As much as we love to read around here—and even though we rely on the printed word (and the e-printed word, or whatever you want to call it) for our livelihoods—by some Friday afternoons, we’ve reached our limit; it’s all we can do to drag our text-saturated eyeballs across another line of type. If you’re feeling about the same—and a quick nap isn’t an option—then perhaps a video diversion will help. And we think we have just the thing: a collection of time-lapse architecture videos from around the Web. Read more…

For an enlightening and occasionally amusing glimpse of the arcane world of New York City landmarks preservation, point your browser to HDC@LPC, a new Web site by the city’s Historic Districts Council.

As a nonprofit advocate for New York City’s historic neighborhoods, the HDC reviews and comments on hundreds of applications for alterations to landmark buildings in the five boroughs. (In fact, it is the only organization to do so.) At weekly public hearings, it testifies to the Landmarks Preservation Commission about the appropriateness of the proposed changes. Now it’s also posting that testimony online, making it easy for any New Yorker to tap into the behind-the-scenes conversation about the city’s historic buildings.

This afternoon I spent some time perusing the most recent entries. One thing I noticed right away: the HDC is not afraid to play the neighborhood curmudgeon, giving a resounding thumbs-down to proposals that seem relatively innocuous to this casual observer.

For instance, you may think that installing a bracket sign on an old factory building in DUMBO would easily meet HDC’s approval. You would be wrong. “Bracket signs gussy up the very simple, clean lines of Industrial neo-Classical style factory buildings like 72 Front Street, and after a while they lose their effectiveness, the clutter of signs all canceling one another out,” the HDC wrote.

How about a rear-yard addition to a Greek Revival house in Brooklyn Heights? Read more…

Last month, the Queens contemporary-art mecca P.S.1 announced the winner of its annual Young Architects Program, which chooses an emerging firm to remake the museum’s courtyard through a temporary installation-cum-party space. This year’s selection, Pole Dance, combines a circus aesthetic with a hint of existential vertigo. The structure consists of 100 pivoting fiberglass rods bolted to the ground and connected by bungee cords to a net suspended overhead. Visitors—quickly transformed into participants—move a set of multicolored balls that fill the net, setting the whole structure in motion. It is the creation of Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL), a Brooklyn firm founded by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu in 2007. Earlier this week, Idenburg spoke to me about the P.S.1 installation, architectural cynicism, and striking the perfect balance between whimsy and anxiety.

Why did your proposal take the form it did? What does it mean?

We take interest in the effects and workings of the immaterial systems we have created to organize our world, especially in relation to the way we organize our physical surroundings. We think people’s care and attention towards our physical environment could be reinvigorated by taking some of the qualities of the virtual into the architectural project. The idea of the structure as an “interface” —elasticity, instability, and connectivity—were ideas we tried to incorporate.

This sounds very serious. At the same time, it is an installation for a few months that needs to accommodate parties. We wanted it to be a really fun place, precisely through this interactivity. We are interested in creating spaces, not objects. We wanted it to be a total dynamic environment. Read more…

Now that green design has gone from a fringe concern to an absolute imperative for the architecture community, you have to wonder what, if anything, is the next frontier. The recent publication of New York City’s Active Design Guidelines suggests one possible answer: architecture to get people off their butts.

The Guidelines, which were unveiled at the Center for Architecture last Wednesday, outline how architects, city planners, and other design professionals can encourage daily physical activity among city dwellers. Strategies range from the simple (posting signs encouraging office workers to take the stairs) to the formidably complex (creating a vibrant streetscape with mixed land use, attractive public plazas, and designated bikeways). And although they’re specifically geared to New York, many of them would be relevant anywhere. Read more…

If you think Thom Mayne designs buildings that stand out for the sake of standing out, you’re only partially correct.

Last week, at the Center for Architecture in downtown Manhattan, Mayne gave a talk on  “performalism,” a portmanteau that describes how architectural form can influence building performance—the way, for instance, the scrim-like façade of Morphosis’s San Francisco Federal Building effectively replaces a traditional cooling system, or the dramatic roof of the still-in-process Phare Tower that doubles as a wind farm and electricity generator, both engineering feats as much as architectural ones. The idea, according to the architect, is to use architectural skins and shape to increase environmental performance, reduce financial burden, and integrate various programmatic and mechanical systems: to create, in Mayne’s words, “layers and layers of performance.”

And, of course, to produce a building that grabs attention. Read more…

Photo: Reuters/Eduardo Munoz, via Flickr

In the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, countless relief organizations have stepped up to provide immediate aid to the Caribbean nation. Architects and designers are contributing as well, and with good reason: Since much of the damage could have been avoided with strictly enforced building codes or earthquake-proof structures, the architecture community will play a key role in ensuring that this disaster does not happen again.

Currently, Cameron Sinclair and Architecture for Humanity are leading the way in reconstruction planning, wisely eschewing a build-now, plan-later approach in favor of a long-term initiative. You can read AFH’s seven-point reconstruction plan here.

Long-term planning is essential, but so is short-term relief. Here is a look at some of the more immediate initiatives proposed by the architecture and design community. (If you know of any important programs we missed, please leave a comment below or send us an e-mail with the details.)

• Article 25 is a UK based charity organization that believes that all people deserve adequate housing and shelter. It designs and delivers architectural solutions worldwide to those in need. Article 25 vowed to monitor the international response effort to determine the coordination between key agencies to ensure success in the reconstruction of Haiti.

• The USGBC pledged its support to “rescue and rebuild” Haiti. In the past, the organization has worked in similar natural disaster zones in New Orleans and Greensburg and now promises similar long-term assistance. In the meantime for immediate aid, those interested are asked to donate through the Clinton Foundation Haiti Relief Fund.

• Habitat for Humanity is working to address the problem of immediate shelter in Haiti. The organization is removing the rubble of fallen buildings to begin the rebuilding process. Habitat is also working to provide transitional housing for families displaced by the disaster.

• Engineers without Borders is not providing direct relief.  But it is rallying support for the cause by seeking out French and/or Creole speaking volunteer engineers to assist in the rebuilding process. Since EWB has several ongoing projects in Haiti, it is also possible to donate through its Web site. Read more…

Architecture-school crits are a famously bruising rite of passage for aspiring design professionals—unless, apparently, your professor is from the renowned Japanese firm SANAA. In the introduction to The SANAA Studios 2006–2008 (Lars Müller Publishers), the Dutch architect Florian Idenburg recalls a crit from his student days in Rotterdam, conducted by SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima:

I remember Sejima sitting, quietly smoking, listening to an exhaustive argumentation to justify one of the less elegant proposals. After a long silence her response was liberating. Pointing first to a sketch and subsequently to a plan she spoke softly: “This … I like … this … I do not like.”

For Idenburg, steeped in the “paranoiac-critical method” of Rem Koolhaas, the directness, simplicity, and seeming intuitiveness of Sejima’s judgment came as a breath of fresh air. He ended up interning at SANAA’s Tokyo office and eventually became an associate at the firm. (He’s now a partner at SO-IL, in Brooklyn.) And, in 2006 and 2007, he helped bring the firm’s understated method to the United States, co-teaching the first two of its three spring studios at the School of Architecture at Princeton University.

But this slim volume—which Idenburg edited, and whose full title is The SANAA Studios 2006–2008: Learning from Japan: Single Story Urbanism—actually provides relatively few glimpses of Sejima and her partner, Ryue Nishizawa, in the classroom. Its focus is not so much what the Princeton students learned from SANAA, or how they learned it, as what the rest of us can learn from the firm’s work and Japanese architecture in general. Read more…

Over the course of a career spanning four decades, Rafael Viñoly has built a reputation as an architect’s architect, a serene functionalist and a master of institutional design. Schools, civic buildings, convention centers, and the like have long been the mainstay of Viñoly’s practice—but in just the last few years, the health-care industry has become his particular architectural demesne. With six innovative projects recently completed or currently underway, Viñoly has staked out a position in the advance guard of medical science, even as the state of the art changes from day to day with new discoveries and new breakthroughs. I caught up with Viñoly to ask how he keeps up.

There’s a lot of bad hospitals out there, design-wise and otherwise. What is your firm trying to do differently?

There are a couple of areas in which these buildings have really failed in the past: one is in terms of their ability to accommodate changes in technology and science; and two, in going beyond a decorative approach to really improve the experience of the researcher, the doctor, and the patient. I think that the problem is that it’s always been the area of a reduced number of specialties. You’ve seen the same thing with transportation, everything getting outsourced to large acronym firms. I think that architects have to challenge that. Having a more curious approach—that’s something we at least think we have.

So how do you find out how these facilities actually work?

We start by setting up an office in the hospital, and our team develops a day-to-day relationship with the people who work there. You need to be constantly addressing this question of how you make a group understand their relationship with the other groups in the overall fabric—and how their field is changing. Research is not something that ends when you put pencil to paper. Read more…

Last month, everyone was talking about Las Vegas’s CityCenter, the $8.5 billion, 18-million-square-foot hotel-and-entertainment complex that now seems like the last gasp of a rapidly-receding era of starchitect cache and real-estate hubris. Well, not quite the last gasp—this morning another emblem of aughties excess officially opened in the UAE: Adrian Smith and SOM’s Burj Dubai—the world’s tallest building!—rising 160-plus stories above a city-state that is now reeling from plummeting property values and crippling debt.

Related: In 2007, Stephen Zacks took a look at the serious ambitions behind Dubai’s insane rate of development in “Beyond the Spectacle.”

We knew architects liked the Chartwell School after it was voted one of the Top Ten Green Projects for 2009 by the AIA. Apparently, students like it too.

Last week, UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE) picked Chartwell, an elementary school in Seaside, California, as the recipient of its 2009 Livable Buildings Award. The prize, given for outstanding environmental design, relies on polls of building occupants to gauge happiness with air quality, lighting, acoustics, and a variety of other conditions in the workplace. Those results, along with net energy emission (Chartwell strives for zero) and general design quality, are considered in the jury’s final decision. Read more…