The Washington, D.C.'s Navy Yard building where last month's mass shooting took place is currently closed, although CH2M Hill Constructors Inc., based in Englewood, Colo., was awarded a $6.4 million renovation contract for Building 197. [The Associated Press, h/t Washington City Paper]
For your nightstand—Salon's Laura Miller reviews "How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit" (out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by architect Witold Rybczynski, Hon. FAIA. Her first few lines: "You would think architecture, the art form we live inside, would be the art we feel closest to. But in its modern incarnation — the kind that gets written up by critics and praised by other architects — architecture can seem forbidding and impenetrable. You don’t have to be Prince Charles (a notorious modern-architecture skeptic) to stand before Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and feel you’re in the presence of something oppressive and monstrous." She suggests reading the book with an iPad or other Google-Image-Search access device on hand. [Salon]
Church turned bookstore and cardboard turned church—Web Urbanist showed us two gems of creative church design recently. In Christchurch, New Zealand-based Shigeru Ban Architects constructed the Cardboard Cathedral in their city with cardboard tubes and shipping containers (as well as other more traditional materials), a "temporary" building that nonetheless is built to stick around for half a century. Across the globe in the Netherlands, Utrecht-based BK. Architecten took an existing church and converted it to a bookstore. [Web Urbanist]
Job change—Woodbury University announced Monday that Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter, AIA, was named the new associate dean of the School of Architecture.
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