Adam Reed Tucker, a Chicago-based architect, conceived the concept for Lego Architecture, an elegant series of building sets celebrated in Lego Architecture: The Visual Guide, published last month. The relationship between Lego and architecture began in 1962 with the company’s Scale Model Series. It only lasted until 1965, but its impact was massive thanks to the introduction of the Lego plate. One-third the size of a traditional Lego brick, the plate added an element of stability that opened up a world of building possibility for kids and adults alike. But few took to the potential quite like architects. Moshe Safdie,
Thomas Heatherwick capped his adaptation of a historic paper mill in southern England into a production facility and visitor center for Bombay Sapphire gin with a grandiose gesture.
Photo courtesy Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition The Guggenheim Helsinki museum is proposed for a prominent waterfront site. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation won’t take no for an answer. Two years after the City Board of Helsinki rejected a proposal for a Finnish version of the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Foundation is trying again. First it revised its operating plan for the museum (reducing projected costs while increasing projected revenue). Then, with a party at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice in June, it launched an architecture competition, organized by British consultant Malcolm Reading. Now it is reveling in the news that
Ali Malkawi has very good timing. In 2013 he moved from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had taught architecture and computational simulation—a sophisticated means of predicting building performance—for more than a decade, to Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where he is a professor of Architectural Technology. A few months later, Malkawi wrote a proposal for what would be called the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, to be funded with a gift from the Evergrande Group, a Chinese company with $75 billion in assets. (Evergrande’s gift was large enough to also fund centers in mathematics and immunology.)
Roxy Paine, Checkpoint, 2014 The mania surrounding the release of the iPhone 6 would have you believe the device might cure cancer or create world peace. Part science, part magic, we seem to be in awe of it and the onward march of progress it encapsulates—especially when it’s made by Apple. But strip away the marketing babble, the shine, even the color, and you’ll find it’s shape and size eerily mundane. It’s an object that would be at home in the new Roxy Paine show Denuded Lens, on view now at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York through October 18.
On Tuesday, David Adjaye received a W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University, along with 12 Years a Slave filmmaker Steve McQueen, the late writer and activist Maya Angelou, and six others who were recognized for their contributions to African American culture. This fall, the architect also celebrates the opening of the early childhood education center at the base of his recently-completed Sugar Hill housing development in Harlem (click the link to read more about the building). The building combines pre-kindergarten classrooms, permanently affordable housing, and the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling. For Adjaye, who has offices
The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, as it looks today. When the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi died in 1926, his masterwork, the Sagrada Familia—the subject of a new show at the City University of New York’s Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture—consisted of a section of an apse and one heroic portal. But that so-called Nativity Facade, with details that seemed utterly original and yet already ancient, made the unfinished building world-famous. It seemed unlikely that the cathedral would be completed after Gaudi’s death. For one thing, nearly all of his drawings and models were destroyed at the onset