news
Panel drop
The National Mutual tower in Collins Street (Godfrey & Spowers, Hughes, Mewton and Lobb) lost a marble facade tile today, clearing the plaza 10 storeys below. The Age has more, mistakenly referring to a fallen ‘concrete slab’, a scary thought.
30.01.12 in buildings
Comment [4]
Trapped in an elevator documentary
“Trapped in an Elevator” is possibly one of the dullest documentaries I’ve ever endured, but it may be of interest to lift buffs out there.
30.11.11 in video-clips
Venice pavilion shortlist yawner
The Australia Council yesterday announced its shortlist for the Venice pavilion competition. As expected, they are playing it safe, with just a couple of smallish practices. Given the level of discontent surrounding the competition, it’s surprising and provocative of them to play it this safe. It’s the competition you have when you’re not having a competition. All blokes who graduated before 1986, so a total lack of Gen X, Y or Z, or XX chromosomes. Of the 67 expressions of interest, the jury of five chose:
24.11.11 in buildings
Comment [8]
The architect & the photographer
John Gollings, Philip Goad, Vanessa Bird, and Alan Saunders spoke at a forum at the State Library of Victoria in July 2011. The transcript and audio are now available. Here’s a snippet.
17.11.11 in photographers audio-clips
Comment [2]
Sustainability - Your laws do not apply to me
Readings sale table, 2011
08.11.11 in sustainability awards
Unbuilt awards close Friday
Architecture Australia’s Unbuilt award nominations close tomorrow, so see if you haven’t built anything, and enter it. UNBUILT
06.10.11 in competitions
A decade
The news caught up with me on the morning of September 12th 2001, when I got to work. I wrote a stunned mullet wikipedia-style post when I got home. I was mainly trying to get to the bottom of how both towers could implode on themselves, using the scant information available at the time. The death toll at the towers was unknown and incomprehensible. A few days afterwards I received an emotional email from the late New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp, touched that people “with kangaroos in Austria” would be thinking of them. The internet was a small place back then.
11.09.11 in buildings
Comment [1]
Designing for the homeless
The question is what can design thinking do to contribute to averting homelessness, mitigating its effects and improving the daily life of those who are homeless and proposing different and longer term pathways to social inclusion, housing, and employment. [ Briefing for DRI 2011:Homelessness competition ]
08.09.11 in cities
Max Pritchard interview
As part of last week’s Plan radio show, South Australian architect Max Pritchard gave a long interview about his career and recent attempts to address the project home, which met with mild success. Worth lending a spare ear to.
05.09.11 in audio-clips architects
Architect / protaganist:
City circuit on a Saturday
Please note that this post is brought to you by the all-new Hyundai Accent *
05.09.11 in tours
Docklands cast shadow: the redux
I’m not sure I get this. The one part of the New Quay promenade at Docklands that gets any sun is to be built out in the interests of providing customers to nearby shops. I will go and figure…
02.09.11 in urban-design real-estate
Venetian blindness
The Australia Council has just released its request for expressions of interest for the design of the new Australian pavilion in Venice’s Giardini. After much effort by Openhaus, 750 people petitioned the Council to ditch their original limited competition in favour of an open anonymous competition. The Council appeared to relent and adopted a two stage open competition model. This caused further fuss as the first stage, an EOI, was ‘open’ only if you happened to have had experience designing similar buildings overseas. Glenn Murcutt protested that even he would be ineligible.
01.09.11 in expressions-of-interest
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Jaunt about town
Hyundai Australia have asked me to show them five Melbourne buildings I like, and I’ll be doing so tomorrow, pottering around in one of their new model Accents. Another five bloggers will be doing the same in other cities. It’s all part of the lead up to a design competition they will have in the coming weeks. Currently agonising over the selection but it should all be in place by 9a.m. tomorrow morning. I have a pretty odd selection of buildings on the list, most of them pre-1980. Photos of the buildings will be tweeted by Hyundai as the bloggers move around their cities, at Hyundai Twitter (which is rather quiet at the moment), and perhaps Hyundai Facebook.
26.08.11 in competitions
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If you want to see Japan...
I have just had to pull out of the next Japan Architecture Tour in late September and October, run by Queensland architect Robert Day. Terrible unfortunate. As some compensation for wasting his time trying to find me a suitable airfare, I would like to plug the tour to anyone remotely interested. I have friends who have been on previous tours and vouch for it – one even going twice.
22.08.11 in tours