From Diane Pham at Inhabitat…
OMA has just revealed plans for the restoration of Fondaco Dei Tedeschi’s landmark building in Venice, Italy. The incredible structure is an iconic piece of architecture held in high esteem for not only Venetians, but for Italy as a whole. Settled right along the Grand Canal, the structure was first built in 1228 and has become a central point for both culture and commerce. After undergoing a number of dramatic changes, the building has recently fallen to disuse and is now completely inaccessible to the public. Commissioned by the Benneton family, who owns the building, OMA has designed an incredible new program for the structure that focuses on reactivating the building as a vibrant new cultural center for the famed city.
The Fondaco dei Tedeschi was first constructed in 1228 as a trading post for German merchants and was later turned into a customs house under Napoleon in 1806. OMA’s new plan for the structure will create a contemporary trading post in the form of a culturally-programmed department store complete with a cinema and other social activities. More…
From Felix Burrichter at The New York Times Style Magazine…
Yesterday was the first day of the three-day vernissage leading up to the official public opening on Sunday of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, better known as the Venice Architecture Biennale. This year’s curatorial director is Kazuyo Sejima, principal of the Tokyo-based architecture firm SANAA, better known to most New Yorkers as the architect of the New Museum. Sejima is breaking new ground on many levels: not only is she the first woman to spearhead the Architecture Biennale, but her theme, “People Meet in Architecture,” is also refreshingly simple and easy to understand, for architects and laypeople alike (unlike titles of previous years, like “Metamporh” or “Next”).
Indeed, on the first day there were a lot of people to be met in the architecture of Venice. Take, for example, the architect Jürgen Mayer H., who giddily held court among an attractive entourage on the terrace at the Bauer Hotel to celebrate winning the Audi Urban Future Award of 100,000 euros (about $127,000) for his Poke Ville project. Rem Koolhaas could be met in many places. Not only was he awarded the 2010 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, but he also spoke at the presentation of a new Moscow architecture and design school, the Strelka Institute, whose educational post-graduate program was put together by his firm OMA/AMO. More…
Kathryn H. Anthony, the newest addition to the 2010 Constructed Environment Conference plenary schedule, is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Architecture’s longest serving female faculty member, its only female Full Professor, the first woman to have served as Chair of the Design Program Faculty and as Chair of the Building Research Council. She holds the lifetime title of Distinguished Professor from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). She received national awards from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the ACSA, and the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). She holds a Ph.D. in architecture and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley.
The author of Designing for Diversity: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in the Architectural Profession (2001, 2008), Design Juries on Trial: The Renaissance of the Design Studio (1991)and over 100 publications, Dr. Anthony has served as a spokesperson about gender issues in architecture on ABC World News with Diane Sawyer, National Public Radio (NPR), The Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, Time.com, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. The New York Times (April 13, 2009) featured her words as the ‘Quotation of the Day’. More on Kathryn H. Anthony…
Also, more on the 2010 Constructed Environment Conference plenary speakers…
As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of the Constructed Environment all submissions are sent for peer review, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.
In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.
If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of the Constructed Environment, please email journals@constructedenvironment.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.
We are now accepting book proposals for our new imprint The Constructed Environment.
Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.
Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.
If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.
From Allison Arieff at The New York Times…
That the Murphys, the couple recently arrested for spying for the Russians from Montclair, N.J., were described by a flabbergasted neighbor as “suburbia personified” is telling, an observation that perfectly sums up our collective notion that the suburbs are chock full of white, middle-class families, both nuclear and normal.
But that prevailing vision contradicts the reality of suburbia today. There may be white picket fences and home owners associations in common, but beyond that, “suburb” has outlived its usefulness as a descriptive term — and as a model for future planning, at least in its current incarnation. Suburbs continue to be designed for homogeneity even though they’re no longer homogeneous at all, and in fact have become increasingly varied in type, density, infrastructure and demographics.
The Long Island- and Maryland-based Rauch Foundation, whose efforts focus on issues relating to children, leadership and the environment, knows this and has dedicated some serious energy to addressing it where they live: on Long Island, a perfect laboratory given that it’s a textbook case of suburban sprawl. Last month, I was a juror for the Build a Better Burb competition organized by the foundation, which asked entrants to consider a series of issues like housing choice and affordability, stemming “brain drain,” enhancing car-free mobility, and equity, access and public space. More…
An interactive panorama shows the progression of work on the memorial pool site at ground zero at The New York Times.
RIBA Stirling Prize 2010 shortlist announced
Two exceptional museum buildings in Oxford and Berlin, a striking new art gallery in Rome, a skilful live/work development in Shoreditch and two schools: one an inventive and uplifting new build in London, the other a clever extension in Guildford, form the shortlist for the prestigious £20,000 RIBA Stirling Prize 2010 in association with The Architects’ Journal and Benchmark.
Now in its fifteenth year, the RIBA Stirling Prize is awarded to the architects of the best new European building ‘built or designed in Britain’. The winner will be announced at The Roundhouse, London on Saturday 2 October 2010, and broadcast live on BBC TWO’s The Culture Show at 6.30pm, presented by Kevin McCloud. More at Dezeen…
“Flushing away unfairness”, From The Economist…
The scene is familiar, infuriating, and usually met with resignation. Women, legs crossed in discomfort or desperation, wait in line for the lavatory while men saunter in and out of their loos. It is a common sight at theatres, sports grounds and other public buildings.
Sanitation and women’s rights are closely linked. West Virginia barred women from jury service until 1956, claiming courthouses lacked female toilets. In 1994 a Texan firm fired dozens of women rather than provide extra lavatories. Until 1993 female senators had to jostle with the tourists visiting Capitol Hill, because no rest rooms were assigned to them.
In poorer countries unequal provision means more than just discomfort. Studies in countries such as Ghana and Cameroon suggest many girls at secondary school miss a week of classes when they have their period, or drop out altogether when they reach puberty. Rude boys plus inadequate or missing girls’ toilets make calls of nature embarrassing or outright dangerous. In India some 330m women lack access to toilets. Many wait until night, raising the risk of rape, kidnap and snake bites. Amnesty International complained on July 7th about the similar plight of women in Kenya’s slums. More…
By Robert Campbell from The Boston Globe…
What happens when some of the world’s messiest occupants move into the world’s most exquisite building?
It should be a fascinating sight. The group of far-out MIT experimenters known as the Media Lab is in the process of expanding into a new building designed by one of the world’s great architects, Fumihiko Maki of Japan.
Maki is a master of delicacy, precision, and understatement. Almost everything in the new building’s interior is white. You sometimes feel, as daylight sifts through the translucent walls, that you’ve been caught in a magical snowstorm.
The Media Lab guys, by contrast, are used to living in a grandma’s attic. Their current quarters are piled high with the dark clutter of new or abandoned experiments, some of them seemingly nutty. Robots peer down at you from shelves. Coils snake around your feet. It’s just as exciting as the Maki but in a completely different way. More…
Vanity Fair, “Survey Says”…
When V.F. asked 52 experts to choose the five most important works of architecture created since 1980, they named a staggering 132 different structures. Here are the top 21, in order of popularity. For more and the slideshow…
By Avinash Rajagopal at Metropolismag.com…
The Institute of Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) celebrates its 25th anniversary this year with an ambitious new exhibition at the Center for Architecture, in New York. A year in the making, Our Cities, Ourselves presents positive, sustainable urban visions for ten cities around the world. Developed in close collaboration with local architects and policy makers, the visions are the true successors-in-spirit of such urbanist dreams of yesteryear as Futurama, but with one big difference—the automobile is conspicuously absent.
“Our cities are constantly engaged in a game of catch-up with transportation technologies that were developed with no reference to their form,” the architecture critic Michael Sorkin said in a roundtable discussion that preceded the exhibition opening last week. (Sorkin’s re-imagination of downtown Manhattan is one of the projects on display.) With city transport responsible for about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the problem is obviously not just one of urban form. And things are only going to get worse: Over the next decade, 95 percent of urban growth will be in Asia and Africa alone, in cities that seem determined to replicate the car-centric model that has proven so disastrous in the developed world. Norman Garrick, a member of the national board of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), quipped that his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, is actually striving to be more like Miami. It is not easy to counter a cultural mindset where owning a car is a matter of pride. More…
From Matt Tyrnauer at Vanity Fair…
On February 7, 1993, the architect William McDonough, a prophet of the sustainability and clean-technology movements, which set in motion many of the green design practices that are commonplace today, delivered a centennial sermon from the high altar of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City. The sermon, which laid the foundation for a lifelong crusade to do nothing less than right the wrongs of the Industrial Revolution, was titled “Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things.”
“If we understand that design leads to the manifestation of human intention, and if what we make with our hands is to be sacred and honor the earth that gives us life,” McDonough said that day, “then the things we make must not only rise from the ground but return to it, soil to soil, water to water, so everything that is received from the earth can be freely given back without causing harm to any living system. This is ecology. This is good design. It is of this we must now speak.” More…
For the 12th International Architecture Exhibition, People meet in architecture (August 29th - November 21st 2010), directed by Kazuyo Sejima, the Biennale di Venezia intends to broaden the platform it offers Universities and learning Institutions, by providing a special opportunity for them to programme and organize a visit to the Exhibition, that can constitute an important educational experience.
This project by the Biennale foresees the possibility of setting up specific agreements with the Universities for accrediting groups of at least 50 students, and to transform the experience of visiting the Exhibition into university credits. The Faculties that choose to participate will be required to organize the project for their visit to the Exhibition, to be developed and discussed in a seminar (or other educational form), in a space equipped with the required technical facilities, assigned by the Biennale. More…
We are now accepting submissions for the first volume of The International Journal of the Constructed Environment. The first submission deadline is Monday 20 August 2010.
The International Journal of the Constructed Environment publishes open broad-ranging and interdisciplinary articles on human configurations of the environment and the interactions between the constructed, social and natural environments. The journal brings together researchers, teachers and practitioners. The resulting articles weave between the empirical and the theoretical, research and its application, the ideal and the pragmatic, and spaces which are in their orientations private, public, community or commercial.
As well as papers of a traditional scholarly type, this journal invites presentations of practice—including experimental forms of documentation and exegesis which can with equal validity be interrogated through a process of peer review. This might, for instance, take the form of a series of images and plans, with explanatory notes which articulate with other, significantly similar or different and explicitly referenced places, sites or material objects.
Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.
Paper submission guidelines are available online.
The London Festival of Architecture will be a city-wide celebration of architecture in the capital. As London gears up for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games we look at ways that planners, architects and local communities play their part in the development of ‘The Welcoming City’. For more…
From Dezeen…
Casa Modernista da Rua Santa Cruz, São Paulo, Brazil
The Modernist House at Santa Cruz St., São Paulo, Brazil, designed by architect Gregori Warchavchik and built in 1928, is considered the first modernist building in Brazil. Defined as a state heritage site in 1984, it is undergoing restoration and conservation work and was reopened to public in 2008. Today receives the Museum of the City of São Paulo. More…
From Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow at The Boston Globe…
Buildings, in many ways, represent the opposite of nature. From a modest suburban house to the most majestic skyscraper, a building signals the presence of people in a place, differentiating human spaces from their surroundings. The built environment consists of organized, inert structures that contrast with the wildness, vitality, and constant change of the natural world.
Buildings clash with nature in another sense, too — constructing and occupying them takes a substantial toll on the environment. In the United States, the construction industry is responsible for much of the waste that ends up in landfills. The use of buildings — consider the lights, the elevators, the air conditioning — accounts for a healthy fraction of the country’s electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.
In recent years, lower impact “green buildings” have crept up in popularity. But a new movement believes that these measures have not gone nearly far enough — that even today’s ecoconscious apartments and offices produce waste and greenhouse gases, while merely scaling back the damage. What we need to do, according to the architects and scientists driving this movement, is fundamentally rethink the concept of a building. More…
The European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Awards were jointly launched in 2002 by the European Commission and Europa Nostra, in the framework of the Commission’s Culture Programme, to celebrate outstanding initiatives among the many facets of Europe’s cultural heritage in categories ranging from the restoration of buildings and their adaptation to new uses, to urban and rural landscape rehabilitation, archaeological site interpretations, and care for art collections. Also awarded are prizes for research, dedicated service to heritage conservation by individuals or organisations and education projects related to cultural heritage.
This Awards Scheme aims to promote high standards and high-quality skills in conservation practice, and to stimulate the trans-frontier exchanges in the area of heritage. By spreading the ‘Power of Example’, the Prize also aims to encourage further efforts and projects related to heritage throughout Europe.
Exemplary heritage achievements in Europe are awarded in the following four categories:
Category 1: CONSERVATION
Category 2: RESEARCH
Category 3: DEDICATED SERVICE by INDIVIDUALS or ORGANISATIONS
Category 4: EDUCATION, TRAINING and AWARENESS-RAISING
More…
From Rochelle Gurstein at The New Republic…
There she was for the whole world to see and hear: a young woman sobbing uncontrollably, completely vulnerable, screaming at her interlocutor on a cell phone, broadcasting the most intimate particulars of her private life on a crowded street in Greenwich Village on a bright Friday afternoon. At moments such as these—and they are frequent on the streets of New York these days—I always think of Henry James’s disgust with “the devouring publicity of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private.” James wrote these words over a hundred years ago in response to a new development in journalism that he detested–”the invasion, the impudence, the shamelessness of the newspaper and the interviewer.” Today the “extinction of all sense between public and private” has gone so far that people like the woman crying on her cell phone now routinely invade their own privacy in the most casual fashion, presenting all of us who are minding our own business as we make our way through the city with the prospect that, at any moment and without our consent, we will be turned into voyeurs. More…
Professor David Mayernik will join as a plenary speaker at the 2010 Constructed Environment Conference, held alongside the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
David Mayernik is an Associate Professor with the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame: he is an urban designer, architect, artist, and writer who has won numerous awards and competitions, including the Gabriel Prize for research in France, the Steedman Competition Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, and the International Competition for the Minnesota State Capitol Grounds (with partner Thomas Norman Rajkovich); that project won an Arthur Ross Award. He was named in 1995 to the decennial list of the top 40 architects in the United States under 40 years old. More…
Tracing the parallel histories of the American megachurch and the corporate-organizational complex.
From Joseph Clarke at triplecanopy…
When Pastor Joel Osteen strides onstage at Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, klieg lights strobe, the Jumbotron flashes his perfect smile, and sixteen thousand worshipers roar their approval. It is an entrance worthy of a pro athlete or a pop star. Megachurches are often compared to big-box sports-and-entertainment venues, but Lakewood is one of the few that actually inhabits one: In 2003, the nondenominational church moved into the Compaq Center, a twenty-nine-year-old arena that had hosted the NBA Finals, bull-riding championships, and concerts by Paul McCartney and Kiss. The building, which came equipped with state-of-the-art A/V equipment, seemed like the most logical setting for the nation’s largest religious congregation. More…
From Nicolai Ouroussoff at The New York Times…
Reconstructive surgery or just a little nip and tuck? That’s the question that troubled the people who run Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for years. As other cultural organizations around the country embarked on extravagant building projects in the late ’90s and the early ’00s, the center’s various institutions bickered about how to compete, given their aging campus. Eventually they settled on a modest course of treatment, hoping that a few careful incisions here and a stitch or two there would be as effective, and produce a result as beautiful, as new construction.
It seemed a sensible, even shrewd, strategy, especially after the completion last year of the project’s first phase — in which the architects, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, carved up the interior of the old 1960s-era Alice Tully Hall and sliced off parts of its facade to produce a striking hybrid of Modern and contemporary. More…
Winners and photos available at dezeen.com…
(Above: Regents Place Pavilion, London, Carmody Groarke. Photo by Luke Hayes.)
(Above: Infinity Bridge, Teesdale, Spence Associates. Photo is by Morley von Steinburg.)
(Above: Broadcasting Place, Leeds, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. Photo by Cloud 9.)
Photographs from the Shanghai Expo 2010…
DANISH PAVILION (below)
SPANISH PAVILION (below)
SERBIAN PAVILION (below)
UK PAVILION (below)
More photos available at Dezeen.com…
From Shelterpop.com…
You might have to do a double take, but it’s worth it. This home was constructed out of parts from a Boeing 747.
There are hundreds of airplanes that have been mothballed in the deserts of California and are sold at the price of their principal raw material, aluminum. This 747 home represents the single largest industrial achievement in modern history and its abandonment in the deserts.
Not only is the final result breathtaking, it’s an environmentally friendly home, too. More…
In this Dezeen podcast for the Design Museum architect David Adjaye talks to curator Gemma Curtin about Urban Africa, an exhibition of his photographs on show at the museum in London. For the interview…
Professor Jeffery S. Poss FAIA is the first in an internationally-known line-up of plenary speakers for the Constructed Environment Conference, held alongside the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
Jeffery S. Poss FAIA is a Professor in the University of Illinois School of Architecture. He creates places of commemoration, introspection, and meaning that evoke the human spirit–public places that bring people together, or conversely, private spaces that allow people to find refuge in quiet contemplation. Through his design work Professor Poss strives to articulate values and symbols that express the highest aspirations of our society: projects that act as inspirational models of design and practice both to the students under his tutelage and the people who use them. More…
By John Noble Wilford from The New York Times…
Archaeologists have embarked on excavations in northern Syria expected to widen and deepen understanding of a prehistoric culture in Mesopotamia that set the stage for the rise of the world’s first cities and states and the invention of writing.
In two seasons of preliminary surveying and digging at the site known as Tell Zeidan, American and Syrian investigators have already uncovered a tantalizing sampling of artifacts from what had been a robust pre-urban settlement on the upper Euphrates River. People occupied the site for two millenniums, until 4000 B.C. — a little-known but fateful period of human cultural evolution. More…
Constructed Environment Conference
17-19 November 2010
Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy
- Kathryn H. Anthony, University of Illinois School of Architecture, Urbana-Champaign, USA
- Jeffery S. Poss, FAIA, University of Illinois School of Architecture, Urbana-Champaign, USA
- David Mayernik, School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins by submitting a paper proposal. More information on proposals, presentation types, and other options available here. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. 2010 Constructed Environment Conference registration options.
Kazuyo Sejima, Director of the 12th Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition, wins the Pritzker Architecture Prize 2010.
About the prize…
The international prize, which is awarded each year to a living architect for significant achievement, was established by the Pritzker family of Chicago through their Hyatt Foundation in 1979. Often referred to as “architecture’s Nobel” and “the profession’s highest honor,” it is granted annually.
The award consists of $100,000 (US) and a bronze medallion. The award is conferred on the laureate at a ceremony held at an architecturally significant site throughout the world.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents Actions: What You Can Do With the City, an exhibition with 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city, and challenge fellow residents to participate.
Actions: What You Can Do With the City documents and presents specific projects by a large and diverse group of activists whose personal involvement has triggered radical change in today’s cities. These human motors of change include architects, engineers, university professors, students, children, pastors, artists, skateboarders, cyclists, root eaters, pedestrians, municipal employees, and many others who answer the question of what can be done to improve the urban experience with surprising and often playful actions.
The exhibition features international contemporary architectural projects, design concepts, research studies, and other ideas conveyed through a range of materials including architectural drawings, photographs, videos, publications, artefacts, and websites. Rather than using traditional tools associated with urban planning and design, the instigators of these actions offer an intensely focused personal engagement. More…
