October 20, 2015
Infrastructure: A Winning Campaign In case you just out of bed today and missed both John Oliver’s Sunday night episode and all of today’s newspapers, the Liberal party won a landslide victory in the Canadian parliamentary election last night, beating the Conservative party that held power for the past decade and the left wing New Democratic Party. Today, everyone is playing Monday Morning Quarterback with that result, trying to suss meaning out of the final vote tallies and their complete incongruity with the polling leading up to the election. But one of the more intriguing explanations comes from Larry Summers over at Wonkblog. First, he says, “polls often get it wrong,” previously in the British election (and even the last U.S. presidential election, which was expected to be closer than it was), because most people don’t like to talk to pollsters and mass opinion can change pretty quickly in our integrated mass media world. And second, Summers says, setting up his real thesis, “in an era of extraordinarily low interest rates and slow growth, it is becoming increasingly clear that progressives do best when they reject austerity and embrace public investment.” Basically, people are sick of hearing about cutting services and balancing budgets and are ready to embrace deficit spending on things we need, like infrastructure, to stimulate our economies and update some areas that have been badly neglected. [The Washington Post]
Softer Architecture for Criminals Las Colinas Women’s Detention and Re-entry Facility, in San Diego, Calif. is at the forefront in a controversial movement for prison design. Previously, and even still, the idea was to make the facility so undesirable that those who were locked up there would never want to return. But this design aims to realize an area where it encourages the inmates to be more relaxed, and learn applicable skills for when they are released. Even the name itself is an indication. It’s not technically called a prison.
And while critics argue that these design concepts have little effect, the proponents argue that is actually gender responsive. In an era where more women are imprisoned than ever (the numbers increased tenfold from 1980 to 2000), these designers are stating that the one difference between male and female locations can’t just be in regards to the bathrooms. For instance, women have expressed interest in communal spaces, so the designs in Las Colinas feature open-concept rooms with shoulder-height partitions. Since the redesign a year ago, the facility’s officials say they have already seen a decrease in violence, both for inmate-on-inmate and inmate-on-staff. [OZY]
The Four Big Questions Guiding Material Innovation At the Adaptive Architectures and Smart Materials Conference in Chicago, debate was privileged over consensus with regard to material approaches in design. After all, the burgeoning field of material technology is ever more complex, diverse, and uncertain, and requires architects to engage its many challenging themes in meaningful ways, and Blaine Brownell, AIA, was there to engage with the other attendees. [ARCHITECT]
We Can Rebuild It. We Have the Technology. Searching for higher and drier ground, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman Wilson House was disassembled last spring and made the 1,200-mile journey from Somerset County, N.J., to Bentonville, Ark., where it was then carefully reconstructed piece by piece. At its new home at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the 1,700-square-foot residence will open to the public on Nov. 11, available for tours and limited programming. [ARCHITECT]
Master of the Piano Method The Cité de l’Architecture & du Patrimoine in Paris will present Renzo Piano Building Workshop. The Piano Method. Curated with the Fondazione Renzo Piano and the Paris office of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the exhibition is a three-piece show in which the projects reflect the international architecture firm’s collective workflow. [ARCHITECT]
King of the Solar Mountain Stevens Institute of Technology won four of the five juried contests on its way to an overall victory in the 2015 edition of the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, held in Irvine, Calif. [ARCHITECT]
Stirling Reputation Burntwood School by AHMM Architects wins the 2015 RIBA Stirling Prize. Selected from a shortlist of six buildings, the Burntwood School becomes the 20th winner of the award. [ARCHITECT]
Awards: Enter Now!
The 63rd annual Progressive Architecture Awards program is now accepting submissions. The winners of our annual program honoring unbuilt designs are published in the February issue. Regular deadline is on Oct. 30, with the late deadline (and extra $50 per entry) on Nov. 4. Enter now!
Nominate an individual or organization that is advancing the green building industry through the adoption of technologies for the inaugural BOLD (Building Optimizers, Leaders and Disruptors) Awards. The deadline is Oct. 28. Finalists will be notified on Nov. 11, and winners will be honored at Greenbuild in Washington, D.C.
The Graham Foundation’s Carter Manny Award recognizes doctoral students working on dissertation topics in architecture. Applications are available online now and due Nov. 15.
The Urban Land Institute is now accepting applications to compete in its student competition to design an urban planning and development scenario. Teams must apply by Dec. 7.
Bathroom products manufacturer Victoria + Albert is challenging designers to create a space that uses its products. Entry is free and submissions are due Dec. 20.
AIA|DC is accepting entries for the Sarah Booth Conroy Prize for Journalism and Architectural Criticism to reward excellent reporting of architecture and urbanism in Washington, D.C. The annual prize is $5,000. Deadline is Dec. 31.
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