Good morning, architects. In The Guardian, new architecture critic Oliver Wainwright digs right in with an open thread on the Stirling Prize. But don't expect Wainwright to get too excited about the kind of projects that made the Stirling shortlist. "All are undoubtedly good buildings, but this is largely architecture by and for the one percent," he writes. "As the Guardian's new architecture and design critic, I will be trying to shed light on the other 99 percent." Good on him for diving right into the comments thread, which is frequently the realm of rhetoric's bottom 1 percent.
The Denver Post rounds up the atypical projects that led Denver AIA's top building awards for 2012: a loading dock for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and a new city human services building.
Chag sameach! The University of Miami student daily paper reports on the school's second-annual Sukkah Competition. The celebration of Sukkot is the most architectural fall holiday.
Le Corbusier and Girard-Perregaux have one thing in common: Le Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Beyond that city, where the architect was born and where the watchmaker is based, there's no other reason to mention the two in the same sentence. That hasn't stopped Girard-Perregaux from launching three terrifically terrible timepieces to represent three cities significant to Le Corb (Le Chaux-de-Fonds, Paris, and Marseille). The Pursuitist previews the pieces, which, in addition to not recalling Le Corbusier in any way, will also set you back $50,000.
Read Ryan A. Cunningham on building a better bat cave. "Bats are awesome," Cunningham writes; indeed, they are.
For the Philly Inky, Inga Saffron praises the Barclays Center, designed by SHoP Architects and AECOM's Ellerbe Becket: "It would be too much to say that the $750 million arena fits into the neighborhood, given that it occupies a Janus of a site with Atlantic Avenue on one side and Flatbush on the other, and it is wrapped in an otherworldly carapace of weathered steel," Saffron writes. "Yet the architecture manages to be both glam and gritty, foreign and familiar. It contains Brooklyn in all its multitudes."
The dream of Construx is still alive in Australia, where The Sidney Morning Herald reports on a modular prefab building system designed by Elenberg Fraser called Klik.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed a bill into law that will enable architecture and engineering firms to extend ownership to non-design professionals, The Business Review reports.
Local officials in Ascension Parish, La., are hearing out a plan from Mougeot Architecture to replace a hospital in Gonzales, La., The Advocate reports. Though the estimated cost for preserving the building is slightly less than the cost of replacing it.
... and remainders: Peter Zumthor mini-profile; new sustainable city for the banks of the Volga near Moscow canceled; The Cleveland Plain Dealer is not happy with a new HOK design for Cleveland State University; preview of new Comma-Q Architecture business college building for Montana State University.
