Today, ArchDaily turns 5 years old! We've already shared with you our special doodle of the day and the 20 Most Visited Projects of ArchDaily history - now, let's look back at the 5 posts that most caught your attention these past five years. From the ever-pressing topic of work/life balance to an underground Data Center lair, these five posts offer us a snapshot of what's important to architects today. Enjoy!
The 5 Most Read Posts in ArchDaily history, after the break....
Lats year, we asked our Facebook Fans to share with us their thought on the best smartphone apps for architects. The list was quite interesting and at number 9 we had [steel] an app for iOS and Android developed by our friends at The Mobile Engineer.
Today, in honor of International Women's Day, we want to take a look at one of the most pressing issues facing architecture today: the lack of women architects. Articles abound about the what of gender inequality in architecture - the facts and figures that reveal the extraordinary gender gap that exists in the profession (in the UK, for example, only 21% of architects are women, and they earn 25% less than their male counterparts) - but strikingly few discuss the how of lessening that gender gap.
Read the opinions of two prominent female architects, and provide your own, after the break...
Last year, we presented you Archipendium 2013 as part of our Books & Magazines section. Now, we can proudly tell you that we've partnered with Archipendium 2014.
Archipendium 2014 showcases great examples of modern architecture from all around the world. 365 different architectural studios have been featured over the past few years, including; BIG, Chaix & Morel, COOP HIMMELB(L)AU, David Chipperfield, Delugan Meissl, Eisenman Architects, Foster+Partners, gmp von Gerkan, Marg und Partner, Graft, Jean Nouvel, King Kong, Massimiliano Fuksas, MVRDV, OMA, Steven Holl Architects, Tony Fretton, UNStudio and Zaha Hadid. In order to get a unique view of modern architecture, every featured architect personally chooses which project to submit. Each project is presented as a main photograph, with additional text and drawings on the reverse.
More than just a calendar, Archipendium 2014 is a collector’s item. This calendar is an impressive overview of the latest trends in both modern architecture and design. Become part of the Archipendium architectural calendar that shows different contemporary architecture for every day of the year. Participation in this publication is free of charge.
Interested? Please send us an email with the following information attached after the break.
This innovative post-graduate program is aimed at professionals who wish to play a leading role in cross functional teams engaged in architectural and urban design.
It covers five areas:
·Architectural Design
·Building and Energy Technologies
·Urban Studies
·Contemporary Culture
·Architectural Management
The program is designed to last one year, with rotations between Madrid and Barcelona and provide its students with exposure to the cultural and urbanistic design paradigms which characterize both cities. It is infused with the entrepreneurial and leadership spirit that defines the IE Business School programs. The curriculum integrates hands on design and theory in an environment that invites open experimentation and professional relationships.
In addition to the core curriculum, the IE Master in Architectural Design Academic Advisors offer an international network of professionals and contributors that ensures the program figures prominently within the context of current international architectural debates. More after the break.
Architects: Despang Architekten Location: Göttingen, Germany Architects In Charge: Günther Despang/Martin Despang Project Architects: Philip Hogrebe/Jörg Steveker Area: 512 sqm Year: 2010 Photographs: Jochen Stüber, Olaf Baumann
The following article by Oliver “Olly” Wainwright (Architecture and design critic at The Guardian) was featured on Fulcrum #67 “The End of Critique”, which also included an article by ArchDaily's co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, David Basulto.
Baubles on Pedestals
It has become increasingly fashionable to trumpet the death of criticism. Barely a week goes by that there isn’t a new blog declaring the end of architectural critique, the slipping of standards, the domination of our screens by an unmediated slew of images.
“Criticism is in crisis,” wail the critics, seeing their traditional role threatened by a torrential tide of websites that funnel an incontinent splurge of unadulterated visual stimulation. From Dezeen to ArchDaily, Designboom to Architizer, we are bombarded with a never-ending deluge of projects, freed from any sense of context or meaning. It is easy to believe the cries that architectural culture is being flattened into a homogenous soup of saturated colours and oblique geometries – a cascade of effortlessly digested eye-candy to be liked, retweeted, pinned and shared across the infinite social media network.
I remember February 27, 2013 because that was the day Aaron Betsky asked a good question on his Beyond Buildings blog at Architect Magazine. Not that he doesn’t ask good questions on other days…because he does…but this particular day presented architecture with the provocative title, “Architecture Beyond Work: Will Architecture and Work Disappear?”
Last year, we were reached by the organizers of Treehouses in Paradise Competition in order to help them spread the word. A couple of days later, we realized the competition was in fact a scam, so we took the call for proposals down, and published this statement.
ArchDaily’s Architecture App Guide will introduce you to web and mobile apps that can help you as an architect: productivity, inspiration, drafting, and more.
With SXSW around the corner, many startups will be launching their new apps during next week, and here is a glimpse. We introduce you Webnote by Hopin a free iPad/iPad Mini app that can help you during your creative process. Webnote is basically a browser, with added gesture functions to clip content and create visual notes from web pages, store it under your profile (with privacy settings), easily share theme on Facebook or Twitter and discover interesting contents or "notes" from people you follow.
A simple double tap on any part of a web page (image, text or video) will isolate that particular element and bring up a frame with a preview of the note, where you can adjust or pinch for zoom in/out. On that frame you will have the option to configure the sharing options, and another tap will bring a text area to describe what you are capturing or to make your own annotation.
All the contents that you save or share will be display for you to revive on a simple and visual sidebar where you can check your private notes, the notes that you shared and also the notes from people that you care about to follow, being also a great source of inspiration.
Within your side bar you can simply slide a note to the right to open the web page from where it was made. Or if you want to save a note for later, slide to the left and save it into your private area.
You can download Webnote at the App Store for free . More screenshots of Webnote after the break:
Last month, we reported on OMA's latest competition winner: the Essence Financial Building, a building that OMA Partner David Gianotten described as "a new generation of office tower" for the city of Shenzhen, China. To talk us through the building's cutting edge sustainable features, we spoke with Arpan Bakshi, an architect, engineer, and Sustainability Manager at YR&G, OMA's sustainability consultants, who led the environmental design for the project.
Learn more about the Essence Financial Building, OMA's collaborative approach, and Bakshi's views on the future of sustainable design - for both China and the world - after the break...
This text was provided by San Francisco-based writer Kenneth Caldwell.
One friend said, “It looks a bit austere.” At first glance, it probably is. But like so many great minimal environments, it asks for patience and generosity. You give, and in turn it gives back.
This is also what the artists Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, and, more recently, Olafur Eliasson ask. Trust them with your time and you may be rewarded with a small measure of serenity—perhaps even with the connection between art and the divine that Dominique de Menil was so focused on.
Designed by Louis Kahn, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is an outdoor sanctuary at the southern tip of what is now called Roosevelt Island, created as a memorial to FDR. The park opened last fall. Kahn’s gift took 40 years to be realized, but it presents a path for human beings to treat each other to peace.
Continue reading after the break...
Gehry’s chiseled, 244 foot tower is not the only mixed-use proposal currently being considered by the city of Santa Monica, as officials have selected three international teams led by prominent architects to submit proposals for a “significant” and “signature” development on a 2.5 acre site downtown. Located on Arizona Avenue between 4th and 5th streets, the parcel is currently occupied by a parking lot and two banks. Although the city did not specify a size constraint, the proposed designs will be expected to fit within the surrounding context and include an appropriate mix of of retail, office, hotel and residential space.
The following teams have been asked to submit proposals in May:
Last Summer, Two Trees bought the Domino Sugar Factory site in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn to be developed into a new mix-use master plan. The previously proposed scheme by Rafael Viñoly Architects (seen here) consisted of four large towers along the East River water front, but the design was largely disliked by the community, and as a result Two Trees hired SHoP Architects along with James Corner Field Operations to have a go at the design. The result is a wildly different scheme, consisting of five towers with 60% more open space along the water front, 631,000 square feet of new office space (versus the previous 98,000 square feet), and over two-thousand new apartments. This marks a huge change for what could be considered as the most important waterfront real estate in Brooklyn, and potentially become the new image of Brooklyn for the whole world.
In cities around the globe, change happens almost instantly. Buildings rise, buildings disappear, and skylines morph before one’s eyes. There is no better example of this, of course, than China. From Ordos to Shanghai, Chinese cities are in a constant state of flux, as the Chinese people willfully abandon signs of the past and embrace the new.
Of course, it’s one thing to know this fact; it’s quite another to witness it firsthand, to experience this urgent impetus to demolish and demolish in order to build, build, build, and build. In the face of such large-scale, exponential urban development, it’s easy to feel powerless to suggest another path.
However, in publishing Anatomy of a Chinese City, that is exactly what two young architects have done. By taking the time to observe the “urban artifacts” that make a Chinese city unique, compiling over 100 drawings of everything from buildings to bicycles, Thomas Batzenschlager and Clémence Pybaro have preserved a piece of Chinese history that is quickly going extinct.
In a world where, in the race for progress, quotidian realities are erased unthinkingly, Anatomy of a Chinese City is not just a resource, but a call-to-action, reminding us to slow down and observe the very human context that surrounds us.
Read more about Anatomy of a Chinese City, after the break...
This article, by Austin Williams, originally appeared in The Asian Age as "India, China: Talk of the Town." Williams is the co-author of Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs and director of the Future Cities Project. He teaches architecture and urban studies at XJTL University in Suzhou, China. Email him at futurecitiesproject@gmail.com
As an architect living in Suzhou, just outside Shanghai, I have become blasé about the skyline being transformed before my very eyes. The classic view of Shanghai’s towering waterfront may not represent great architecture, but it’s impressive all the same… and constantly improving. In most cities across China it is the same story: high-speed construction activity, modernisation, transformation and skyscrapers everywhere. There is a palpable sense of opportunity pending — what the émigrés to America must have felt when arriving in New York 100 years ago.
While many Western commentators point to the failures (the accidents, the pollution and the corruption) with an unremitting Schadenfreude, China marches on. Where else can you watch a modern city grow and change in real time? Where else, indeed?
Read more of Austin Williams' account of the different kinds of urban development happening in China and India, after the break...
UPDATE: Unfortunately this video is no longer available.
"Even a brick wants to be something." - Louis Kahn
In this jaunty little clip, Louis Kahn stresses the importance of honoring your materials to a group of students at the University of Pennsylvania.
Last week, our latest featured film showed New York in the ’60s - this time we move to the future, about 200 years from now. This film, directed and co-written by Luc Besson, shows a New York City with flying cars and technological systems applied all around the human environment.
Enjoy and let us know your thoughts of how our cities will look in the next century!
Dessen Hillman is currently a graduate student at MIT, pursuing his SMArchS degree in Architecture and Urbanism. He is interested in investigating the role of architecture in various urban settings through the scope of architecture design.
Since the modernist movement in architecture (early 1900s), building design has been majorly focused on expressing itself as a unique entity, becoming more of an art than architecture. Buildings are now formally expressive more than ever. After pondering the differences between the two, I have, for now, come to a conclusion on one fundamental difference:
Art is a form of self-expression with absolutely no responsibility to anyone or anything. Architecture can be a piece of art, but it must be responsible to people and its context.
Read on to find out how changing the way we snap images coud change the way we evaluate architecture, after the break...
The following article was featured on Fulcrum #67 "The End of Critique" and includes texts by Oliver "Olly" Wainwright (Architecture critic at The Guardian) and me, David Basulto (Founder and Editor in Chief of ArchDaily). Thanks to Jack Self for the invitation and for his thorough editing.
Towards a new architecture
Since the early 1900s, modern architecture has undergone incremental development, where each new iteration has been informed by previous findings and solutions designed by other architects. This process started at a very slow pace, when a young Le Corbusier went east and published his findings and observations in Vers une Architecture.
The book became very influential among his contemporaries, who, based on his observations, produced their own iterations, second, third and forth waves, very quickly. These architects then started to unite. CIAM is an instance of where this early knowledge was shared, replicated, and published, therefore advancing at a faster pace.
Since then, architectural knowledge pursued a steady curve of advancement, accelerated by architectural publications that made this knowledge available to different parts of the world. Ultimately, the Internet arrived, making the exchange rate of information so fast that new iterations of modern architecture are today accelerating this curve in unprecedented ways.
The expandable multi-use cultural venue dubbed "Culture Shed" is one of the most radical proposals to come out of New York's Hudson Yards Development Project. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro - the New York-based interdisciplinary practice that played a major role in designing the High Line - in collaboration with the Rockwell Group, this 170,000 square foot cultural center will be located at the south end of the Hudson Yards, with the main entrance located near the conclusion of the High Line at West 30th Street.
More information on the Culture Shed after the break...
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"Take Five: A Titan of Architectrual Criticism has Died, but Architects are Best Prepared to Carry on the Conversation" was originally published in AIArchitect.
In a stirring call-to-action written for AIArchitect, Robert Ivy, FAIA and AIA EVP/Chief Executive Officer, reflects on the state of architecture criticism today. He recognizes that the late, great Ada Louise Huxtable was unquestionably the best critic of our time. However, the time of the singular architectural voice has passed; in the 21st century, and with the rise of the Internet, we have all become architectural critics - architects, informed citizens, and, often most vociferously, not so informed citizens. In this world of critical noise, Ivy proposes that the architect must step up to take on the role of architecture critic... and advocate.
Read Ivy's stirring article in full, after the break...
Prefabricated design has come to be known as a fast, green, and cost-efficient way to create buildings. Although this technique has most prominently been used with small residential structures, it’s now taken a turn towards greater, larger projects. With prefabricated towers and skyscrapers now in the works (and, in some cases, going up in as little as six days), pre-fab begs the question: is it really safe? Does quick production time lead to instability, making prefabricated buildings more likely to collapse?
Read more after the break.
Last year, Google founder Sergey Brin demoed Google Glass a new technology from the big G that puts an augmented reality display in front of your eye. The device is scheduled for early release to developers and creatives (in order to get feedback before the $1,500 product finds its way to the general public) in just a few weeks, but it has already been highly acclaimed by the media (including Best Inventions of the Year 2012 by Time).
