Pictorial> Steven Holl′s New Oceanic Museum in Biarritz
(Photo: Iwan Baan)
Steven Holl’s new Cité de l’Océan et du Surf in Biarritz, France is at once rugged and ethereal. Designed in collaboration with the Brazilian artist Solange Fabiao, the building includes an accessible concave plaza roof covered in cobblestones, pierced by two milky “glass boulders,” or pavilions housing a restaurant and a “surfer’s kiosk.” The boulders offer views out to the ocean, while the plaza directs the eye to the sky above. The museum “explores both surf and sea and their role upon leisure, science, and ecology,” according to a statement from the firm.
The landscape beyond is scooped out to reflect the building’s concave form and create a new gathering place for the city. The museum opens to the public on June 25.
Giveaway! Win Tickets to the Chicago Architecture & Design Film Festival
The first annual Chicago Architecture & Design Film Festival is almost here. With 39 films ranging from shorts to feature length as well as panel discussions, Q&A’s, and related events, there will be so much for architects and the general public to see and enjoy.
The Architect’s Newspaper is proud to be a media sponsor, and I’ll be introducing the program called “Renegade Redux,” featuring a film on architecture collective Ant Farm, and shorts on a giant brink warehouse in Liverpool and overlooked corners of London.
The festival runs from May 5 through May 9, and we have a couple of pairs of tickets to give away. Just leave a comment below by noon CST and we’ll randomly select two lucky winners who will each get a pair of free tickets!
Most screenings will be held at the Gene Siskel Film Center, located at 146 North State Street. Some additional screenings will be held at SCREEN@theWit, located at the Wit Hotel, 201 North State Street. We’ll contact the winners via e.mail (Don’t worry, we won’t share your e.mail address). So leave a comment for complimentary tickets now.
MoMA To Go House Hunting in the Burbs
(Courtesy The Washington Independent)
The foreclosure crisis has up-ended old assumptions about the relative prosperity of cities versus suburbs. In many regions waves of foreclosures have hit the suburbs hardest. In the second iteration of their “Issues in Contemporary Architecture” residency and exhibition series, MoMA and P.S. 1 will ask five teams to design interventions for five “megaregions” facing high levels of foreclosures. Like the earlier iteration, Rising Currents, the new project, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream will include a residency and public workshops at P.S. 1, followed by an exhibition and public programs at MoMA. Organized by Barry Bergdoll, chief curator for architecture and design, and Reinhold Martin, director of the Buell Center at Columbia, Foreclosed “will enlist five interdisciplinary teams of architects to envision a rethinking of housing and related infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country’s suburbs,” according to a statement from the museum.
Art for Architects
Stephen Talasnik in Gensler's New York offices (photos courtesy Gensler)
Artist Stephen Talasnik has long been inspired by architecture and engineering. Now he can return the favor, thanks to an in-office exhibition at Gensler in New York’s Rockefeller Center. The show, called Adrift/Afloat, includes 16 pieces, including sculptures, drawings, and diagrams. Talasnik’s work is in the collection of the National Gallery, the British Museum, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, among other institutions.
Signs of Life for Architecture?
John Morefield's Architecture 5 Cents project captured the feeling of the recession. Are things picking up?
According to Crain’s New York, the city’s five biggest firms began rehiring last year. Kohn, Pederson Fox, Perkins Eastman, Gensler, HOK, and SOM all began staffing-up, though all five firms pointed to international work as driving much of the growth. “New York started coming out of the recession earlier than the rest of the country, and business is improving, but it’s still uneven,” Bradford Perkins, chairman and chief executive of Perkins Eastman, told the business journal. Perkins Eastman added around 30 architects last year. Nationally, billings have been back in positive territory for the last few months, though results vary substantially by region. And today the AP reported that new home construction is beginning to bounce back. Are you feeling a rebound?
Unveiled>Blaffer Art Museum Renovation by Work AC
The new entrance to the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston. (all images courtesy WORK ac)
The New York-firm WORK Architecture Company is retooling the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. The intervention, which includes a new entrance and circulation plan, should dramatically boost the visibility of the museum. It shares a large 1970s concrete building with the university’s art school, and it is currently accessed off an interior courtyard. The architects are moving the entrance to the north side of the building, with a new cantilevered interior staircase serving as a portico. Read More
Video> wHY Architecture Reveals Speed Art Museum Design for Louisville (Updated)
The new Speed design features dramatic cantilevered volumes facing a public plaza. (Courtesy wHY Architecture)
Louisville’s Speed Art Museum has unveiled plans for a new addition designed by Culver City, CA-based wHY Architecture with Reed Hilderbrand landscape architects. Located on the campus of the University of Louisville, the museum hopes to increase connections with the city and the university along with increasing gallery and educational space. The scope of wHY’s work includes 200,000 square feet of new and renovated space in three phases valued at $79 million. The first phase including the new north structure will begin construction this year.
A fly-through (after the jump) offers a peak at the design, which calls for a simple monumental form next to the 1920s-era Beaux-Arts main building that cantilevers over a stand of trees forming an outdoor room and cafe on the campus facing side. A large garage-like door opens out to the garden. The street facing side features an outdoor amphitheatre-like seating set in the ground and a large reflecting pool. A cantilever staircase will be visible through the street facing facade.
A Shindig For Storefront
Menking and Crompton with Webb on the mic. (photos: Dillon DeWaters)
Monday night the Storefront for Art and Architecture threw a benefit party at the new home of the Paul Taylor Dance Company on the lower Lower East Side. Arguably the city’s most experimental architecture venue, Storefront can count some of the city’s major architecture names as supporters, or at least as party goers, including Steven Holl, Brad Cloepfil, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, and Bjarke Ingels. Read More
Eduardo Souto de Moura Wins 2011 Pritzker Prize (Updated)
Apartment Building in Maia, Portugal (Courtesy El Croquis)
Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura has won the 2011 Pritzker Prize, according to several reports. The Porto-based architect worked for the country’s other Pritzker winner, Alvaro Siza, but has had a prolific career on his own since opening his office in 1980. Not widely known outside Portugal, Souto de Moura designed the new stadium in Braga in 2004, which, like much of his work, has strong, highly legible forms. There he blasted granite from the site that was later crushed to make concrete for the building.
Unveiled>Amanora Apartment City by MVRDV
Phase one of MVRDV's Amanora Apartment City in Pune, India (all images courtesy MVRDV).
Like its neighbor to the northeast, India is urbanizing at break-neck speed. Much of the resulting development takes the shape of monotonous towers and slabs designed to house the maximum number people as quickly as possible. The innovative Dutch firm MVRDV’s project Amanora Apartment City punches through, twists, and slices off pieces of a monolithic superstructure, to create a new park-side landmark within a largely undifferentiated urban field.
Unveiled> INABA′s Norwegian Skylight
Courtesy INABA
INABA has won a competition to design a permanent art work for the new concert hall in Stravanger, Norway. Called Skylight, the approximately 43 foot tall helix-like form will be visible to city through the transparent glass cladding of the five story great hall. At night colored, artificial light will animate the form and indicate cues like curtain calls. During the day it will reflect natural light throughout the space.
Gowanus On My Mind
A view of the Gowanus Canal (all images courtesy of Gowanus By Design)
The Gowanus Canal has been in the news a lot lately, with its superfund designation and sunken schooner. The canal and surrounding neighborhood have long fascinated architects and urbanists, and has been the subject of numerous architecture school design studios. A new ideas competition looks to develop that fascination into a series of proposals for the site, which would improve connectivity across and around the polluted waterway and take better advantage of the area’s unique history, character, and economic potential.
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