News Roundup, September 21, 2015 to September 25, 2015

Awards: Enter Now!

The AIA, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, and the Architects Foundation’s Design & Health Research Consortium is adding up to six new member organizations. Application materials are available on the AIA’s website. Deadline is Oct. 16.

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!

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.

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.

For more news and views, sign up for the ARCHITECT Newswire, the best daily newsletter on architecture and architects.

Click “next” to read past days of the News Roundup.

September 24, 2015

Some Oppose Gehry Working on the L.A. River Restoration Project Frank Gehry, FAIA, is working on a restoration project for the 51-mile Los Angeles River. The nonprofit L.A. River Revitalization Corporation brought the Los Angeles architect to the table with the support of Mayor Eric M. Garcetti. The project’s goal is restoration as well as water reclamation. When the news was leaked that Gehry was working on the project, there was criticism from community leaders. “I’m doing something that’s going to be good and trying to be inclusive, and they are trying to cut me up before I even get out of the gate,” Gehry tells The New York Times. “That’s not nice. I don’t want to create a fight with them, but they should grow up.” Critics argue that Gehry, based on his past work, is not the right fit for the project. [The New York Times]

Swapping Crowns for Hard Hats Yesterday, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and Prince Harry joined hundreds of volunteers in helping to renovate homes for army veterans as part of a BBC series called “DIY SOS.” According to The Guardian, the two brothers were responsible for painting kitchens, cutting doors, and laying paving slabs. The project, on a derelict street in Manchester, England, includes the renovation of eight buildings and the facades of 62 homes in the development of a new mixed community. Launched on Monday, it is the largest project the show has undertaken and is scheduled for completion at the end of this week. The British show “DIY SOS” tapes home improvement gone wrong that are then fixed by a team of professionals. [The Guardian]

Step Up Nadel, a design firm headquartered in Los Angeles, hired Andrew Simmons, AIA, as director of its hospitality studio, working out of its Las Vegas office.

Dame Zaha Wins Gold Zaha Hadid, Hon. FAIA, has won this year’s Royal Gold Medal for Architecture from the Royal Institute of British Architects, and becomes the first woman to win the Gold Medal in her own right. She will receive the medal itself at a ceremony in February 2016. [ARCHITECT]

Western Urbanism on Display A free new exhibition in the formerly derelict Paladion Mall examines how San Diego is accommodating its population and physical growth. “Rethink Downtown: Behind San Diego’s Skyline” will have videos, scale models, photographs, historic maps, and displays, and opens this weekend. [ARCHITECT]

A GSD Pavilion for Miami Design Miami has selected a student team from the Harvard Graduate School of Design to design and build this year’s entry pavilion this December. The pavilion, named UNBUILT, will be a metal canopy outfitted with pink foam architectural models of buildings submitted by other GSD students. [ARCHITECT]

A Step Closer to a 3D Printed House Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Oak Ridge National Laboratory combined their efforts and designed and printed a shelter and vehicle, which both share renewable power to stay off grid during periods of peak energy demand. The team completed the project, from design to production in less than a year. [ARCHITECT]

Get More from Your BIM Work Micheal Kilkelly, a principal at Space Command and a former associate at Gehry Partners, lays out seven ways to get the most out of your building modeling. [ARCHITECT]

Reclaimed Wood Portal The Chicago-based Building Materials Reuse Association has partnered with the American Wood Council and the Canadian Wood Council to create the website Reusewood.org to educate project teams on what types of waste wood are suitable for reuse, and in what capacity, and provides a database of North American suppliers. [ARCHITECT]

The Evolution of Retirement Amanda Kolson Hurley talks to architect and author Deane Simpson about his new book Young-Old: Urban Utopias of an Aging Society what has come be know as the Third Age, people aged from about 55 to 75 who are retired yet in relatively good health. [ARCHITECT]

September 23, 2015

The Edge Will Change The Way You Think About Offices Not only is this Amsterdam building , designed by London-based PLP Architecture, the greenest structure in the world, Bloomberg also calls it the smartest, too. And The Edge’s developer called it the “Uber of buildings.” The British rating agency BREEAM gave the office building, which produces more energy than it consumes, the highest ­sustainability score ever awarded: 98.4 percent. All of its integrated technology contributes to that level of efficiency. LED panels, developed specifically for The Edge require such a small amount of electricity that they can be powered using the same cables that transport data for the Internet. And those LED panels are also packed with sensors—motion, light, temperature, humidity, infrared—to track data and allow building managers to maximize efficiency. [Bloomberg]

One Step Closer to a Perfect Encryption Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology broke the distance record for quantum teleportation, transferring across more than 60 miles. This is four times the previous distance achieved. Yes, teleportation is cool. We’d all love to get “beamed up.” But the salient bit with quantum teleportation is in creating the perfect form of encryption. In theory, quantum encryption would use translation keys sent from encrypter to encryptee using quantum particles (such as photons) that are then used to decode the encrypted file. Under the (admittedly weird and hard to wrap your head around) rules of quantum mechanics, anyone nosing in would change the quantum state of the key, thus rendering the process unhackable. And the 5.6 milion people who had their fingerprints stolen in the recent Office of Personnel Management cyberattack would probably have appreciated that. [The Washington Post]

Tallest Swiss Tower Herzog & de Meuron’s new tower for healthcare company Roche has opened in Basel, Switzerland. The 41-story-tall tower is a part of the headquarters campus expansion that the company is undertaking. It’s the tallest building in Switzerland and the firm’s tallest to date, and additional campus buildings are in process as well. [Designboom]

30 Rare Photos Inside NYC’s Woolworth Building Although the tower, in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, has been closed to tourists for the past two years, Business Insider scored a behind-the-scenes tour of the 1913 skyscraper designed by Cass Gilbert, and snapped some gorgeous pictures in the process. The tour included a look at the lobby, elevators, the former subway connection, bank vault, and even the basement, which few have seen. Business Insider reveals some interesting, little-known facts about the building’s Gothic ornamentation and its history, including the meaning behind the ceiling’s artwork. [Business Insider]

Brazilians Submit Their Ideas for Their Dream Home, An Architect Designs It Question: “If you could start building the house you will inhabit in 2040 today, what would it be like?” That was the very one Brazilian firm Studio Arthur Casas and Italian electricity company ENEL posed onto their native country in order to design the NO.V.A house. The response was overwhelming. With 4,000 ideas submitted to the organizations, they had more than enough to give their technical committee so that they could come up with a final product to be built in Rio de Janiero. To make it sustainable, the site includes a number of components, allowing it to determine when to switch the features on and off. [Residential Architect]

More from Times Square The back and forth of the pedestrian plaza of Times Square has been continuing for months. The New York City police chief proposed opening the iconic square to car traffic again, to get rid of the unsightly public elements his department has been battling. Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed. Our own Aaron Betsky weighed in recently, too. City Hall has now decreed that the pedestrian plazas will remain. And yesterday, New York TImes architecture critic Michael Kimmelman stepped into the fray as well on how the city can make the plaza work. “The other day,” writes Kimmelman, “Craig Dykers, a founding partner of Snohetta, the firm hired five years ago to design the plazas, showed me plans for improvements yet to come, including widened sidewalks along a repaved Seventh Avenue. The design’s lack of bells and whistles derives from an understanding of the rough-and-tumble from hundreds of thousands of people passing through the square each day. The plazas cede drama to what’s happening in and around them. They aren’t especially pretty. Still, the scheme makes sense of a complicated geography. It needs to be expeditiously completed.” This, better policing, and an understanding from Mr. Mayor that you can’t simply and unceremoniously drop your predecessor’s policies in a city as big and complicated as New York, combine to form Kimmelman’s prescription for fixing this particular NYC ill. [New York TImes]

A Big Award for Leadership in Sustainability Gail Vittori, co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, Texas, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Hanley Award for Vision and Leadership in Sustainability. Now in its sixth year, the Hanley Award is sponsored by the Hanley Foundation and is supported by ARCHITECT and our sister titles Builder and EcoBuildingPulse. Given out each year, the award honors a person who has shown extraordinary contributions to sustainability and who has influenced policy and the industry’s response to critical environmental challenges in the United States. [Builder]

Market Tightens After three months of growth, the American Institute of Architects’ monthly Architecture Billings Index drops back under 50 (the cutoff line for the index between growth and contraction). Over the past year, this is the third month that the index has shown contraction in the market. Most regions and sectors are still growing, just more slowly than they had been over the past few months. [ARCHITECT]

Home Away From Home at the Office Technology is freeing workers from the office, so employers are responding with incentives to encourage workers to keep showing up. Among them are spaces that better meld the digital, physical, and social aspects of contemporary office life. To that end, we picked eight products that combine soft forms and a warm material palette with the resilience needed for high-traffic areas. [ARCHITECT]

Women in Architecture The fourth biennial AIA Women’s Leadership Summit gave its sold-out audience ideas and resources to advance equity in architecture. [ARCHITECT]