February 3, 2016
Maya Lin and Frank Gehry Featured on PBS’s “Finding Your Roots” The descendants of immigrants, particularly those coming to the U.S., have long contended with incomplete familial records and documentation due to their relatives’ emigration. But a PBS television show from noted Harvard history professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., does some digging into notable contemporary figures’ previously unknown lineage to provide clsoure.
“Finding Your Roots” profiles three individuals per episode based on a common theme. Gates chose Chinese-American artist and architect Maya Lin, Canadian-born turned Los Angeles-based architect Frank Gehry, and British businessman and investor Richard Branson for its “Visionaries” edition.
Although each innovator went into the project with vague ideas of their lineage, each one was surprised with the host’s findings. Lin, for instance, discovered that her great-grandmother became a practitioner in family medicine after losing her husband and was left to raise five children alone before the Communist Revolution in China. Gehry is told that his distant cousin survived three different concentration campus during the Holocaust, and was eventually liberated by Russian troops. Branson, the non-designer, discovers that he has South Asian lineage. [PBS]
Bjarke Ingels Group
Boxy Cop Shop in the Bronx BIG has released new renderings for its design for a new 43,500-square-foot 40th Precinct Station in the Melrose neighborhood of the Bronx, in New York City. [ARCHITECT]
Robert Baudin for Hornibrook Ltd. Courtesy Australian Air Photos
Sydney Opera House under construction, April 1966
The Story of Arup “Ove Arup was the greatest engineer of the 20th century,” says “Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design” exhibition co-curator Zofia Trafas White. See if you agree. The exhibition will be held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, from June 18 through Nov. 6. [ARCHITECT]
Official Opening The team of Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroupJJR have released an official opening day for Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture: Sept. 24. [ARCHITECT]
Modeling for the Masses NBBJ is releasing the Human UI free plugin for Grasshopper that creates a user-friendly interface for nonprogrammers to modify designs in Rhino and thus bring parametric modeling to everyone. [ARCHITECT]
Photography: Porter Gifford
Michael Murphy
People Person In this month’s AIA Voices, Michael Murphy, executive director of Boston-based MASS Design Group, discusses how he leads design and research programs in several countries. Murphy advocates for “lo-fab” design, which combines local labor and economical prefabrication—“not to fetishize ‘the local,’ but to exhume the commodity of labor,” he says. [ARCHITECT]
Awards and Competitions
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is now accepting submissions to its fourth Wheelwright Prize, an open, international competition for early-career architects that supports travel-based research. The deadline for submissions is Feb. 15, 2016. Read more about the Wheelwright Prize.
The Architectural League has announced a call for entries for its Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers, focused this year around the theme of (im)permanence and time as a defining characteristic of architecture. Entries are due Feb. 17, 2016.
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge recognizes initiatives that take a comprehensive and anticipatory design approach to advance human well-being and the health of the planet’s ecosystem. The Buckminster Fuller Institute awards one $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a design solution that addresses complex global problems. The application window will open on Jan. 15 and entries are due by March 1.
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