Showing posts from category: architects
The Freelancers Union: Platform for an Independent Workforce
As someone who has fought for 24-years to bolster the right of architects and designers to work as independent professionals in the eyes of state and local government for income tax purposes, I endorse the goals of the Freelancers Union. CFA is an advocate for freelancers rights and a longstanding member of the Freelancers Union. The Freelancers Union lobbies elected government officials to achieve its goals and recently announced that the organization will endorse candidates in the upcoming election. Their announcement follows:
Freelancers Union will endorse candidates in New York City’s 2009 elections who have demonstrated a strong commitment to independent workers.
Freelancers are the backbone of the modern economy, but employment laws haven’t kept pace: we’re over-taxed, uninsured, and have few workplace protections. We’re working to change that by forming a Political Action Committee that helps elect candidates for political office who support freelancer issues such as eliminating the Unincorporated Business Tax (UBT) and making benefits affordable and accessible.
We’re finding out where the candidates stand on key Freelancers Union priorities by having them fill out a questionnaire and come in for an interview between July 22 and 24. Members are encouraged to attend.
Additionally, there will be a Comptroller and Public Advocate candidate event on July 29. All members are invited to attend and can register here.
The final endorsement decision will be made by the Freelancers Union Endorsement Committee. The team includes Founder and Executive Director Sara Horowitz, Advocacy staff, Freelancers Union members, and a member of the Freelancers Union Board of Directors.
We know that if we go it alone, we’ll keep slipping through the cracks. But if we come together and elect candidates that share our commitment to a strong social safety net, we can win the rights and protections we deserve.
Learn more about the Freelancers Union
In Seoul or San Francisco, they took down their expressways. In New York, they built the High Line on top of an abandoned elevated rail line. In Toronto, they don’t have the guts to tear down the Gardiner expressway, so architect Les Klein has come up with the typical compromise solution: Put a High Line on top of the expressway.
Klein states the obvious to Paige Magarrey in Azure:
“Once you tear it down, it’s gone.”
Well yes, that might be the point. But Klein says if we keep it we might have both a better highway and a park.
Accessed via stairs and ramps at all intersections, the Green Ribbon would also have elevators and concessions at the busier junctions. From melting snow to lighting, the whole project would be self-powered by wind turbines and photovoltaic systems lining the whole seven kilometers.
Klein knows all the green arguments.
The most green thing you can do is not sending something to a landfill,” he says, adding that the amount of energy required to dispose of all the rubble would be staggering.
Meanwhile, the Green Ribbon could decrease the heat island effect in Toronto, while adding green space and giving the people living around it a completely different kind of view. But most importantly, he says, a concept like this stops the city from making a decision that it’s not ready to make yet. “Once we take down the Gardiner, it’s gone for good.”
Klein then takes a huge leap and calls the Gardiner a heritage structure.
“It’s time to think about the Gardiner in a different way,” he says. The Green Ribbon is intended to get Torontonians reflecting on what the Gardiner once was – and what it could be in the future. “Cities are often judged by how they treat their heritage,” he says. “40 years ago, the Gardiner was a symbol of progress, a symbol of success, a symbol of power. You can’t just snap your fingers and say ‘that doesn’t matter.’”
Sometimes you can. Sometimes you just have to look past the solar panels, wind turbines, bicycle paths and even invocations of minimizing waste and point out that it is a highway full of cars that are being dumped into downtown, not a heritage structure. Greenwrapping it doesn’t change that.
Via Treehugger Blog
The Big Dig was a carbon footprint disaster, but it’s salvaged materials helped seed a few green sprouts.
If the walls of the Big Dig House could talk, they’d tell you that it’s comprised of 600,000 lbs of recycled materials that were rescued from the Big Dig highway project in Boston. Inhabitat last reported on the striking modern residence in 2006 when it was still in its planning stages, and it has since come a long way from being a pile of rubble and recycled materials. We may now behold what stands today — an elegant and modern private home in Lexington, MA with an exciting backstory.
At a final cost of $150 per square foot, most of the materials for the Big Dig house were free, minus the expenses to ship the materials to Lexington, MA. Set in an area of Lexington called Six Moon Hill, the finished Big Dig House has joined other modern homes that are well known to the area.
To save time and energy, Single Speed Design, engineers and designers of the Big Dig House, used most of the salvaged materials from the Big Dig in the condition in which they were found. Using the structural materials “as is” equipped the house to take on a much heavier load than standard building materials. As such, the house features an elaborate roof garden above the garage. Slabs of concrete reclaimed from the highway support three feet of soil, and the entire garden is designed to use recycled rainwater.
The house’s exterior is elegantly clad in cedar siding and glass, giving it a clean and modern finishing touch without disguising the exposed steel tubes and beams. They say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. The Big Dig House is a perfect example of the treasure to be found in recycling and reuse.
Via Inhabitat
It was clear that Frank Gehry is self-aware from the introductory biographic notes that Pritzker read: “Frank Gehry has been the subject of a Simpsons episode…” was how it began. Gehry is often dismissed as the worst offender among “starchitects” seeking iconic memorials to their own talents, ala Howard Roark. And maybe it’s that his advanced age has offered him some more perspective (Gehry is 80), but this interview made it clear that his well-known style was mostly accidental. Here are my observations from watching the session:
1. He came from very humble beginnings.
Gehry was driving a truck at age 19 or 20, and taking some college classes as night. In one pottery class, he became friendly with the instructor, who invited Gehry to visit his home while it was under construction. Gehry was taken with the design and construction process he observed, so the professor recommended an architecture course, which the professor then paid for when Gehry couldn’t afford it.
2. Disney’s lawyers treated him pretty badly.
When Gehry was announced as being on the short list for the Disney Concert Hall, the family’s attorneys called a meeting with him too provide him with a list of things that he couldn’t do in the project. The meeting ended with the lead attorney declaring that he “would never let them put the Disney family name on something he designed.” (In the end, Gehry chose brass railings throughout the widely-acclaimed project because they had been on the attorney’s early list of forbidden things.)
3. He was mostly pre-occupied with the interior acoustic functions in designing Disney Concert Hall.
Full article via Parrot blog
Designed as a single-family residence combined with a dance studio, this three-story reinforced concrete building is private and open to the sky, and best of all it has plenty of parking, which comes at a premium in Japan.
Dancing Living House, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan, by Junichi Sampei, for A.L.X. (Architect Label Xain)
via: What we do is Secret
the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, Texas
Read article on A Daily Dose of Architecture
A BREAK IN THE ACTION: Stalled cranes and shells of structures stand in contrast with the exuberant building boom of the last two decades along Sheikh Zayed Road.
Many of the city-state’s bigger-than-life projects may be in a holding pattern, but don’t look for its mega-growth world influence to be contained any time soon.
By Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic
June 21, 2009
Reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates — If a city can be spectacularly quiet, this waterfront city-state has certainly qualified in recent months. Hundreds of abandoned construction cranes languish above Dubai’s gated communities and beach-side developments and, most dramatically, up and down Sheikh Zayed Road, its high-rise spine. According to a recent estimate in the Middle East Economic Digest, projects worth a staggering $335 billion in the United Arab Emirates — of which Dubai, with a population of about 2 million, is the largest member — are stalled or have been canceled outright.
Dubai’s residents, roughly 85% of them expatriates, have been left to wonder if the current crisis is merely a pause, a recessionary lull that will be painful but temporary, or closer to a fundamental reckoning that will entirely reorder the emirate and how it does business. The same question is being asked in cities around the world, of course. But it’s a particularly acute, even existential one here, since it goes right to the heart of Dubai’s self-image.
Has New York lost its great chance with an architectural legend? Gehry speaks.
By Justin Davidson
Published Jun 21, 2009
Frank Gehry’s New York looks so vivid in miniature, a parallel city of masterpieces in plastic, cardboard, and painted foam. Let’s start our fantasy tour at the vantage point of Brooklyn Heights. That’s the Guggenheim’s downtown branch across the East River, on the Manhattan side, rearing out of the spume, whipping together water, sky, and steel. Sheets of swirling metal enfold galleries that seem to levitate over the piers, which form a public esplanade. In winter, you can tour the outdoor sculptures on ice skates. “Commerce surrounds her with her surf,” wrote Herman Melville of Manhattan, and the new building stirs the old excitement of a maritime New York, a city at the nation’s edge. Gehry’s money-bright museum stands at the confluence of capital, art, and tide.
Full article via New York Magazine
Kadawittfeldarchitektur just completed their competition-winning kindergarten building in Sighartstein, Austria.
Gerrman architecture firm kadawittfeldarchitektur recently completed their competition-winning kindergarten building in Sighartstein, Austria.
The kindergarten is integrated into the landscape like a chameleon (including a crèche) for 4 groups. Kadawittfeldarchitektur’s proposal for the building won the 1st prize in the public architecture competition in 2003. The project was realized between 2008 and 2009 with a budget of €1.2 million ($1.7 million).
Full article and additional photos via Bustler Blog
architects, architecture, buildings, modern architecture, modern buildings, new buildings
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Austria, Bustler Blog, German Architecture, Kadawittfeldarchitektu, kindergarten building, Sighartstein
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Daniel Libeskind’s recent project, a series of signature prefabricated homes, is a drastic change from his usual commissions. Although a smaller project (5,500 square foot), the residence strongly speaks his language of design with drastic angles, strong geometries and seamless transitions between spaces. In this ever-growing age of prefab dominance, Libeskind’s villas will be able to be shipped to almost any location in the world within months, and will be assembled on site by a team of experts within weeks.
Full article via Architecture Daily
