Good morning, architects. Writing for The San Diego Union-Tribune, Greg Moran says that the arrest of architect Eugenio Velázquez was “no ordinary bust.” After Velázquez was caught allegedly smuggling cocaine across the U.S.-Mexican border, he argued last summer before a U.S. federal judge that a former client compelled him to serve as a drug mule (!). The government apparently corroborated his case. Velázquez and his client had disagreed over architectural and security fees (!), leading the unidentified client to threaten the architect at home and at his office. Velázquez received a light sentence (one year of confinement, six months of which are to be served in prison). Possibly because Velázquez is a high-status, noted Tijuana architect, prosecutors did not argue against the light sentence (though they argued for a much harsher penalty). And to that end, The New York Times reports that theorists and political scientists who gave us mandatory minimum sentencing in the early 1990s are rethinking their position on how to sentence non-violent offenders. Perhaps light sentencese in cases such as these should not be such extraordinary events.
ALL EYES ON LENS. The Louvre Lens Museum opens today in Lens, France. Oliver Wainwright recorded a video for The Guardian talking to architects SANAA about the Louvre’s latest satellite.
TIME AND SPACE LAPSE. Over at The Atlantic, video channel editor Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg introduces a trippy music video that features “hyper-lapse” videography, which is a sort of moving-pictures version of time-lapse photography. The focus of the music video isn’t on architecture, exactly, but it’s plain that this is an irresistible new way to capture buildings.
CAN’T PLEASE EVERYBODY. Writer and professor Richard J. Williams writes an obituary on Oscar Niemeyer for Foreign Policy that casts a specific focus on Niemeyer’s allegedly casual attitudes about post-occupancy. Not a shocker.
…AND REMAINDERS. Dallas-based HKS acquires Miami education design firm HADP Architecture… More on new AIA president Mickey Jacob, FAIA… On Twitter, @sebastiansmee is live-tweeting his thorough exploration of the new Ennead-designed Yale Art Galleries… I can’t resist sneaking in an architecture story from my hometown of Brownwood, Texas.
