2010 AIA Institute Honor Awards Excellence in Architecture

WASHINGTON, DCL.- The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected the 2010 recipients of the Institute Honor Awards, the profession’s highest recognition of works that exemplify excellence in architecture, interior architecture and urban design. Selected from over 700 total submissions, 28 recipients located throughout the world will be honored in June at the AIA 2010 National Convention and Design Exposition in Miami. Outpost: Central Idaho” by Olson Kundig Architects 2010 Institute Honor Awards for Architecture The jury for the 2010 [...]

Experts Restored Part of Venice’s Gothic Palazzo Ducale

VENICE.- Experts have restored part of Venice’s Palazzo Ducale, cleaning marble facades and uncovering hidden shades of color and gold. The gothic palace in St. Mark’s Square housed the city’s top official, the Doge, when Venice was the capital of an independent and powerful republic. The museum that now preserves the palace said Thursday that experts had restored the facades overlooking an internal courtyard and the adjoining Church of St. Nicholas. A view of an inner courtyard of the “Palazzo [...]

Marlins Select Artists Daniel Arsham/Snarkitecture For Two Large Public Commissions at New Ballpark

MIAMI, FL.- Miami-raised artist Daniel Arsham and his collaborative practice Snarkitecture have been commissioned to create two large signature features for Miami’s new Florida Marlins ballpark. The new 37,000-seat stadium, situated on the site of the former Orange Bowl in Little Havana, is scheduled to open in 2012. The $5.3 million Art in Public Places budget, a requirement for all new Miami-Dade county buildings to set aside 1.5% of the capital costs for public art, will encompass four projects, two [...]

Cooper-Hewitt will Present “National Design Triennial: Why Design Now?”

NEW YORK, NY.- Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum will present the fourth exhibition in the National Design Triennial series in spring 2010. “Why Design Now?” will be on view from May 14 through Jan. 9, 2011, and will explore the work of designers addressing human and environmental problems across many fields of design from architecture and product design to fashion, graphics, new media and landscape design. Organized by Cooper-Hewitt curators Ellen Lupton, Cara McCarty, Matilda McQuaid and Cynthia Smith, the Triennial [...]

Eco-Conscious Couple in Taiwan Builds School with Donated Wastepaper

TAIPEI.- An eco-conscious couple in Taiwan has opened a small schoolhouse built with donated newspapers fed through a homemade blender, the chief architect said on Wednesday. Canadian-born John Lamorie and his Taiwanese wife, Shelly Wu, used more than 1,000 kg of newspapers, many collected from students who would turn them over for points in class, to build the 75 sq-meter schoolhouse. “I’m very much into the way I feel about the environment, especially reusing things,” said Lamorie, 59, a former [...]

Dubai Opens World’s Largest Building “Burj Dubai” Measuring More than 2,625 Feet

DUBAI.- Dubai opened the world’s tallest building amid tight security on Monday, celebrating the tower as a bold feat on the world stage despite the city state’s shaky financial footing. But the final height of the Burj Dubai — Arabic for Dubai Tower — remained a closely guarded secret on the eve of its opening. At more than 2,625 feet (800 meters), it long ago vanquished its nearest rival, the Taipei 101 in Taiwan. The Burj’s record-seeking developers didn’t stop [...]

Installation by Architects and Walead Beshty to Open at Italian Cultural Institute

LOS ANGELES, CA.- LATER LAYER, a site-specific installation designed by architects Johnston Marklee and artist Walead Beshty, will be on view at the Italian Cultural Institute (IIC) in Los Angeles from January 16-February 28, 2010. The installation will feature architectural models of Johnston Marklee’s work in Italy and Beshty’s photograms in the DEPART Foundation Collection. Presented as two connected projects, Johnston Marklee’s architectural models and Beshty’s photograms will be displayed throughout the gallery in a field of modular nesting boxes [...]

Winners of Global Design Competition Visit the Guggenheim

NEW YORK, NY.- The winners of this summer’s Design It: Shelter Competition—an online competition that asked participants to create and submit designs for virtual 3-D shelters using Google SketchUp and Google Earth—visited the Guggenheim Museum and Google offices in New York on Thursday, December 17. As part of their competition prize, David Eltang, the Juried Prize winner, and David Mares, the People’s Prize winner, first met with Google staff at their New York offices and were given a behind-the-scenes tour [...]

Steven Holl Architects Presents New Book Urbanisms: Working With Doubt

NEW YORK, NY.- Steven Holl Architects announced the release of a new book, Urbanisms: Working with Doubt. Contemporary urban development is increasingly characterized by a reliance on diagrams, maps, and graphs to convey the rational, statistical point of view of the professional urban planner. This volume suggests that just as modern medicine has recognized the power of the irrational psyche, urban planners need to realize that the experiential power of cities cannot be completely rationalized and must be studied subjectively. [...]

‘Burj Dubai’ to be World’s Tallest Building, How Tall? It’s Still a Secret!

CHICAGO.- In the annals of tall skyscrapers, there is no doubt that the soon-to-open ‘Burj Dubai’ will be the world’s tallest. But how tall is known to only a few. “It’s still a secret,” William Baker of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP, the tower’s structural engineer, said in an interview ahead of the ‘Burj Dubai’s’ January 4 opening. “The client (Emaar Properties PJSC) will only let us say it’s more than 800 meters (2,625 feet) tall. It’s part of the [...]

New Frank Gehry Designed Theater Set for 2012 Opening in NYC

NEW YORK, NY.- A nonprofit theater selling tickets for just $20 is bringing one of the world’s most renowned architects to New York’s pricey theater district. An arts center designed by Frank Gehry and originally intended for ground zero will anchor a new complex that will also include apartments with some low-income housing, a hotel, a cafe and a bookstore, the city announced Tuesday. Despite the recession, the $800 million, 59-story Signature Center “is an example of how our city [...]

Design 1880-1980 Includes Visionary Objects from MoMA’s Design Collection

NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art has reinstalled the modern design section of The Philip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries on the third floor. Shaping Modernity: Design 1880–1980, on view from December 23, 2009, to July of 2010, features a selection of visionary objects, graphics, architectural fragments, and textiles from the Museum’s collection that reveal the attempts of successive generations to shape their experience of living in the modern world. The installation features 300 works organized into five [...]

TEFAF DESIGN to Present Rare and Influential Pieces in 2010

MAASTRICHT.- TEFAF Design, the stylish newcomer to TEFAF Maastricht in 2009, will exhibit works by some of the greatest names in the history of design when the world’s most influential art and antiques fair opens at the MECC (Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre) in the southern Netherlands from March 12-21, 2010. They will include a suite by Frank Lloyd Wright, a unique sculpture by Gio Ponti, a rare chair by Le Corbusier and furniture that Otto Wagner made for his [...]

In the Arts, Bigger Buildings May Not Be Better

Within months of its opening in 1997, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao had given the language a new term and the world a new way of looking at culture. The “Bilbao effect,” many came to believe, was the answer to what ailed cities everywhere — it was a way to lure tourists and economic development — and a potential boon to cultural institutions. Municipal governments and arts groups were soon pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into larger, flashier exhibition [...]

Fundacion ICO Presents the Architecture of Raili and Reima Pietila

MADRID.- The architecture of Raili (born 1926) and Reima (1923–1993) Pietilä, which became world famous during the 1960s, is experiencing a second coming in this exhibition, which uses original drawings to present the work of the husband and wife team in the form of some previously unseen designs and others that have attained iconic status in the history of architecture. A host of sketches shows, in a fascinating way, how in their search for design solutions every possible alternative is [...]