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In 30 years of working with AIA architects, I have heard one oft-repeated refrain: “Why isn’t there a national Architecture Week?”
The answer was typically that it’s under discussion. Finally, last year, in its 150th year, the AIA took advantage of close connections on Capitol Hill to get a resolution passed calling for Architecture Week to be celebrated around the anniversary of the founding of the Institute in 1857. This year, it is April 7-14 (details here).
Walking around Nationals Park on opening day with HOK Sport Project Architect Joe Spear was a special experience. He gave us a thorough tour of the public spaces, but, to him, it was obviously another walk-through, checking details.
At one point, he observed that the massive project had crossed from construction project to living building, just as the day’s baseball fans were starting to swarm, in a highly controlled way, through the security checkpoints. (Having President Bush throw out the first pitch on the opening day of a new ballpark, with ingress of 40,000 people, was definitely an issue of its own that day—Secret Service agents and officers were everywhere.)
Is Deconstuctivism 20 years old, or has it yet to even be born? My trip to Cincinnati and the University of Cincinnati for the opening of Daniel Libeskind’s, AIA, second American project put this question to me in a way that couldn’t really happen anywhere else. Libeskind’s work was on display (along with projects by Frank Gehry, FAIA, Zaha Hadid, Hon. FAIA, Peter Eisenman, FAIA, Bernard Tschumi, FAIA, Rem Koolhaas, and Coop Himmelb(l)au) in 1988 when AIA Gold Medal Winner Philip Johnson curated a show at the MoMA called “Deconstructivist Artchitecture,” widely considered to be the first coalescence of what would become the late 20th and early 21rst centuries’ design vanguard. Along with Libeskind, buildings by Eisenman, Tushcmi, Gehry, and Hadid have sprung up in Cincinnati, and newer talents that are typically described as Deconstructivist torch-bearers, like Thom Mayne, FAIA, have buildings on the University of Cincinnati campus as well.
Continue reading "Deconstructivists, Please Raise Your Hand" »
The May National Geographic will be featuring an article on the tremendous development currently ongoing in Beijing, with thousands of new buildings being constructed largely by unskilled labor pouring into the city from the rural regions of the country. This means several things:
The battle ground of an epic New York City preservation fight is about to be revealed. Soon, Edward Durrell Stone’s Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle will be reborn as the Museum of Arts and Design, via a drastic renovation by Brad Cloepfil, AIA, of Allied Works Architecture.
Around here, rain storms, a slowly gestating wall of humidity, and the odd perfect 70-degree day or two have announced the beginning of lawn mowing season (also known as spring) in Washington. The two-and-a-half-story rowhouse I live in leaves me acquitted of this duty, and for that I’m glad, but I didn’t realize the (non)decision to live in a house without a lawn had a moral and sustainability component until I heard of Fritz Haeg.
This page contains all entries posted to AIArchitect in April 2008. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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