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Today’s News - Tuesday, November 21, 2017

EDITOR'S NOTE: We're taking a bit of a long-ish break for the Thanksgiving Day holiday, and will return Tuesday, November 28 (giving you extra time to puruse this rather long-ish news day). Happy Turkey Day to our U.S. friends and family!

●  Giovannini remembers our dear friend Kirsten Kiser and "the entrepreneurial and trailblazing career of the woman, architect, architectural curator, gallerist, bon vivant, and founder of ArcSpace.com - who understood early on the power of the internet to mediate and broadcast architecture" (fab photo of her with Corbu!).

●  Dietsch gives two thumbs-ups to SmithGroupJJR's new Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC: the "architecture soars in subtle and magnificent ways" by "injecting doses of modernism into the neoclassical warehouse to signal its new life as a museum" ("even skeptics wary of the founders" will be won over).

●  Speaking of D.C., a most impressive design team is creating "a new hospitality brand aimed at progressive millennials," combining a hotel and co-working space, aspiring "to be a press club, a sanctuary for intelligent thought, and a canvas for rising neighborhood talent" ("detox food" included).

●  Singh Bartlett walks "Beirut's wartime demarcation line," once "an overgrown wasteland of shredded buildings and shattered dreams, now a cultural pathway where a string of museums is erasing old boundaries, knitting the city together."

●  Wainwright parses four very different cities, from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and San Francisco, to Calais and Jerusalem, that "reveal a shared experience: of human ingenuity against the odds" (with amazing photos from David Levene's new book "City").

●  Brownstein looks at how Seattle is moving "aggressively to confront the challenges of growth. It hasn't necessarily found all the right answers," but at least it's "asking the right questions."

●  Simon delves into social impact investment, "a trillion-dollar trend most people have never heard of - to prevent climate-related disasters, we need to invest differently - and it's "become increasingly accessible."

●  MAD Architects' Huangshan Mountain Village "looks like a UNESCO World Heritage Site" (with lots of flowery all-about-nature words - it hardly looks "unobtrusive" - looks a lot like MAD's Paris project - just sayin').

●  Who hasn't weighed in on the Architectural Association's layoffs, putting the beloved AA Files and exhibitions program at risk: Dyckhoff: "gruesome" and "madness" + McGuirk, Hatherley, Woodman, et al.

Everything old is new again - or gone:

●  Schneider takes a deep dive into how, "from the ruins of a retail meltdown, post-industrial playgrounds emerge" as a number of defunct 1920s Sears warehouses "have been resurrected in the image of the contemporary city - it pays to consider how the leftovers of a past economy can shape the next one."

●  Historic England calls out "exemplars" of disused textile mill projects that are "'shining a light' on successful regeneration projects that could inspire others."

●  On a less upbeat note, "time is running out" for the U.K.'s Alton Estate as Studio Egret West's redevelopment master plan calls for the demolition of "one of world's most important" housing estates.

Deadlines loom!

●  Call for Entries: Folly/Function 2018: Seats for Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC (always one of our faves!).

●  Call for entries (deadline looms!): Submissions for "SENcity": installations for the 13th Festival des Architectures Vives, Montpellier, France.

●  Call for entries (deadline looms!): European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies/Chicago Athenaeum International Architecture Awards.

Weekend diversions (and lots of 'em!):

●  Cramer parses whether the new "Blade Runner 2049" stands up to the 1982 "sci-fi masterpiece": "There are moments of great beauty, but the film feels soulless, like a replicant, desperately searching for an identity of its own in the long shadow of its progenitor" (but "go see it anyway").

●  Abbott's take on "Blade Runner 2049": it is a "skillful blend of two distinct images of L.A. - as noir jungle and harbinger of the future - when 'La La Land' seems to be the new iconic L.A. film, the ambiance of 'Blade Runner' may seem a bit shopworn. Perhaps '2049' will change that."

●  Sisson talks to "Blade Runner 2049" production designer Gassner, who "explains how he visualized an update on one of film's most famous urban landscapes," and his "thought process behind updating a sci-fi touchstone (Brutalist architecture, the Barbican, Budapest's "colorful Secessionist architecture" included).

●  The Asia Society Hong Kong Center hosts M+ Matters' 3-day "REORIENT: Conversations on South and Southeast Asia."

●  Madsen cheers the National Building Museum's "Making Room: Housing for a Changing America" that offers "insight into flexible living arrangements - now more common than the nuclear family" (1,000-square-foot demonstration home constructed within the NBM included).

●  In Burlington, Vermont, "Imagining Home" presents ideal spaces as imagined by seven current or former homeless citizens, and rendered by architects: "Every single one of them started out saying, 'I want my design to be one that will help a lot of people - to provide housing for more than just me.'"

Page-turners:

●  Dittmar considers Jane Jacobs' "Vital Little Plans": "perhaps her radical notions can help address issues like the restructuring of work, the collapse of the globalist ideal, and the commodification of city land for investment."

●  Carl Anthony, "one of the first African Americans to get a Columbia architecture degree," offers an excerpt from his "The Earth, The City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race": it took a trip to Africa "to learn what I had not been taught in the nine years it had taken me to earn my professional degree."

●  Kolson Hurley's great Q&A with Ian Volner re: his "Michael Graves: Design for Life" that "tells of his arc from small-town obscurity to stardom, and how to reconcile the various sides of his architecture and character."

●  An excerpt from Volner's "Michael Graves: Design for Life" that highlights "how Graves became Graves."

●  Jansen hails Franklin and Howard's "Post-Modern Buildings in Britain": "sumptuous photographs and detailed texts reveal not only the lost language of post-modernism but also the richness of its ideas. Perhaps it's time for a comeback."

●  Budds picks "7 wild, wonderful icons" from "Post-Modern Buildings in Britain" that prove "Pomo's wackiness was an antidote for modernism's asceticism - decades after its heyday, it's finally getting its due."

●  With "Zaha Hadid Architects: Redefining Architecture and Design" (and "d-espite some notable omissions"), "the company she founded is hoping to further honor her legacy."

●  Smith's "Designing Detroit: Wirt Rowland and the Rise of Modern American Architecture" is "as formidable as Rowland's architectural work," and "is particularly refreshing in light of the numerous architectural porn books on Detroit's crumbling infrastructure."


  


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