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Story Archives of 'Architecture'
BLDGBLOG Roundup
By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, August 27, 2009.
The website BLDGBLOG launched five years ago with this quote from the late British novelist J.G. Ballard, “Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system.” In the past half-decade writer Geoff Manaugh has explored how those disparate elements of city life fit together.
BLDGBLOG combines insights from architecture, history, graphic design, urban exploration, and city planning in a sort of online ideas factory. His pairing of stunning archival photographs with highly-literate essays has earned the site nearly six million visitors. In June The BLDGBLOG Book was released, expanding upon the ideas explored on his blog. Geoff is also a senior editor at Dwell magazine, and he joins us from London with some updates from the world of imaginative architecture:
BLDGBLOG: Landscapes of Quarantine
BLDGBLOG: The Bioluminescent Metropolis
BLDGBLOG: Scuba Diving Beneath Hagia Sophia
(Photo of The Church of Hagia Sophia via BLDGBLOG)
The Modernist Backlash
By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, April 23, 2009.
Earlier this month the Pritzker Prize was awarded. It’s the highest honor in architecture, sort of the Pulitzer or Nobel Prize of its field. The winner is a little-known Swiss architect named Peter Zumthor. He’s not a celebrity starchitect, and his list of built projects is surprisingly sparse.
The Los Angeles Times pointed out in their coverage that Peter Zumthor doesn’t really embody any of the current trends or fads in architecture, like social activism or sustainability, and that he embodies a more timeless aesthetic.
Here with his thoughts on the prize is our architecture afficianado and commentator Donald Kreis. He's also assistant director of The Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School.
View a slideshow of Peter Zumthor's work
(Photo of Peter Zumthor's Saint Benedict Chapel by Rory Hyde via Flickr/Creative Commons)
China's Empty Nest
By Millicent Scott on Tuesday, March 24, 2009.Landmarks like Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building visually articulated New York City’s rapid ascent as a premier cultural and economic powerhouse in the 20th century. What happened in the Big Apple, Vanity Fair has pointed out, is not unlike the urbanization of 21st-century Beijing. Since 2001, China has commissioned renowned architects to craft a similar post-modern identity.
New Hampshire's Winning Architecture
By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, January 22, 2009.
AIANH, the New Hampshire chapter of the American Institute of Architects, handed out its annual Excellence in Architecture Awards last week. The prize honors some of the best new buildings in the state and the people behind them. Three buildings took top honors - a library on Squam Lake, an academic building in Tilton, and the revamped Currier Museum of Art in Manchester.
Of course, this caught the attention of Word of Mouth armchair architect/commentator Donald Kreis. He joins us in the studio to share his thoughts on the winning designs (click here to view them).
Passive Houses
By Avishay Artsy on Saturday, December 27, 2008.The current economic gloom can be especially painful in these cold winter months, as the nighttime chill means higher heating bills for most of us. But for the inhabitants of Darmstadt, a town in central Germany that has pioneered passive heating, there are no drafts or cold tile floors. Taking advantage of a revolution in building design, homes there can stay cozy and warm using the amount of energy needed to run a hair dryer.
Adaptable Houses
By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, November 13, 2008.
“All buildings are predictions,” according to Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue. “All predictions are wrong.”
Our families, communities, and neighborhoods are not static, so why should our dwellings be? A growing field of architecture is promoting open buildings -- structures that can adapt to changing technologies, flow around needs, and expand or shift along with the families who live in them. Americans spent $235 billion on home remodeling in 2007 -- an amount that doesn’t include the strain on a family’s budget or serenity, not to mention the piles of construction debris from renovations, demolitions, and tear-downs that support America’s dubious reputation as the most wasteful nation.
Advocates for adaptable housing are building in Canada, Europe and Japan. One of the movement’s foremost campaigners is Tedd Benson of Bensonwood Homes in Walpole, New Hampshire, and he joins us on Word of Mouth to talk about his work.
Click here to check out the Unity House by Bensonwood Homes.
Reinventing the Mall
By Virginia Prescott on Tuesday, October 21, 2008.
In this age of high gas prices and carbon consciousness, the suburbs get a bad rap. And the poster child for suburban blight has become the shopping mall, vilified since the 1950s for sucking the life out of downtown centers.
If malls have a birthplace, it's the Southdale Center, just outside Minneapolis, built (and then disowned) by architect Victor Gruen. Since then malls have become symbolic of architectural compromise.
So it’s surprising that influential architects are trying to breathe new life into malls with contemporary design, and to revive the original idea of malls as small-scale urban centers. Two malls opening this month, in Bern, Switzerland, and in west London, exemplify the new trend.
Mason Currey wrote about the new crop of high-concept malls for Metropolis magazine, where he's an assistant editor. He joins Word of Mouth with more on the new trend of high-end malls.
(Photo of West Village, London's mall courtesy of Gabellini Sheppard Associates)
Re-Imagining the White House
By Avishay Artsy on Sunday, September 21, 2008.Architects and designers were presented this past January with a delightful challenge: what would the residence of the most powerful individual in the world, the White House in Washington, D.C., look like if it were designed today?
