Good morning, architects. I know I mentioned it the other day, and I realize it's total cheese, but this trampoline bridge—I still can't get over it. This is a proposal by the Paris-based firm AZC to build a bridge made of trampolines between La Rive Gauche and La Rive Droite, right over the Seine River. The renderings, which I discovered on Papermag, show commuters and pedestrians boing-boinging across the span. My first thought (well ... my first thought after "squeee!!") was of the horrifying liability ramifications; my other thought was that this project isn't unprecedented. There's Wendy by HWKN and the Bloomberg Balloon by Diller Scafidio+Renfro as recent examples of the prominent place that the supersilly has in architecture.
NIEMEYER WATCH. Oscar Niemeyer, the eminent Brazilian architect, has been hospitalized for dehydration. The Agence France-Presse reports that Niemeyer, who is 104, is now doing fine, considering that he was hospitalized earlier this year for pneumonia (and considering that he is 104). His work was recently given the 3-D treatment, should you need a reminder of what he's all about.
PUT A BUILDING ON IT. Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times gets results. After speaking with Jeanne Gang, FAIA, about the fate of Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, Gang sketched out a design for a 31-story research tower that would sit on top of the Prentice. This is often the element missing in preservation debates: If one building is erased, what building will come in its place? Gang doesn't want to see the Prentice go anywhere.
SUCCESSION DRAMA. Matt Chaban profiles Goldstein, Hill, and West for The New York Observer. Once architects working under Costas Kondylis, the architect who designed the Trump World Tower and condo towers across New York, the three fell into their practice when Kondylis's partners dissolved his firm. It's a fascinating story that looks at a firm whose work is ubiquitous but whose name sounds new.
...AND REMAINDERS. Theater community remembers Ulrich Franzen... Inga Saffron dives deep on Louis Kahn... Oslo's combover?... $40 million for a pool does sound rather high... Philip Nobel mulls the death of the starchitects.
