratives. But German automaker Audi hopes to change the role of its product in the next chapter of the story. Next week, it will present the second Audi Urban Future Award, the culmination of a biennial competition to reimagine the city beginning with

Singapore hosted the 2012 World Architecture Festival last week. The annual event convenes juries to select top new and future projects in categories ranging from Cultural facilities, Houses, and Health Care to World Building of the Year. Click on slide show below to see each of this year’s winners. World Building of the YearWilkinson EyreCooled Conservatories at Gardens by the BaySingapore

Photo © Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images (left) / Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images North America President Obama in Michigan (left) / Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Florida. When it comes to public infrastructure, Americans face a stark policy choice this November. More than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Barack Obama has made investing in infrastructure central to his presidency. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, says little about issues like transportation and housing. When he does, it is to suggest cuts to programs and agencies that provide them. The current administration encourages cities and states to spend federal money on projects

Lella and Massimo Vignelli, Peter Marino, New York AIA president Joseph Aliotta, and many others gathered last night at the SoHo showroom of Poltrona Frau in New York to celebrate the start of Archtober—a month long design festival organized by the New York AIA—and the Architecture & Design Film Festival. Architectural Record was a sponsor of the event. View a slide show below. Roberto Guerra and Kathy Brew, directors of "Design Is One: Lella and Massimo Vignelli," with Massimo Vignelli and Architecture and Architecture & Design Film Festival founder Kyle Bergman at the Poltrona Frau showroom in New York for

From a former wasteland to a genuine cultural hub, Lyon's Confluence area accounts for one of Europe's boldest city-center urban developments. Odile Decq's Pavilion 8 office building will house a "floating" restaurant and offices in Lyon's former wharf district. When Jean-Paul Viossat, director of the Rhône Saone Développement, first opened his office in the Lyon Confluence district in 2004, the industrial zone was full of derelict buildings and empty streets. “We lived together with local prostitutes and drug addicts,” he recalls. "They were the only living souls in the area." What a difference a decade can make. Today, the district,

Herzog & de Meuron’s Parrish Art Museum shown under construction.   Here's a message not all architects will want to hear.Less is more. Even less money.Exhibit A is the Parrish Art Museum, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and scheduled to open on November 10. The museum, which is visible to anyone driving along the Montauk Highway on the South Fork of Long Island, New York, is a single low-slung rectangle, about 100 feet wide and more than 600 feet long, under a standing-seam metal roof.It's not a small building, but it is a simple one. The design replaced an

Roman Mars raised over $170,000 on Kickstarter for the third season of his "tiny" radio show about design, 99% Invisible. © Raymond Ahner Roman Mars, host of 99% Invisible. As host of the weekly radio show and podcast 99% Invisible, Roman Mars takes a democratic interest in the stories behind all kinds of design. With typically “tiny” 4- to 10-minute segments (a project of KALW in San Francisco), Mars has explored the past and future of the Purple Hotel outside of Chicago, designed by John Macsai, the sound of the World Trade Center towers “breathing,” and depression induced by airport