architecture

Frank Gehry‘s Guggenheim and Jean Nouvel‘s Louvre, both in Abu Dhabi, haven’t been the only high-profile Middle Eastern projects placed on shaky ground due to the recent turmoil in the region. The Guardian is reporting that internationally-renowned architect Zaha Hadid has seen her firm’s profits cut by more than half because of the Arab Spring. Despite news like her winning the Stirling Prize for the second year in a row, and landing commissions like being included among starchitects who have built a parking garage in Miami, to even her inclusion in the Sunday Times‘ annual “Rich List,” the paper reports that the number of projects that have been put on hold due to the Arab Spring turmoil have taken “a toll on the financial position of her firm.” How bad is it? There have been 76 people laid off and “before tax slumped to £1.8m in the year to 30 April 2011 from £4.1m the year before.” While we’re certain things aren’t teetering on the brink for the celebrated architect, it certainly must be making things a bit more tricky in an already struggling industry.

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The Serpentine Gallery, who have learned to master the art of generating buzz about one annual project nearly year round at this point, announcing their pick for who will design the next one just as the one before it is fading from memory, have decided to up the ante even more so this year. They’ve just announced that this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, a temporary structure set up in London’s Hyde Park, will be designed by a reunited Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. The two had previously collaborated on Beijing’s celebrated “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium ahead of the last Olympics in 2008. Weiwei’s gradual coming out against the project over labor and human rights issues was, for those not already in the art world, their first encounter with the artist Weiwei, whose outspoken views and clashes with the Chinese government have made him one of the most well-known and powerful artists today. With the Olympics coming to London in just a few months, and Weiwei now forced to work on projects from his virtual house arrest in Beijing, whatever the two parties come up with is sure to generate some nice press and an increased general interest for the Serpentine. Here’s a bit from the press release about what it’s going to look like:

This year’s Pavilion will take visitors beneath the Serpentine’s lawn to explore the hidden history of its previous Pavilions. Eleven columns characterising each past Pavilion and a twelfth column will support a floating platform roof 1.5 metres above ground. Taking an archaeological approach, the architects have created a design that will inspire visitors to look beneath the surface of the park as well as back in time across the ghosts of the earlier structures.

“Wendy does not play the typical architecture game of ecological apology,” say the architects of their boundary-pushing pavilion, shown here in a rendering.

Who’s tripping down the streets of the city, smilin’ at everybody she sees? Who’s reachin’ out to neutralize an airborne pollutant? Everyone knows it’s Wendy! That’s right, fans of emerging architectural talent, the spiky and proactive creation of New York-based HWKN (Hollwich Kushner) has been declared the winner of this year’s MOMA PS1 Young Architects Program, besting finalists Ammar Eloueini of AEDS Ammar Eloueini Digit-all Studio (Paris and New Orleans), Martin Felsen and Sarah Dunn of UrbanLab (Chicago), and the solid Cantabrigian (Massachusetts) contingent: Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim of I|K Studio and Cameron Wu.

Now in its thirteenth year, the Young Architects Program program challenges each year’s winners to develop creative designs for a temporary, outdoor installation at MoMA PS1 that provides shade, seating, and water. HWKN’s “Wendy,” which will debut in Long Island City in late June, is composed of nylon fabric treated with a nifty titania nanoparticle spray to neutralize airborne pollutants. This summer, Wendy will clean the air to an equivalent of taking 260 cars off the road. “Wendy crafts an environment—not just a space,” note the architects of their 5,000-square-foot creation. “Spikey arms reach out with micro-programs like blasts of cool air, music, water canons, and mists to create social zones throughout the courtyard.” And speaking of summery social zones, HWKN also was recently tapped to design a new entertainment complex to replace the Fire Island dance club, Pavilion, that burned down last year. The firm is collaborating with Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the project.

Here are two things we didn’t know up until just a second ago: 1) that musician and longtime New Yorker, Moby, is now living in Los Angeles (apparently we must’ve missed this NY Times profile on the castle he bought in the Hollywood Hills), and 2) that, as of last week, he’s recently started a new architecture blog, the perhaps over-aptly named Moby Los Angeles Architecture Blog. Thus far, it isn’t the sort of site that you’ll glean a lot of factual information from, not even such info as who the architect was who built the building he’s profiling on that day. Instead, his very well-made photos are accompanied by leisurely thoughts on Los Angeles’ architecture (all residential thus far) and where that building-of-the-day seems to fit within the city. It’s certainly an interesting, somewhat meditative departure from our usual architectural reads, but we’ve already bookmarked it and are already awaiting more. Here’s a bit of the description of his new site from his first post:

a daily (or weekly) collection of some of the random and strange and banal and beautiful architecture i see in l.a. most cities have beautiful architecture. but most cities have beautiful architecture that is prominently displayed and relatively easy to find (think: chrysler building, sacre couer, st peters, sydney opera house, etc). one of the very odd things about l.a is that the most beautiful architecture in l.a is hidden on tiny streets that very few people will ever see. and the architecture in l.a is, generally, of a very domestic and modest scale (probably facilitating it’s strangeness).

Philip Johnson‘s Glass House will soon have a new leader manning the transparent and modern ship. Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced that Henry Urbach will be taking over as director of the historic architectural landmark in New Canaan, Connecticut. Urbach most recently served as curator of architecture and design at SFMOMA, having taken leave from the position last spring to work independently, which included research work at the Glass House itself. Previously, he’d also run a popular gallery in New York for nearly a decade, the eponymous Henry Urbach Architecture. It is currently planned that he will take on the roll at the Glass House on April 2, replacing its current interim director, Rena Zurofsky, who had this to say about his selection:

I met Henry last spring and was struck by his energy and enthusiasm for the site. He seems to me ideal to lead the dedicated Glass House team into even more innovative and exciting programmatic terrain, and to push restoration programs on track. I congratulate Henry, and also Estevan Rael-Galvez, Vice President of Sites at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, on his astute choice.

We’re not entirely sure how it’s played, and at least just a few days ago you’d have to travel to Amsterdam to buy a copy (and making sure to call first so they know you’re coming), but now that we know about it, we’re in desperate lust for NEXT Architects‘ “The Modern Architecture Game.” Launched earlier this month, it’s the second edition of the board game, first developed in 1999 between the partners at the firm and the Delft University of Technology. The most recent update includes a translation into English and spreads its questions more internationally, ranging “right across the breadth of modern world history.” For now it’s available from NEXT themselves, but only if you do that calling ahead first (they write that they’re not able to ship one off in the mail). We’ve also found it at Architectura & Natura Booksellers in the Netherlands, and it can be purchased here. Granted, it isn’t cheap, particularly with the dollar-to-euro difference, but how often do you get to play a board game with pieces like Koolhaus’ CCTV Tower, or Foster’s Gherkin? Here’s a short trailer.

Which states have the most LEED-certified building square footage per capita? The U.S. Green Building Council has crunched the numbers, and the results are in, with the District of Columbia leading the country in LEED-certified commercial and institutional green buildings (per capita, based on 2010 Census data). In 2011, our nation’s capital boasted more than 31 square feet of LEED-certified space per person, including the Treasury Building (how green can you get?), which happens to be the oldest LEED-certified project in the world. Of course, it helps that the District has a low residential population and all those government buildings: nearly a third of all LEED projects are government-owned or occupied LEED buildings, and the federal government alone owns and operates some 500,000 buildings. “But, hey! D.C. isn’t a state!” You say, with a disenfranchised gleam in your eye. Quite right. The top state is Colorado (2.74 square feet per capita and home to the LEED Platinum Casey Middle School in Boulder), followed closely by Illinois (2.69), Virginia (2.42), and Washington (2.18, did you know that Seattle’s Hard Rock Café is LEED Silver?). The Empire State cracks the top ten at 1.89, barely bested by California’s 1.92. According to the USGBC, there are roughly 44,000 commercial projects participating in LEED, comprising more than 8 billion square feet of construction space in all 50 states and 120 countries. Admire photos of LEED-certified buildings such as the undulating, Douglas Cardinal-designed National Museum of the American Indian, Discovery Channel HQ, and Denver’s Gold Museum of Contemporary Art on Flickr here.

After surviving a very rough and tumble summer, starting around mid-October, things were began looking tough again for both the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim and the Louvre wing that was also set to go up in the Middle Eastern cultural hub, and it only got worse from there. First, there was a semi-innocuous delay on the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim there, blamed originally on some government contract disputes. Then, as more news was released about a mass of unpaid bills and the entire United Arab Emirates quickly pulling their money out of any and all cultural projects to focus instead on Arab Spring-related matters, it was sounding like both projects might be entirely abandoned. So dire did it seem that the Guggenheim was quick to ramp back up their interest in building a new arm in Helsinki (though this could have been just convenient and beneficial timing). However, it now seems like perhaps both the Guggenheim and the Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre extensions have been placed back on track and all the worry may have been for naught. Yesterday, the Abu Dhabi Tourism Development and Investment Company announced that work will soon resume on the projects, as well as the surrounding Saadiyat Cultural District in which both will call home. The only thing changed will now be the opening dates, pushed back by a number of years. The Louvre, originally set to open sometime next year, is now slated for 2015. The Guggenheim, also originally set to open in the next year or two, has been pushed back to 2017. A long time to wait, for sure, but both institutions must be breathing a sigh of relief in knowing that, at least for now, the projects haven’t been abandoned.

What started as but a rumor back in 2008, and followed by the slow progression of hiring an architect and then hunting for donations, is finally all starting to come into factual fruition for London’s Design Museum. This week the organization unveiled a first look (pdf) at what will become their new home sometime in 2014. Build upon the former home of a government-funded research institute, the new space has been designed by John Pawson and is estimated to cost somewhere in the $100 million range to develop. The move is set to not only give them “three times more space” but also put the Design Museum closer to the city’s other cultural touchstones, like the V&A, the Royal College of Art and the Serpentine Gallery. In addition to this first batch of official details, the museum has also released this quick video tour of their soon-to-be new digs:

Pruitt-Igoe. Cabrini-Green. Mellifluous hyphenates that have evoked, in turn, hope, pride, fear, terror, shame, and utter disappointment in utopias, razed. In The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, filmmaker Chad Friedrichs wades through the thicket of emotions aroused by the infamous public housing project, built in the early 1950s by the St. Louis Housing Authority, to examine what comes between optimism—for 33 pristine, Minoru Yamasaki-designed high-rises that promised to solve the problems of overcrowding in a then-booming inner city—and disillusionment, with a vertical ghetto that, just two decades later, was leveled and declared unfit for habitation. This documentary is complex and fascinating: a chilling clash of Modernist zeal, postwar urban decline, and racial tensions that plays out through an incredibly rich (and masterfully edited) collage of archival footage and the individual stories of a handful of former Pruitt-Igoe residents, who share their memories against a backdrop of optic white. “So much of our collective understanding of cities and government and inequality are tied up in those thirty-three high-rise buildings, informed by the demolition image,” notes Friedrichs in his notes on the film, now playing at the IFC Center. “Too much of the context has been overlooked, or willfully ignored, in discussions of public housing, public welfare, and the state of the American city. Pruitt-Igoe needs to be remembered and understood—in a different way that it has been—because the city will change again.”

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is now playing at New York’s IFC Center. Click here for a schedule of upcoming screenings nationwide.