Will the luxury high-rise give Jerusalem's downtown a boost, or create a ghost town? The news that Jerusalem is to have a pyramid of its own, a skyscraper designed by Daniel Libeskind, has elicited mixed reactions. City officials say the stone-and-glass building will help revitalize the city center, and one expert hopes that world-class architecture will be a boon for the area. But critics have voiced concern that the luxury tower—with 200 apartments, a boutique hotel, a restaurant, and a ground-floor arcade of upscale shops—will exacerbate the phenomenon of ghost apartments in the city, that is, apartments owned by residents
For the first exhibition in its newly minted facility, A+D commissions architects to propose new ways to shelter the city. wHY built a model of Wilshire Boulevard in which houses occupy the spaces previously devoted to cars. Los Angeles is currently “reaching a saturation point,” says Sam Lubell, who with fellow curator Danielle Rago created Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles, the inaugural exhibition for the Architecture + Design (A+D) Museum’s new home in the city’s Downtown Arts District (on view now through November 6). Decades of migration to L.A.'s sunny skies have led to unprecedented strain: The
With the selection of five finalists for its memorial competition, the United States World War I Centennial Commission seems to be moving closer to a showdown with preservation groups.
After the success of its 2009 book, the firm will publish a new and expanded third edition. Every drawing in the third edition of 49 Cities will be tweaked for improved legibility. In 2007, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, principals of the New York-based architecture firm WORKac, were teaching an “eco-urbanism” seminar at Princeton University. To grasp this relatively new term, Andraos, Wood, and their students had to first learn the history of the two fields from which it evolved. So the architects had their students dissect a number of city plans, from the fully realized (Levittown, New York, 1947)
Architecture lovers now have the ability to bankroll (“steamroll,” if you will) the finishing touch on Bjarke Ingels Group’s energy plant/ski slope hybrid in Copenhagen—a vapor ring-belching chimney.
The easy-to-assemble structures will quickly shelter those left homeless after the earthquake in Nepal. Shigeru Ban has released plans for his “Nepal Project”—modular, wood-framed structures that can be assembled quickly and easily, to house victims of this April’s devastating earthquakes in Nepal that left hundreds of thousands homeless.
Photo courtesy Passive House Institute A 16-unit apartment building (foreground) in Innsbruck, Austria, is the first of its kind to be certified under Passive House Plus—a new certification program that combines stringent efficiency standards with a renewable energy requirement. When the first Passive House building was built in Germany 25 years ago, the certification system raised the bar for energy efficient buildings by introducing a rigorous performance-based standard. This summer, the Passive House Institute in Darmstadt, Germany, has raised the bar higher with its certification of a multi-unit residential complex in Innsbruck, Austria, and a single-family home in Ötigheim, Germany,
A symposium and exhibition in China explore ways of rethinking the countryside. Nan Xiao, Qingyun Ma, and Gary Paige at the symposium. Every year about a million people in China move from rural villages and towns to big cities. Lots of planning efforts—both good and bad—have focused on fast-growing cities, but very little work has looked at the countryside where depopulation and the changing economics of farming threaten the very existence of many villages. With that as a backdrop, the University of Southern California’s American Academy in China (AAC) and its School of Architecture addressed the urban-rural divide in
Every summer for the last 29 years, Bogotá’s University of Los Andes has programed its International Workshop in Architecture, which it holds in the Caribbean coastal city of Cartagena de Indias. For four weeks this past July, about 80 undergraduate architecture students—from countries ranging from Spain to Argentina—convened in the 16th-century walled city to absorb the culture and the rich architecture within its confines, while considering new visions for this historic center. With so many years behind its belt, the seminar, directed for over a decade now by Carlos Campuzano Castelló, has become a well-oiled program. After a week of