architecture

Apparently the city of Berlin isn’t as welcoming of branded art projects as New York is. The BMW Guggenheim Lab, which was met with relatively positive marks when it premiered this past August in the East Village, was expected to next move to Germany, where all 2,200 square feet of the mobile structure, designed by Tokyo’s Atelier Bow-Wow, would set up shop beginning in mid-May and run through the summer. As announced back in January, the site selected to host the next stop on a planned world tour was the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg, “known for its engagement with social action and public art” and “centrally located.” Unfortunately for the traveling exhibition, they didn’t expect massive push back from left-wing activists. Bloomberg reports that due to numerous threats, “elevated risk,” and planned protests, the Lab has decided to cancel its plans and move elsewhere. Where that “elsewhere” might be (somewhere in Germany? Or moving out of the country entirely?) hasn’t been announced yet.

Some call it “March,” but to us, it’s Santiago Calatrava Bridge Month! A couple of weeks ago, the architect was in Dallas to unveil the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, his first vehicular bridge in the United States. The gleaming white parabola, which according to the Dallas Morning News cost a total of $182 million, is the first of a series of bridges designed by Calatrava’s office to span the Trinity River. Calatrava can keep on his cowboy hat for the next gala bridge inauguration, because it’s up in Calgary, Alberta. On Saturday, the city will celebrate the opening of his twisty, red Peace Bridge (pictured), a tubular steel truss creation that traverses the Bow River without supporting piers in the riverbed so as to minimize environmental impacts. Geometrical constraints led Calatrava to defy his taste for swooping verticals in favor of a low single-span design that will offer pedestrians protection during harsh Calgary winters. “Although the design concept for the Peace Bridge is very challenging, it is one that I am extremely proud of,” said the architect in a statement issued by his office.

Anymore when a large urban landscape project is in the works, you could fairly safely guess that New York’s High Line co-designers, James Corner Field Operations, would either be on the short list or had just won (it’s even been speculated that all the High Line enthusiasm could be the next “Bilbao effect”). And so it has happened again, right here in Chicago. Back in September you might recall, the organization behind the city’s Navy Pier, which juts out into Lake Michigan and offers spectacular views of the skyline and therefore should be an inviting experience but is, instead, a soul crushing tourist trap, announced plans for a major, let’s-actually-make-this-place-inviting redesign competition. The original list included teams upon teams of industry heavies, which was then whittled down, somewhat surprisingly, to some less household name teams. In the end, this week it was revealed that James Corner’s group, which also includes Bruce Mau Design, nArchitects, and Ed Marszewski, along with twelve other firms, has won the project. We were initially very excited, but then reason prevailed in the form of the Tribune‘s Blair Kamin, who writes that the project provides both “great promise — and peril” given that “pier officials’ historic tendency to favor pragmatics over aesthetics” which “could undercut a thoughtful conceptual plan.” If you’ve been to Navy Pier at any point, you’ll likely come to that worry as well. And with a relatively small budget as well, we’ll hope for the best, but we’ll do so with fingers tightly crossed. Here’s Corner and Co.’s lengthy presentation video from back in February, and here’s the quicker, animated plans:

Here at UnBeige, we’ve been known to select dining establishments based on their chairs and typefaces, so when the James Beard Foundation announces its annual slate of award nominees, we head straight for the design and graphics categories. A posh swimming pool in Las Vegas (the celebrity chef version of Branson, Missouri) was the setting for yesterday’s announcement of the 2012 contenders, selected by committees of industry professionals in each of the categories. Duking it out for the James Beard Award for outstanding restaurant design (for North American establishments designed or renovated since January 1, 2009) are a trio of Gotham heavyweights: Thomas Schlesser of Design Bureaux for Boulud-on-the-Bowery DBGB Kitchen and Bar, Bentel & Bentel for their overhaul of famed Le Bernardin, and Glen Coben of Glen & Company for the breath of fresh air that is Miguel Sanchez‘s Romera. The restaurant graphics category is also dominated by New Yorkers: graphic gourmand Richard Pandiscio gets a nod for the Americano at Hotel Americano, while Jon Santos of Common Space Studio made the shortlist for the boldly nostalgic brand he cooked up for The Dutch. The left coast avoided a shut-out thanks to Clive Piercy, who keeps it cool at Air Conditioned and is nominated for whipping up tasty graphics for Farmshop in Santa Monica. Winners of the 2012 James Beard Foundation Awards will be announced on May 7 at a Lincoln Center ceremony hosted by Alton Brown. Wear your fanciest clogs!

We, and everyone else in the country, has certainly jinxed it before, but maybe, just maybe, things really are turning around. The American Institute of Architects have released what’s become one of our favorite monthly rituals, the Architecture Billings Index. As you may know, anything above 50 indicates growth within the business of building, anything below and everyone starts getting gloomy and misty-eyed for those halcyon days of the mid-to-late-aughts. For the last three months running, there’s been none of that sadness, with this latest release indicating that things are still in the positive. At 50.9, following a slight dip from an even 51 the month prior, it certainly isn’t champagne and top hats just yet, but after the last couple of years, any slightly-above-water trend like this is welcome relief. However, cautious as usual, the AIA’s resident mathematical soothsayer warns that we’ve seen this sort of thing before…

“Even though we had a similar upturn in design billings in late 2010 and early 2011, this recent showing is encouraging because it is being reflected across most regions of the country and across the major construction sectors,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA. “But because we still continue to hear about struggling firms and some continued uncertainty in the market, we expect overall economic improvements in the design and construction sector to be modest in the coming months.”

The world of design can be intimidating to some, but Dwell‘s team of editors strives to show the field’s friendlier, welcoming side.

“Dwell has always been about showing real people in real homes,” said editor-in-chief Amanda Dameron. “We don’t send stylists, and we don’t want people to create an artificial idea of how they live in their home.”

With its recent expansion, the pub is wide open to ambitious freelancers — and photographers. “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,” Dameron said.

Think you can nail the mag’s voice? Read How To Pitch: Dwell for a full list of those editors accepting pitches. [sub req'd]

Forget the Oscars (but didn’t Gwyneth look stunning in that Tom Ford number?), it’s Pritzker time. This year’s architectural megaprize goes to Wang Shu, whose practice is based in Hangzhou, China. He’ll receive the prize—$100,000 and a swell bronze medallion inscribed with the Vitruvian ideal of “firmness, commodity, and delight” —on May 25 in a ceremony in Beijing. “This is really a big surprise,” said Wang, 48, when he learned that he would be joining past Pritzker laureates such as Philip Johnson (1979), Tadao Ando (1995), and Zaha Hadid (2004), who served on the nine-member jury for this year’s prize along with the likes of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and 2002 laureate Glenn Murcutt. “I am tremendously honored to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. I suddenly realized that I’ve done many things over the last decade. It proves that earnest hard work and persistence lead to positive outcomes.” The jury praised Wang’s buildings, which include the Library of Wenzheng College at Suzhou University (below, at left) and the Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum (at right), for their “unique ability to evoke the past, without making direct references to history” and “strong sense of cultural continuity and re-invigorated tradition.”

(Photos from left: Lu Wenyu and Lv Hengzhong, courtesy Amateur Architecture Studio)

Microsoft and its new Windows logo apparently aren’t the only things receiving negative heat this chilly month. With his Eisenhower Memorial in DC on very shaky ground and his Abu Dhabi Guggenheim going through a series of on-and-off again hurdles, along with a series of other issues at hand, architect Frank Gehry looks to be returning to those days from a couple of years ago when he seemed a little bummed out. In speaking to the Guardian this week, the architect unloaded a bit, speaking very frankly (puns!) about the world occasionally turning against him and his work, as well as “starchitecture” as a whole. The whole piece is somewhat friendly to his plight, but no matter your opinion on his work, or buildings by celebrity architects in general, it’s an interesting read regardless, as Gehry rarely censors himself on telling it like how he thinks it is. Here’s the money quote:

“There is a backlash,” says Gehry, now aged 82, “against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling”, that is “self-righteous” and “annoying… The notion is that it is counterproductive to social responsibility and sustainability. Therefore, curving the wall or doing something so-called willful is wrong and so there is a tendency back to bland.

There are many ways to while away the hours between screenings at the Sundance Film Festival: skiing, shopping for ponchos, stalking Robert Redford, donning the aforementioned poncho (four-ply cashmere, vaguely Navajo-inspired) to crash the nearest “celebrity gifting suite.” But this year’s festival offered a new pastime: inspecting models and designs of the buildings proposed for Park City’s Kimball Art Center. Festivalgoers (and anyone visiting the non-profit arts center last month) were invited to weigh in on the five finalists in the design competition for its renovation and expansion project: submissions by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, Brooks + Scarpa Architects, Sparano + Mooney Architecture, Will Bruder + Partners Ltd., and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.

No word as to whether the jury was swayed by the results of the feedback it solicited, but the winner is BIG. The New York- and Copenhagen-based firm proposed “what is in essence a highly evolved log cabin.” BIG envisions a new Kimball Art Center made of massive stacked timber elements (reclaimed from train track piles from the Great Salt Lake) that enclose a spiral staircase, exhibition spaces, and a restaurant, all topped by a terrace. For the historic Kimball Art Center building, located directly adjacent to the new one, BIG proposed that it be renovated into an educational hub with a rooftop sculpture garden. Inspired by the “raw charm of Park City and the Kimball Art Center,” Ingels says that he sought to continue the town’s tradition of repurposing old industrial buildings for cultural purposes. His firm’s winning proposal looks to the construction technique of the old mines and salavaged railroad trestles “to create a raw spacious framework for the art and artists of Park City—a traditional material and technique deployed to produce a highly contemporary expression.” The project is expected to begin in mid-2013 and be completed in mid-2015.

Before planning your next trip, be sure to review the newly crowned winners of the Travel + Leisure Design Awards, which will be featured in the magazine’s March issue (on newsstands next Friday). The 2012 winners range from the Zaha Hadid-designed Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi to the ultimate in travel-friendly apparel (the 1964 by Scott James blazer and Issey Miyake‘s eminently packable origami folding clothing). Many of this year’s favorites will come as no surprise, including the city-friendly Fiat 500 (best car) and Leica’s drool-worthy D-Lux 5 Titanium Set (best camera). Preston Scott Cohen‘s smart and sculptural Herta and Paul Amir Building at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art got the nod for best museum (edging out the Brad Cloepfil-designed Clyfford Still Museum, alas), and two NYC destinations—Jane’s Carousel Pavilion in Brooklyn and the Freitag Store—won for best public space and best retail space, respectively. Meanwhile, 2012 T+L Design Champion H.E. Mubarak Hamad Al Muhairi, the driving force behind Abu Dhabi’s transformation and evolution as a cultural and design capital, joins past honorees such as ubercollector Micky Wolfson, André Balazs, and Amanda Burden. Tasked with choosing “the best new examples of design” in 20 categories was a jury moderated by Chee Pearlman that included architect Billie Tsien, fashion designer Derek Lam, High Line pioneer Robert Hammond, and artist Michele Oka Doner. Keep reading for the full list of winners.
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