Chicago's Next Generation The inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial (October 3, 2015 through January 3, 2016) is a global event. With over 60 firms or studios featured—representing more than 30 countries across six continents—it is also drawing attendees from all over the world. Titled The State of the Art of Architecture, the exhibition, curated by Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima, reaches beyond the national conversation to generate a larger discussion about the future of the built environment.
A show of Polish-born architect Ania Jaworska’s work is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), running in tangent with the Biennial through January 31, 2016.
The firm’s 2011 speculative project Farmland World is a chain of agro-resorts-cum-theme parks that allow guests to work on a real farm. For its contribution to the Biennial, Design With Company (Dw/Co.) is entering its own late—very late—scheme for Chicago’s Harold Washington Library Competition, which was held in 1987.
Paul Preissner, 41, recently made a couple of round, flat-pack tables out of mint-colored Corian. “It was the cheapest way of producing furniture with one of the most expensive materials,” says the architect, who was experimenting with the process to help out a friend who runs MakeTime, a company that lets designers share time on computer numerical control (CNC) machines.
Like many architects, Sean Lally is concerned about climate change and how his profession can help address the immense environmental pressures bearing down on the globe—he just has a very singular vision for the solution. With a background in landscape architecture, Lally, 41, is pursuing a field of design in which steel, wood, and concrete are replaced by energy: electromagnetic, thermodynamic, acoustic, chemical.
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)
Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks, edited by Donald Albrecht and Andrew S. Dolkart. Photographic portfolios by Iwan Baan. The Monacelli Press, 2015, 208 pages, $50. Filled with Iwan Baan's people-centric photographs of New York City's five boroughs and his famous helicopter aerials, Saving Place celebrates the 50th anniversary of the New York City Landmarks Law. “Much of what we love about New York today we owe to the law and its administering body,” writes Robert A.M. Stern in the introduction. With archival photographs, too, the book narrates the preservation movement, from its origins to its later
Boston is full of co-working centers, incubators, and labs, but most are housed within one of the city's 50 institutions of higher education, cloaked with exclusivity or even anonymity simply by association. Others are part of a particular company, perhaps relegated to the corner of a lobby or makeshift space. District Hall, the result of a public-private partnership, belongs to everyone, and it's a smash hit, not just an idealistic showpiece for the city. The bright, airy 12,000-square-foot building on the South Boston waterfront, across from Diller, Scofidio + Renfro's Institute of Contemporary Art, is an innovation center unaffiliated with
