Photo courtesy Lawrence Halprin Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin conducting a “Driftwood City Discussion” at Sea Ranch during a July 5, 1966, workshop. Fifty years ago, a breathtaking, 10-mile-long, mile-wide strip of the California coast, 105 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, was declared a privately-owned model community and opened for radically eco-friendly residential development. Owned and managed for 42 years as a sheep ranch, the new town was named The Sea Ranch (the “The” is mandatory). Al Boeke, manager of The Sea Ranch for its new owners (Oceanic Properties, a division of
The Royal Institute of British Architects has awarded this year's Stirling Prize for best building to the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. Haworth Tompkins Architects recently rebuilt and greatly expanded the rundown chapel that has housed the theater since the 1960s (incorporating some of its original material). The metal shades on the project's street-facing facade feature etched images of Liverpool residents.The Haworth Tompkins building beat out Feilden Clegg Bradley's Manchester School of Art, Mecanoo's Library of Birmingham, O’Donnell + Tuomey's student center at the London School of Economics, Renzo Piano's Shard, and Zaha Hadid's London Aquatics Centre to win the
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.
RSS
