Christoph Gielen has a unique perspective—literally—on the sprawl that has taken over so much of the American built landscape since the 1960s. As someone who has spent a lot of time in helicopters, looking down on the eerily perfect geometries of the nation’s suburbs, the German artist knows just how artificial, and unsustainable, these communities really are. With his Arcadia series, a portion of which we’re featuring here, Gielen hopes to spur viewers to think about the consequences of what they’re seeing (and, perhaps, where they live). “With these pictures, I am interested in exploring the intersection of art and environmental politics,” Gielen says. “I hope to trigger a reevaluation of our built environment and the methods of its development, to ask: What can be considered a viable, ecologically sound growth process?” Click here to launch a slide show of Gielen’s photographs.

Back in 2005, we wrote about the artist Janet Echelman’s remarkable textile sculpture installed over a small traffic island in Porto, Portugal. Now we’ve received photos of two more public sculptures by Echelman that again create “wind choreography” through colorful netted forms suspended in the air. After the jump, slide shows of her new work for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games and a civic park in Phoenix, Arizona. Read more…

In a slide show posted on the Life Web site—yes, Life; it lives on despite ceasing regular publication in 2007—BoingBoing co-founder Mark Frauenfelder writes about Raymond Loewy’s inimitable body of work, which includes iconic designs for Coke, Lucky Strike, Greyhound, and Studebaker. “His signature, streamlined sensibility combined a feeling of luxury with practicality, novelty with familiarity, and boldness with elegance,” Frauenfelder writes. He also takes a look at a couple of classic Loewy designs that have since been tinkered with—not surprisingly, to disastrous effect. Check out the complete slide show here.

Related: Last March, in “The Children of Raymond Loewy,” Deyan Sudjic wrote about the “curious lineage” that exists between the dapper Frenchman and today’s design stars.

The parking garage is the Rodney Dangerfield of building types, the troubled snag in the urban fabric, the Gordian Knot of design. But for all the ugly-red-haired-stepchild car parks of the world and the many generic, bunker-like auto warehouses, there are also stunning examples of man-and-machine triumph that incorporate both function and aesthetics. And they are about to be celebrated in an exhibition that opens tomorrow at the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C.

Based on the book The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form by Shannon Sanders McDonald (Urban Land Institute, 2008), the show highlights the driving designs of such standout architects as Santiago Calatrava, Louis Kahn, and Eric Owen Moss, among others, and plumbs the building type’s history. Originally adapted from the design of stables, early garages offered a similar kind of “curry” service: You could get your car gassed, tuned up, and washed while it was parked. The future of parking brings some of the same, with plans for “smart” garages where you can get your electric car charged inside a building that sports environmentally friendly features like solar panels, green roofs, and (in something of an ecological irony) LEED certification.

If McDonald’s exhaustive tome isn’t enough, you can always check out Simon Henley’s The Architecture of Parking (Thames & Hudson, 2007), which, in addition to using case studies to discuss design theory, delves into how the auto garage has influenced the designs of such buildings as the Mercedes-Benz Museum by UNStudio, as well as designs by Rem Koolhaas, David Chipperfield, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Click here for a slide show of noteworthy examples of the form.

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Having trouble viewing the slide show? Continue reading for a single-page version of the story. Read more…

Balkany in front of a Gropius-designed power plant on the Reese hospital campus. Photo: Edward Lifson

When Chicago recently dreamt of hosting the 2016 Olympics, its bid included the demolition of an unused hospital complex to make way for an Olympic Village. Then a young architect in town named Grahm Balkany sounded alarm bells that some of the buildings, the planning, and other aspects were the work of the pioneer of modern architecture and creator of the Bauhaus—Walter Gropius! Once Chicago lost the Olympics to Rio you’d think the city would have called off the bulldozers, right?  Alas, if you think that, obviously you don’t know “The Chicago Way.”

During our recent conversation, Balkany looked battle-weary, as if he fears that if he ever got a good night’s sleep, he’d wake up to find the Gropius buildings gone. It often takes a transplant to show locals what they’ve got. Balkany moved from Denver to Chicago in 1998. “Specifically for the architecture,” he says. “I saw a beautiful Gothic Revival limestone field house, and learned Chicago was about to tear it down! I thought, man, you don’t have buildings like this where I’m from and here they toss them out like rubbish.” He wrote letters to newspapers, and helped establish Preservation Chicago to advocate. Three years ago Balkany brought to light drawings, letters, and blueprints that seem to show that Walter Gropius and his firm, the Architects’ Collaborative, were heavily involved in designing at least eight buildings, plus the master and site plans and the landscaping of the 37-acre Michael Reese Hospital complex on the near south side by Lake Michigan. Balkany founded the Gropius in Chicago Coalition to try to save it all. The city of Chicago, which now owns it, has other ideas.

Did you celebrate when Chicago lost the bid for the 2016 Olympics?

We would never celebrate anything that is a loss for Chicago. But I admit a part of us rejoiced. Only that part that sees this as an opportunity to revisit the premature decision to demolish Michael Reese Hospital. Read more…

Photo: Jeff Caldwell

Within hours of arriving in Detroit, nearly $14,000 worth of computers, iPods, cameras, and art supplies went missing from the backseat of a car. The robbery was surprisingly quick, executed in the few minutes the vehicle was left unguarded on the street. The two victims knew better than to leave valuables in plain site, yet they hadn’t quite expected the crime. Neither had they backed up their hard drives properly, so the loss was more than just monetary.

Welcome to Detroit. Read more…

Click the image to launch a slide show of Hemmerle’s photos.

Earlier this summer we sent frequent Metropolis contributor Sean Hemmerle to photograph New York’s new baseball stadiums for “Play Ball.” Hemmerle turned in a stellar set of images, only a handful of which we were able to run in the magazine. Here’s a slide show of Hemmerle’s photos, including several that didn’t make it into print.

Click the image to view the proposal.

Every Thursday we’re posting excerpts from notable 2009 Next Generation proposals that didn’t quite make the final selection featured in the May issue of the magazine. (Click here to check out previous selections.) This week’s proposal is a little different—called World Wide Rail: A Tale of the Necessary Future, it takes the form of a comic strip (!), in which the authors, Copenhagen’s Stig Hessellund and Jacob Bro Knudsen, envision a zero-carbon society linked by a worldwide rail system. Click the image above to begin a slide-show presentation of their proposal—and, as always, leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments form below.

(Note: Next week we’ll be taking a break from our regular Thursday Next Gen posts to prepare a final roundup of the remaining 2009 Notables. Stay tuned for that story in early August.)

A 2007 portrait of Shulman in his Hollywood Hills home. Photo: John Ellis for Metropolis. Click the image to launch a slide show of Shulman’s work.

Metropolis was saddened to learn this afternoon that the legendary architectural photographer Julius Shulman passed away last night, just a few months shy of his 99th birthday. We’ll be posting more about Shulman’s astonishing career in the coming days. In the meantime, we thought readers would like to revisit Paul Makovsky’s 2007 story, “The Photographic Memory of Julius Shulman,” in which the photographer discusses the genesis of some of his most remarkable images. You can also view the photos and read Shulman’s commentary in a slide-show format by clicking the image above.

Each spring, the AIA and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) select ten examples of leading sustainable architecture to be honored at the AIA National Convention and Design Exposition. The 2009 COTE Top Ten Green Projects were judged not only on their technical prowess and advanced green design but also for their aesthetics. One juror noted that “other awards and organizations look strictly at performance without care for how a building looks.”

This year’s panelists included Michelle Addington, Brandy Brooks, William Leddy, Nadav Malin, Kim Shinn of TLC Engineering for Architecture, and James Timberlake. What else did the jury have to say about the winners? Click here to launch the slide show.