- Via WIRED

Photo Seth Anderson
Illustration: Rob Beschizza

“With the space age entering its crassly commercial phase and science fiction dominated by gritty dystopian visions, you could be forgiven for giving up on the future. But not everyone has. With Dubai’s 800-meter-tall Burj Dubai skyscraper almost complete, starry-eyed visions of tomorrow’s cities are more popular than they’ve been in 50 years.

Here’s a collection of promised skylines we never got to see — and a few that may yet come to be — as seen from the imagined eyes of those who live there. Read the full story

Popularity: 16% [?]

- Via New York Mag

We offer four architects a fantasy job: a full block downtown, with no client to worry about.

The site today. Sculptures for the park, which is expected to exist for two or three years, will be chosen by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

The odd-shaped block at Canal and Varick Streets is, in some ways, an architect’s dream. Even the nearby Holland Tunnel entrance, nominally a downside, ensures that whatever goes up there will be visible on all sides. The owner, Trinity Real Estate, cleared the site earlier this year, and says it’ll be used as a sculpture park until plans firm up. (There’s already a small plaza next door, Juan Pablo Duarte Square, with a statue of the Dominican hero.) New York asked four architects to come up with ideas for the plot (which, we will admit, faces our offices). We required only that the result include a residential component and that it more or less meet zoning requirements. Read the full story

Popularity: 12% [?]

- Via New York Times

” SEVENTEEN years ago, Frances Whitehead and James Elniski were married inside a florist’s leaky old greenhouse, where the resident parrot seemed to mock their vows with what sounded like sardonic laughter. The location was, in a way, prophetic. The bride and groom couldn’t have known it, but another sort of green house eventually would come to dominate their lives.In mid-February, Ms. Whitehead, 54, and Mr. Elniski, 56, gave this reporter a tour of their new residence in the West Town neighborhood here, leading the way up a spiral staircase into a modest office. Sliding doors opened onto a wintry rooftop scene, where two silver corkscrews mounted on tall poles twirled lazily in eddies of wind. “I think of them as the new Brancusis,” said Ms. Whitehead, an artist with thick, tousled hair that brings to mind a shorn field in a crazy wind…..” NY TIMES

Popularity: 4% [?]

- Via The Observer

“It is one of the most seismic changes the world has ever seen. Across the globe there is an unstoppable march to the cities, powered by new economic realities. But what kind of lives are we creating? And will citizens - and cities - cope with the fierce pressures of this new urban age? Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum and author of a major new report, asks if the city of the future will be a vision of hell or a force for civilised living?

The world is changing faster now than ever before. The dispossessed, and the ambitious are flooding into cities swollen out of all recognition. Poor cities are struggling to cope. Rich cities are reconfiguring themselves at breakneck speed. China has created an industrial power house from what were fishing villages in the 1970s. Lagos and Dhaka attract a thousand new arrivals every day. In Britain, central London’s population has started to grow again after 50 years of decline……” The Guardian

Popularity: 6% [?]

- Via New York Times

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF ” It has been 12 years since the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas unleashed his concept of “the generic city,” a sprawling metropolis of repetitive buildings centered on an airport and inhabited by a tribe of global nomads with few local loyalties. His argument was that in its profound sameness, the generic city was a more accurate reflection of contemporary urban reality than nostalgic visions of New York or Paris.
Now he may get a chance to create his own version.

Read the full story

Popularity: 6% [?]

- Via NYTimes

The heart of the newspaper is the main newsroom, on the second, third and fourth floors, topped by a skylight and linked by stairways, with a wraparound balcony on the highest level.

” By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Writing about your employer’s new building is a tricky task. If I love it, the reader will suspect that I’m currying favor with the man who signs my checks. If I hate it, I’m just flaunting my independence. 
So let me get this out of the way: As an employee, I’m enchanted with our new building on Eighth Avenue. The grand old 18-story neo-Gothic structure on 43rd Street, home to The New York Times for nearly a century, had its sentimental charms. But it was a depressing place to work. Its labyrinthine warren of desks and piles of yellowing newspapers were redolent of tradition but also seemed an anachronism.

Read the full story

Popularity: 4% [?]

- Via NewYork Times

Bernard Tschumi
The Parthenon (5th century B.C.) and, right, its neighbor: the New Acropolis Museum (A.D. 21st century).

” By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

NO sane architect, one can assume, would want to invite comparisons between his building and the Parthenon. So it comes as little surprise that the New Acropolis Museum, which stands at the foot of one of the great achievements of human history, is a quiet work, especially by the standards of its flamboyant Swiss-born architect, Bernard Tschumi

Read the full story

Popularity: 5% [?]

- Via NewYork Times

An Article by Christopher Mason
” ELEVEN years ago, when Christopher H. Browne bought an 18-acre oceanfront estate on Further Lane in East Hampton, he thought he knew what he wanted to do with it. A gardening aficionado, he planned to tear down the existing 1950s house on the dunes and build an English country house in the center of the property, surrounded by formal English gardens and only remotely connected to the sea.”
Read the full story

Popularity: 4% [?]

- via The Guardian

Glasgow city council’s Bridge Arts Centre created a new library and learning centre, multifunction auditorium and a base for the National Theatre of Scotland.

” Projects ranging from a recyclable visitor centre to a rooftop nursery have been named on the 18-strong shortlist for the Prime Minister’s Better Public Building Award, announced today. The award recognises projects that have achieved high standards in design, construction and financial management. The winner will be named in October.”

check below the participants:

Read the full story

Popularity: 6% [?]

- Via The New York Times

A proposal for the New Orleans National Jazz Center (Photo: Morphosis)

” By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

In the two years since Hurricane Katrina, what has the rebuilding effort produced? No grand designs. No inspired vision for the future of New Orleans. There have been only a handful of earnest, grass-roots proposals to preserve what’s left of the historic fabric.

Amid this atmosphere of malaise, two recently announced projects for downtown New Orleans stand out as the first truly creative attempts to foster the city’s resurrection. The first, an extravagant proposal for a new New Orleans National Jazz Center and park by Morphosis, is the most significant work of architecture proposed in the city since the Superdome. The second, a six-mile-long park and mixed-use development along the Mississippi, designed by TEN Arquitectos, Hargreaves Associates and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, would undo decades of misguided building on the riverfront.

An artist’s rendering of the Bywater Point, proposed by TEN Arquitectos.

The design of the riverfront project has yet to be finished; even the developer concedes that it would take years to build under the best conditions. And construction of the park would probably require the cooperation of city, state and federal agencies — an almost laughable notion, based on recent experience.
Read the full story

Popularity: 4% [?]