In presenting their work, a number of speakers at the ninth Mundaneum conference on architecture charted personal journeys of finding their professional voices. These tales included moments of doubt and self-criticism, along with humor and discovery.
For its first home, the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago fittingly chose a local public housing architect—not a globetrotting museum designer. After funding is secured, Landon Bone Baker Architects (LBBA) will adaptively reuse the last standing Jane Addams Home—one of the first public housing projects built in the city, named after a Progressive-era reformer—for the fledgling institution. It’s a unique-meta exercise for LBBA, which has excelled at designing community-oriented dwellings in a city with a tortured housing legacy. A museum dedicated to a stigmatized building type isn’t an intuitive choice, but LBBA’s Peter Landon says a closer look reveals
House model; Nayarit, Mexico, 100 B.C.–A.D. 200 Long before rendering two-dimensional designs into three-dimensional models became standard architectural procedure, the indigenous peoples of Latin America represented buildings in small-scale forms to much different ends. Andean and Mesoamerican cultures crafted replicas of temples and houses for funerary and burial rites, and to honor loved ones at shrines. This ritualistic use of the architectural model is the focus of Design for Eternity: Architectural Models from the Ancient Americas, a compact and enlightening exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that opened Monday and runs through Sept. 18, 2016. The first such show
Superpowers of 10, a play by architect Andrés Jaque and his Madrid-based Office for Political Innovation, starts innocuously enough—the stage-ready version of the iconic Eames’ 1977 short film Powers of 10, performed during the opening weekend of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, reenacts an idyllic picnic on Lake Shore Drive and a journey through space and subatomic particles, using the adorable medium of papier-mâché props on wheels.
New Yorkers don’t mind being underground when the surroundings are as welcoming as Rockefeller Center’s concourse or Grand Central Terminal’s Oyster Bar.
I grew up with what Peter Smithson described as a whiff of the powder of Modernism, and with a passion for its architecture – plus a presumption that architecture was women’s work,” Denise Scott Brown said in a recent interview with architecture curator Clare Farrow, recalling her Norman Hanson-designed childhood Johannesburg home and how it helped steer her towards her venerated career.
The Monterey Design Conference, held last week in Pacific Grove, California, once again lived up to its reputation for creating an inspiring and memorable weekend-long conversation on design. Set against the bucolic backdrop of the Asilomar Conference Center, a former YMCA camp designed by Julia Morgan in the early part of the 20th century, the biennial event, hosted by the AIA California Council, has made a name for itself by using its rustic backdrop as a portal for showcasing innovative work across the globe and the personalities behind it.Emceed by the unstoppable architecture critic and consultant Reed Kroloff and attended
The Stevens Institute of Technology, a private university based in Hoboken, New Jersey, won the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s 2015 Solar Decathlon Saturday—taking an unprecedented first place in seven of the 10 competition categories.
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