The AIA's Architecture Billings Index for August was 53.9 (any score over 50 indicates an increase in billings).
The Smithsonian Institution has awarded the contract for designing the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which will be located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to The Freelon Group and Davis Brody Bond.
Architect and former ambassador Richard Swett, the author of Leadership by Design: Creating an Architecture of Trust, will serve as vice president and managing principal of Leo A Daly's Washington D.C. office.
German architect O.M. Ungers died on Sept. 30. He was 81 years old. An influential postmodernist, Ungers served as the dean of Cornell's Department of Architecture from 1969 to 1975; he was a visiting professor at Harvard and UCLA as well. Among his many notable buildings is the Washington, D.C., residence of the German ambassador, completed in 1994.
The Royal Institute of British Architects' 2007 Stirling Prize was awarded to David Chipperfield Architects for the firm's Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, Germany.
Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, a leader of the metabolist movement, died on Oct. 12 at age 73. A plan to tear down Kurokawa's Nagakin Capsule Tower (1972), a landmark of metabolist architecture, was approved by the building's management company earlier this year.
