The Trusteeship Council Chamber at the United Nations, originally designed by Danish architect Finn Juhl in 1952, reopened last month after a three-year renovation.

“We all moan about the United Nations, but there was no supranational body, no international forum [in 1914],” says Harold Evans in this week’s New York Times Book Review Podcast, discussing the DIY state of diplomacy at the dawn of the First World War. “You were reliant on these errant telegrams, these errant messages, these ambassadors in their frock coats carrying these ambiguous messages. Oh, crikey! What a thing worth studying.” The frock coat-free body has just had an update of its own, with the reopening of the Trusteeship Council Chamber at the UN headquarters in New York. Originally designed by Finn Juhl in 1952, the chamber has undergone a multi-million-dollar renovation–a collaborative effort by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Danish Ministry of Culture, Realdania, and the UN.

The floor and wall panels have been restored, but this was basically a gut reno: new ventilation, piping, wiring, and carpeting as well as a fresh floor that recreates the original, including the sunken section in the middle of the horseshoe configuration. And then there’s the furniture: a modified version of Juhl’s FJ51 chair is joined by new furniture designed by Kasper Salto and Thomas Sigsgaard. The Copenhagen-based designer-architect duo won a 2011 design competition for new tables for the delegates and a new table and chairs for the secretariat. “Our motto has been letting the furniture add to the existing room by having them consist of as few elements and parts as possible,” say Salto and Sigsgaard, who were on hand last month for the opening ceremony. “Respecting the room and the consequent use of wood in the room.” Their Council chair (pictured) is an elegant two-part shell of molded Reholz 3D veneer in oak, upholstered in light-colored leather. Juhl’s Chieftain chair was a primary inspiration.
Read more

What are the most influential buildings in America? Jot down a top ten list and then compare your picks with the structures that get their close-ups in 10 Buildings That Changed America, a special that premieres Sunday night on PBS. Host Geoffrey Baer criscrosses the country on a journey that spans two centuries of architectural innovation, from Thomas Jefferson‘s neoclassical Virginia State Capitol to the swooping stainless steel forms of Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. In an interview with Baer, Frank Gehry reveals the secret behind the profusion of brass handrails in the concert hall and describes winning the 1988 design competition as “the least-likeliest thing that I thought would ever happen to me in my life.” New York is represented by the Seagram Building, which comes in at #7 and with insights from Phyllis Lambert, although three other Gotham landmarks–the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Guggenheim–made the extended list (“ten more buildings that changed America“) posted on the program’s website, where you can watch the individual segments along with web-exclusive additional footage.

For the last 13 years, Dwell has provided design and architecture insights that are as practical as they are modern. “We remain true to our founding editor’s fruitbowl manifesto,” editor-in-chief Amanda Dameron attested. “It has everything to do with authentic design, as opposed to artificial environment.”

Dameron also said that her team is looking for content that covers fresh topics that readers weren’t expecting, and one of the best ways to distinguish your submission is to get behind a camera. “We put a lot of resources behind how we tell our stories visually. So when we’re reviewing initial ideas, having good pics always helps.”

Get contact info and more in How To Pitch: Dwell.

The full version of this article is exclusively available to Mediabistro AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, register now for as little as $55 a year for access to hundreds of articles like this one, discounts on Mediabistro seminars and workshops, and all sorts of other bonuses.

– Nick Braun

(Photos from left: Fred Ernst and courtesy Veuve Clicquot)

April is not the cruellest month when you’ve got a Pritzker and projects in progress on most continents. It’s just one more month to collect commissions, continue the epic battle against jetlag, and receive awards. Two recent honors of note: Rem Koolhaas is this year’s recipient of the Dutch state prize for the arts, the Johannes Vermeer Award, while Zaha Hadid has been declared the the winner of the 41st Veuve Clicquot Business Woman Award, an honor that we hope comes with a lifetime supply of bubbly.

Koolhaas will receive the Johannes Vermeer Award, a €100,000 prize that is mainly to be used for the realization of a special project, at an October 21 ceremony at the recently reopened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Past winners of the award, established in 2008 to honor artists working in the Netherlands and across all disciplines, include photographer Erwin Olaf and artist Marlene Dumas.
Read more

• “[S]tripped of most traditional linguistic elements, the short film has to move fast, but it must strive not to confuse the viewer with too many objects or jarring cuts,” writes Stephen Apkon in The Age of Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, new this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book inspired this short film (above) by Daniel Liss.

• And speaking of short films, the Tribeca Film Festival has selected the winners in its six-second film competition. Watch all of the jury’s top picks in under a minute here.

• It’s the end of an era for Cooper Union, which will begin charging undergraduates tuition beginning next fall.

• The design community and members of the general public are protesting MoMA’s decision to raze the building that Tod Williams Billie Tsien designed for the American Folk Art Museum. The Architectural League drafted this open letter requesting MoMA to provide “a compelling justification for the cultural and environmental waste of destroying this much-admired, highly distinctive twelve-year-old building.”

• All is fair (use) in love and appropriation? Artist Richard Prince emerged largely triumphant in yesterday’s appeals court ruling on the copyright case involving his 2008 “Canal Zone” series, which used portraits from Patrick Cariou‘s Yes, Rasta book.

Crank up the LEED Zeppelin, design fans, because Twitter is abuzz with a most delightful hashtag: #ArchitectBandNames. Who wouldn’t want to listen to Edward Durell Stone Temple Pilots or jam out to Jeanne Gang Gang Dance? Enjoy some of our favorites from across the twitterverse:

Chaka Kahn #architectbandnames

— ARCHITECT magazine (@architectmag) April 23, 2013

Favorites so far: R.E.M. Koolhaas, Lana Del Ray Eames, The Holl Steady, Death CAD for Cutie. #ArchitectBandNames

— Gary Hustwit (@gary_hustwit) April 23, 2013

The McKim, Mead & White Stripes #architectbandnames

— Mpls Institute Arts (@artsmia) April 24, 2013

Skid Row, Owings & Merrill #ArchitectBandNames

— UnBeige (@UnBeige) April 24, 2013

Aha Hadid; Neutra Milk Hotel; Charles Rennie Macklemore; Adolph Loos Lobos; #ArchitectBandNames

— jimdatz (@jimdatz) April 24, 2013

Read more

“After so many years of averting the border patrol between the disciplines of art and architecture, while inhabiting both yet claiming to be outsiders, this is the ultimate validation,” said Elizabeth Diller last Wednesday at the Plaza Hotel, as she joined partners Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro in accepting the American Academy of Rome’s Centennial Medal for their exceptional contributions to the worlds of architecture and the visual arts. The trio spent the previous evening at the New York Public Library, where they discussed their interdisciplinary design studio’s renewal of Lincoln Center. We asked writer Nancy Lazarus to attend the event and harvest some memorable quotes. Learn more on May 10, when Diller and Scofidio will be joined by DS+R monograph author Edward Dimendberg for a book talk at the Center for Architecture.

Redesigning Lincoln Center was an epic undertaking that involved a prominent public landmark and a painstaking process that evolved over nearly ten years. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the design studio behind most of the project, has chronicled their experiences in Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account (Damiani). The three principals shared their views on the project and the book at a recent event hosted by New York Public Library and moderated by Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA. The DS+R trio is just as articulate as they are creative, so here are excerpts from that discussion.

On Lincoln Center’s design:
Diller: The old Lincoln Center was too elitist, solid, and turned its back on the neighborhood and community. We were drawn to the promenade levels where everyone pours out in the middle of events. We wanted to extend that social feeling to the rest of the project. We broke down the edges to enable events in the public spaces. There’s more symmetry now across the public and private spaces.

Scofidio: There were no photos of the old Lincoln Center except the main plaza with the fountain. Someone said that in the 1960s, plazas were designed to be desolate.

On how they approached the project:
Diller: To win the project we showed many ideas, since we tend to think in multiples, with different approaches and solutions. We demonstrated our affection for the place and showed how to take it to the next step. We felt we could do it justice and interpret it for contemporary culture. We wanted to transform Lincoln Center for the logic of our time.

Scofidio: We didn’t go in and say here are the problems we have to correct. We just said we can finish Lincoln Center.
Read more

Two of of the seven 2013 Time 100 covers, which feature portraits by Mark Seliger.

Today Time revealed its annual selection of the 100 most influential people in the world, and while we remain suspicious of any list that includes both Christina Aguilera and Elena Kagan, it’s difficult not to enjoy the logistical wonder that is the Time 100 issue. On newsstands tomorrow, the massive editorial effort commissions a diverse group of notable figures—many of them Time 100 alumna—to write a paragraph or two about the chosen influencers. And so this year we get Richard “I know a thing or two about building spaceships” Branson on SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, Claire Danes‘s clear-eyed look at the uniquely vanity-free and shameless Lena Dunham, and Michael Bloomberg‘s cliché-ridden paen to Jay-Z, who emerges as a 21st century Gatsby that gets the girl–she also made the Time 100–and the American Dream.

Art and design stars that made it onto this year’s Time 100 include Apple’s Jony Ive, Michael Kors, who joins the likes of Uniqlo honcho Tadashi Yanai and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in the “Titans” category; artist Ed Ruscha, who Richard Lacayo likens here to “a SoCal Magritte;” 2012 Pritzker laureate Wang Shu; and Jenna Lyons, executive creative director of J. Crew. “She has made fashion relatable,” writes fashion designer Prabal Gurung of Lyons. “Being fashionable doesn’t mean being trendy; it means having a sense of style. Jenna has made J. Crew more than a brand or a company–it’s a philosophy that believes in style.”

Get your sketch on with Trace, a simple and beautiful yet incredibly useful iPad app created by the architects of the Morpholio Project. Free to download, the sketch utility allows users to instantly draw on top of imported images or background templates, layering comments or ideas to generate immediate, intelligent sketches that are easy to circulate. “Tracing over something is absolutely the foundation of the app,” says co-creator Toru Hasegawa. “Layers of trace paper are not the same as ‘layers’ in Photoshop or other tools. Here, they are the stacking of ideas, as opposed to the organizing of files.”

Got an app we should know about? Drop us a line at unbeige [at] mediabistro.com

“Tall buildings are all about statistics. There are entire websites devoted to how to measure the height, which building has the highest square-footage of hospitality space versus residential space; there are many, many categories and there are lots of high-rise aficionados that keep track of those things. There’s a guy in my gym that knows more about the stats of tall buildings than I do. He’ll ask me questions when I’m on the treadmill like, ‘Is the Sears Tower 1,700 feet, or do they count the…?’ and then he’ll rattle back.”

-Architect Jeanne Gang, interviewed by Michael Bullock in the latest issue of PIN–UP