Tag Archive for "architecture" tag

Take a look at some of the most beautiful subway stations in the world.

You think times are tough for you? At least you don’t own a mall. Once a bulwark of American economy, culture and probably its soul, the shopping mall has fallen on hard times. And to see the decline close up you should check out the site deadmalls.com. So what should we do with this new surfeit of empty big boxes surrounded by oceans of asphalt? There are a few good ideas submitted to Reburbia, a design competition to re-imagine suburbia. One suggestion from the Alabama-based architecture firm Forest Fulton suggests that perhaps the mall should see a reversal of a function and go from being:

a retailer of food – food detached from processes from which it came to be – to producer of food. The parking lot becomes a park-farm. The inside of the big box becomes a greenhouse and restaurant. Asphalt farming techniques allow for layering of soil, compost in containers on top of asphalt. The big box store’s roof is partially replaced with a greenhouse roof. Other details, such as the reversal of parking lot light poles into solar trees that hold photovoltaics can be implemented. One can imagine pushing a shopping cart through this suburban farm and picking your produce right from the vine, with the option to bring your harvest to the restaurant chef for preparation and eating your harvest on the spot.

See more finalists in the Reburbia design competition.

Where y’at New Orleans? Four years after Katrina, architects, planners and builders have made messy, heterogeneous efforts at rebuilding the Crescent City. There’s a great article in the recent Atlantic Monthly profiles some of the approaches to rebuilding that are underway.

In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city’s neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It’s at once exhilarating and frightening to behold.

Swiss Architect Peter Zumthor has won the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Saying his architecture expresses respect for the primacy of the site, the legacy of a local culture and the invaluable lessons of architectural history, the Pritzker jury will award the 65 year-old architect their $100,000 prize on May 29th. To see photos of his buildings, take a look at this Pritzker image library, a Guardian slideshow, or to get the full picture of Zumthor’s work, download the Pritzker photobooklet of his work (5MB .pdf).

Probably one of the last signature architecture pieces in New York for a while the new Cooper Union academic building at Third Ave. and 7th St. in New York is taking shape. Designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis, the building will have a 120ft. atrium, Gold LEED certification, carbon dioxide detectors in the building that will automatically dim power and ventilation when rooms are unoccupied and a green roof that will be covered by a layer of low-maintenance plantings. One of the more interesting things about the building is that Cooper Union’s promotional website contains the worst description ever written in English about a building, e.g.: The zoning envelope proscribes the kind of exuberant challenge to the grid that the institutional personality of Cooper Union would seem to demand.

Hong Kong architect Gary Chang has done the most of his 344-square foot apartment. By using shifting wall units suspended from steel tracks bolted into the ceiling his studio can transform into at least 24 different layouts. Check out the photos.

I like photographer Michael Wolf’s images of Hong Kong buildings in his series Architecture of Density. More at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.