- Via AftenPosten

” A jury formed to select the winning design for Oslo’s new ski jump at Holmenkollen recommended on Tuesday that the city award the job to a Danish architectural firm. It beat out a long list of other candidates to build what’s considered one of Norway’s leading landmarks.

Copenhagen-based JDS Architects won the unanimous support of the jury set up by the city to choose the design of the new ski jump. It was praised for the “purity” of its lines, and public space at the top of the jump that will allow visitors to experience much the same as the ski jumpers do themselves.
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Popularity: 3% [?]

- Via The Guardian

The Guardian interviewed Koolhaas on Preservation, CCTV, and OMA..

” Welcome to the future Any self-respecting world city now needs outlandish buildings, but what about the past? Superstar architect Rem Koolhaas tells Jonathan Glancey why even he gets nostalgic

Rem Koolhaas has some photographs to show me. Not glossy shots of some earth-shattering new building he has created but small snaps of street life in the age-old courtyards of Beijing. Known as “hutongs”, these are tight webs of hotchpotch homes and alleys gathered around wells.
“Most of them will soon be gone,” says the architect, speaking in the Rotterdam headquarters of his company, Oma.”The Olympics next year will find them old-fashioned and unsightly. Those who live there are being given new high-rise flats. These are well-equipped and clean, but people, I think, miss their old life down below in the courtyards.” Yes, down below - with the fruit-sellers, public kitchens, urban bustle and banter, the travelling conjurors and steaming public laundries. All going to make way for the brave new Olympian world. …..” read more

Popularity: 2% [?]

…very not unique…. towers that are inspired by other towers. seven towers with nothing special or innovating quality about them. WHY? has our imagination and creativity become so dry?

- Via Skyscrapersnews

” The energy rich country of Kazakhstan could soon to be the home of an interesting new development that is going through the application process called Seven Towers in its capital city, Astana.

As the name implies, there will be seven towers within the complex, the tallest hitting a height of 60 storeys or 230 metres, with the entire complex spanning over an internal area of 450,000 square metres that will be used for both office and commercial space.

Standing uniformly in line along the main highway from the airport each tower will be different in shape, colour and height. Developers Bazis International Incorporated appears to have drawn inspiration for the complex from other proposals and skyscrapers from around the world - for example, one proposed tower heavily references the Freedom Tower that is being built to replace the World Trade Centre in New York.
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The towers all have very angular looks to them and feature glazed facades which when hit by the sun should create varying visual effects whilst doing the usual job of reducing heat gain thanks to the shading. There will also be double facades to sheath the towers with the glass allowing the average Joe passing by to see what’s going on inside and admire the structures.

It’s unsure as to what retailers will be making their new homes in the complex but with all the space available it’s doubtful the consumers will be disappointed. The workers lucky enough to be employed in the towers will be treated to triple A grade office spaces and benefit from the usual amenities that are becoming common place in these sorts of projects such as gymnasiums and pools.

All being well with the approval stage it shouldn’t be long before naked men brandishing rubber fists are chasing about in the luxury conference rooms of Kazakhstan. ” Skyscraper News
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Popularity: 100% [?]

“Is the tall building an anachronism? Does it, like sprawling suburbia and out-of-town shopping malls, seem doomed to belong only to what is increasingly referred to as “the oil interval,” that now fading and historically brief moment when easily extracted oil was abundant and cheap? The answer is probably “Yes,” particularly for the conventional freestanding, air-conditioned, artificially lit tower that guzzles vast amounts of energy and is built for short-term profit out of high-embodied-energy materials, many of them petroleum derivatives. Such buildings are utterly contrary to the requirements of times of increasingly insecure and dwindling oil supplies, in which even the United States must one day embrace the quest for more sustainable lifestyles and forms of development. Energy-wasteful buildings also offend values held by more and more people.” an article by Peter Buchanan (Harvard Design Magazine)

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Popularity: 2% [?]

- Via International Herald Tribune

Scott Dalton for The New York Times
Mr. Fajardo greets residents in Santo Domingo Savio, where he has built a structure with a library, an auditorium, a day care center and an art gallery. Mr. Fajardo is the country’s most popular mayor, with approval ratings above 80 percent.

MEDELLÍN, Colombia: Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, sporting three days’ growth of beard and unruly hair nearly down to his shoulders, Sergio Fajardo looks every bit the nonconformist mathematician who spent years attaining a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.

But that was a past life for Fajardo, the mayor of this city and the son of one of its most famous architects. Now he presses forward with an unconventional political philosophy that has turned swaths of Medellín into dust-choked construction sites.

“Our most beautiful buildings,” Fajardo, 51, said, “must be in our poorest areas.”

With that simple idea, Fajardo hired renowned architects to design an assemblage of luxurious libraries and other public buildings in the most desperate slums of this city. Their eccentric shapes - one resembles an immense blackened loaf of bread sliced in half - occupy areas where foot soldiers in the Colombian cocaine wars once died by the thousands each year. But several years ago, residents here say, a tenuous peace was imposed by paramilitary drug traffickers who outfought their rivals.

Now, Medellín is no longer stymied by being described as the deadliest city in the world.

Scott Dalton for The New York Times
Passengers ride the new Metro Cable, which carries people to and from Santo Domingo Savio, a hillside slum that is home to 170,000 people. The cable car system is part of Mayor Sergio Fajardo’s push to improve infrastructure in Medellín, Colombia.

This city of about two million had 29 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2006, down from 381 per 100,000 when killings peaked in 1991.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

- Via Archinect
Apparently, The Home Office is looking to develop a network of short-term jails that could be plugged into shopping malls and major sporting venues, as a way to streamline high-volume crime processing and burden of detaining criminals. Call them “retail jails” or, as we are told in the Times, “Tesco jails.” The Ministry of Defence called for mobile units that could be moved swiftly to the scene of large-scale disturbances and protests. ” Times Online

Popularity: 2% [?]

Buying Culture
By luring Western institutions like the Louvre and Yale, Abu Dhabi aims to become a global arts center.

AFP-Getty Images

- Via Newsweek

Newsweek has published an article on the development of art and architecture in Abu Dhabi - Read it below:

” By Zvika Krieger - Newsweek International

Tough negotiations are nothing new to Jean d’Haussonville. The special adviser to France’s Foreign Ministry has represented Paris in major negotiations with both the EU and NATO in recent years. But nothing prepared him for the high-stakes deal he struggled to hammer out over the past year and a half: an unprecedented agreement to open a branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the tiny capital of the United Arab Emirates. Persuading his compatriots to part with a portion of their cultural heritage was no easy matter; founded by Napoleon in the 18th century, the home of the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa had never before established a presence outside France. And there was plenty of resistance to opening the first foreign outpost in a country that had gone from barren desert to glitzy shopping haven in the space of 30 years. The general feeling, as Sorbonne president Jean-Robert Pitte summed it up, was, “Can we really bring culture to camel riders and carpet sellers?”

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Popularity: 3% [?]