If you’re the kind of person who can’t help but swoon when you come across a smartly-conceived building — or who bristles when confronted with a shoddy structure that resembles nothing more than a great, big box of ugly — then you’re going to love this 3D typography series by UK-based graphic designer Christopher Labrooy, which pays homage to the work of famed architects like Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Toyo Ito, and Oscar Niemeyer. Click through to see what he’s come up with so far, and leave your nominations for who he should tackle next in the comments. We’re thinking Renzo Piano. Or Steven Holl. Or SANAA. Or Jeanne Gang. Really, he can’t go wrong!
We all have our dark shameful pasts, secrets we’d rather let lie in the closet of our yearbook photos, haircuts that need never see the light of even dusk. The great thing about being completely un-famous, though, is that our pasts, while they may haunt us on Facebook, aren’t physically built. No one has to live in our embarrassing high-school mistakes, and no one has to work in them. The ten architects behind the projects that follow, however, don’t have such a luxury of anonymity. Herewith we present ten projects either explicitly rejected by their designers or so tremendously equivalent to a killer side-scrunchie with Keds, that they probably should have been. Take a spin through the glory that is our Schadenfreude, and let us know about any metalmouths we’ve overlooked. Read More »
1. This morning Radiohead released a video for “Lotus Flower” — the first single off the band’s latest studio album The King of Limbs — and it’s directed by Garth Jennings. But that’s not even the big news. They also made their new LP available for download a day ahead of time. [via The Daily What]
2. To honor the tenth anniversary of Apple’s first brick-and-mortar location, the company is planning to open its largest location ever — in the balcony of Grand Central. The store will open sometime in the fall, most likely in early September. [via Wired]
3. A comprehensive Cindy Sherman retrospective is in the works at the MoMA, where it is scheduled to open next year; this is really exciting news, as it has been nearly 14 years since the public has had a chance to check out her work all in one place. [via NYT]
4. It looks like Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation project might be back on track. The government is pushing to have last week’s decision made by a Parisian judge to block the construction overturned because it considers the building “a public good.” [via UnBeige]
5. Ryan Murphy is headed back to FX with a new pilot called American Horror Story that could debut as early as this fall. We’re wondering if he still remembers how to do the Nip/Tuck thing after spending so long working on Glee. [via The AV Club]
1. Get ready to bro it out at Lollapalooza this year. An early report points to Eminem, Foo Fighters, and Muse headlining the festival, which takes place August 5-7 at Chicago’s Grant Park. [Chicago Tribune]
2. A portrait Picasso painted of his teenage mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, sold for £25,241,250 (about $36 million) at a Sotheby’s London auction last night. [Telegraph]
3. Frank Gehry‘s massive, glassy Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation project in Paris has been put on hold by French courts. [UnBeige]
4. Jude Law and Sienna Miller have split up again. Honestly, we didn’t realize they were back together. [Washington Post]
5. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) will honor Ricky Martin for finally coming out of the closet and Kristin Chenoweth for sticking up for queer actors at their Media Awards next month. [AP]
With the rise of starchitect culture in recent decades, there has been a subsequent rise in the number of museums designed by celebrity architects. (It was believed that if a big name was behind a building, it would attract more attention, and in turn, visitors. Makes sense.) Click through to check out 10 of the most eye-catching modern museums on the planet — including a few that are still currently in progress — and we think you’ll see why it works.
[Editor's note: For the next two Fridays, Flavorwire will be counting down our 20 most popular features of 2010. This post, which originally ran on August 9, 2010, comes in at position number 20.] A gray, concrete rectangle isn’t the only option available when it comes to designing buildings. The final shape and style of an edifice is limited only by an architect’s imagination. To showcase some other possibilities, we collected 10 buildings that resemble something else, including an elephant, picnic basket, pair of grazing armadillos, and much more. Click past the jump and let your structural creativity soar!
Frank Gehry strikes again! The starchitect has revealed the plan for his first-ever Australian building, a business school. We’re wondering how the University of Technology Sydney feels about paying $150 million for a structure that’s been nicknamed The Treehouse and already looks like it’s melting or imploding or something. As for Gehry, he’s characteristically modest about his achievement: “Historically the great artists of our history have always been fascinated with the fold. Michaelangelo did many drawings, Leonardo Da Vinci did many drawings on that topic, and I’ve been fascinated with that topic.” [via UnBeige]
London’s 40-year-old Serpentine Gallery may have housed works by Man Ray, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons, but the gallery’s most impressive feature is its summer Pavilion series, which was created in 2000 by gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones. What started with Pritzker Prize winner Zaha Hadid’s steel structure became an annual invitation from the gallery for an architect to design an outdoor pavilion on its lawn.
The Pavilion project has attracted some of the most world renowned architects, none of whom had designed a building in England before (yes, that’s the one stipulation). With the financial backing from various sponsors (the gallery lacks any budget for the pavilions), these architects have been able to exert their creative freedom into a project that is completed in a mere six months, and on display for an even slighter 100 days. But no matter — roughly 250,000 visitors come each year, making the installation more than twice as popular as the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Today it was announced that controversial French architect Jean Nouvel is on board for 2010′s installation. Images from the past ten years of Serpentine Pavilions, plus a closer look at Nouvel’s mock-up, after the jump.
Despite the clunky moniker, we read with interest as The Independent UKrattled off the seven — count ‘em, seven — relevant starchitects in the world, contrasting them with commercial building firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM is a workhorse firm (established in 1936) that has put up major projects from Dubai to Beijing including five of the ten tallest buildings in the world — in other words, America’s first “super practice.” What SOM hasn’t hammered down is the je ne sais quoi of its flashier architectural contemporaries. A primer on the heavy hitters after the jump.
Man oh man, Frank O. Gehry is not having a good month. (Maybe it’s true what they say about the end of January, no matter how starchitect-y you are.) Last week came the news that Gehry Partners is being axed as architect of record on the Museum of Tolerance in Israel; now we’re hearing wind of a stop-work order on New York’s own Beekman Tower. At least the band-aids are coming now, rather than three years after construction — as in the case of MIT’s Stata Center, over which Gehry was sued for breach of contract (read: leaks and cracked masonry) in 2007. See what the world will be missing in the form of Israel’s flashiest to-be building, after the jump.
