If you believe in dinosaurs and that the growing number of earthly catastrophes is caused by global climate change, consider the American Museum of Natural History’s new exhibit. Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future, explores a 400-year timeline of industrial milestones and how they contributed to our current inconvenient truth. More than just a bunch of gadgets demonstrating how to be greener, the exhibit demonstrates data on ocean acidification, urban flooding and more.
The exhibit runs through 16 August. Learn more at AMNH.org.
If you don’t believe in dinosaurs or that (naturally) there’s no need to recycle or get off of fossil fuels, then don’t bother.
23/01/2009 • 2:30 pm 0
If you believe in dinosaurs
16/01/2009 • 2:30 pm 0
Expanding Architectural Conversation
Metropolis editor in chief Susan S. Szenasy will discuss the publisher’s new book Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism with some of its contributors on Sat., 22 Jan., in Atlanta. Contributors include designers, developers (yes, they can fit nicely in the same sentence), manufacturers, policy makers and others.
Learn more about this free and participatory event through Metropolis.
Filed under: AIA, design, events, urbanization
13/01/2009 • 2:30 pm 0
Gertude Lempp Kerbis: An Architectural Pioneer
When she was in college she broke into Frank Lloyd Wright’s house in Wisconsin, slept in it overnight and listened to Beethoven, waking the next morning with a knowledge so enviably keen self-awareness: she would become an architect. In the next few years she would realize that intention, studying under world-renown architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Six decades later Chicago architect Gertrude “Gert” Lempp Kerbis has received the 2008 American Institute of Architects Chicago Lifetime Achievement Award. Some of her work includes Modernist designs on the Air Force Academy, O’Hare International Airport and a condo building in Chicago.
“Her contribution is definitely two-fold: the progress she made so that women can be architects and then the progress she made as a designer,” Carol Ross Barney, FAIA, principal of Ross Barney Architects, says in an 18-minute doc made about Gert. The doc was shown recently at the Cliff Dwellers Arts Foundation, an artsy hangout in Chicago’s Loop.
“I was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright… (Gropius and Mies). These were the visionaries of our age,” says Lempp Kerbis says, who’s also worked for SOM.
While studying at the University of Wisconsin the Chicago native read a Life magazine article in which she discovered Wright’s Taliesin was just near. “So I immediately left the dorm and hitchhiked (there). It was like a group of buildings, and this particular building has glass going all the way to the floor… so you could easily see into these living rooms and bedrooms, which is what I was peering into. As I was peering into this marvelous enchantment I had heard heavy footsteps behind me and I turned around, thinking someone was going to scream at me, and it was a white peacock in full flutter. It was so amazing, it was like an outer body experience.”
Lempp Kerbis founded Chicago Women in Architecture (which meets Tuesday, 20 Jan). “I had asked Mies if I could please do my own thesis, and he said to me, ‘You mean you want me to work on your project and you don’t want to work on my project? No.’”
Shortly therafter Gert began working for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. There she was lead designer of the dining hall of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. She also designed O’Hare International Airport’s Seven Continents Building. One of her most discussed projects is an urban renewal project for the City of Chicago, an 11-unit condominium building at 2131 N. Clark Street. It earned her a Distinguished Building Award from the AIA.
Originally she thought it was a “very undesirable site.”
“I thought I could change that… if I created a kind of special space to isolate you from the bus line and the traffic. The bedrooms looked out on the greenhouse. Their living rooms and dining rooms opened out on the greenhouse. Forty percent of the people who originally bought the greenhouse 35 years ago are still residents. I love the project,” she says.
To learn more about Gert contact the Chicago AIA. Meanwhile see some recent video of her through the Art Institute of Chicago.
Filed under: AIA, architecture, events
12/12/2008 • 2:30 pm 0
Architects debate through art
San Diego-based architect Teddy Cruz and Mexico City-based artist Pedro Reyes have together been deliberating on, among a host of other interconnected matters, the relation between design strategy and social transformation in the age of globalization. Under the initiative of San Francisco Art Institute’s Exhibitions and Public Programs, they come together again to repurpose their “micropolicies” for transfiguring the socio-urban topography as resolution procedures, in particular, for the variously imbricated, ground-level conflicts obtaining in post-invasion Iraq.
This free exhibit has been extended through 31 January. Learn more about it.
Filed under: architecture, art, community, events, urbanization
28/11/2008 • 2:30 pm 0
For the Greener Good: Divorce Your Car
While showing this editor around Miami in a Hummer last summer, an architect friend suggested that New Urbanism is wrong: it doesn’t develop land plans around cars but vice versa, he said almost incredulously. Meanwhile designers, planners and architects across the country disagree, especially after the green movement emerged as the norm.
The National Building Museum will hold a panel discussion of transit, design and community experts to address a mass divorce of the car.
What will it take to get Americans out of their cars? What is the role of private business in public transit? How do you provide a variety of transit options? How can we design neighborhoods that are more walkable and encourage public transit? Listen to Robin Chase, Co-founder, Zipcar and Founder and CEO, GoLoco; Bert Gregory, FAIA, President and CEO, Mithun Architects + Designers + Planners; and Shelley Poticha, President and CEO, Reconnecting America discuss how to encourage more energy efficient travel for the future. Juliet Eilperin, a journalist at The Washington Post, will moderate the program.
The program will run from 630-8 PM Thursday, 4 December, at the National Building Museum, 401 F Street NW Washington, DC 20001, phone 202.272.244.
Get more information about ticket prices, time, date, etc.
Filed under: community, events, urbanization
21/11/2008 • 2:30 pm 0
Lecture on Intelligent Communities
Peter Katz of Virginia Tech will present a lecture on Attaining the Intelligent Community at the University of Utah College of Architecture and Planning at 530 PM on Monday, 8 Dec. Katz is an urban theorist and community design advocate and wrote The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community. Read more.
Filed under: architecture, community, events
14/11/2008 • 2:30 pm 0
1909 Urban Plan Still Invigorates in Chicago
Photo from Chicago Architectural Club
Legendary architect and planner Daniel Burnham‘s composite plan for Chicago as the hub of a network united by a high-speed rail (which is still talked about and hoped for today) is the center of an exhibit at the Chicago History Museum. This year marks the plan’s centennial of his 1909 Plan for Chicago.
Curated by the Chicago Architectural Club, the exhibit envisions a new plan of Chicago in the form of discrete topics, episodes, and urban projects conceived by teams of the club’s members. The show will also display the top entries in the club’s biennial Burnham Prize international design competition, focusing on designs for one aspect of the new composite urban plan: an intermodal terminal in Chicago’s West Loop district
where a regional high-speed train hub will interface with local highway, metro, and riverway networks.
Discover more about Burnham and this year’s competition, which offers a first place prize of $10,000.
The exhibit is included in the price of admission to the museum. It is open Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm; Thursdays from 9:30 am to 8 pm; and Sundays from 12 to 5 pm. The show runs through January 19.
Filed under: architecture, events, urbanization
07/11/2008 • 2:30 pm 0
Western European design exhibit to brighten Indy
More than 250 works showcasing European design from 1985-2005 will be exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in March 2009. The works will include furniture, glass, ceramics, metalwork, and product design created by 118 designers from 14 Western European countries. The exhibition will accompany an international symposium slated for March.
Read more about it at Dexigner.com
24/10/2008 • 1:30 pm 0
Furniture Design Show
In a new blog feature, SpaceDesignJournal will now list events open to the public and in various locales around the country.
The introductory post centers on Deceptive Design, a furniture exhibition featuring gorgeous designs. It’s put on at the Chicago Cultural Center by the Chicago chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) in collaboration with the Chicago Furniture Designers Association (CFDA). The free and compact exhibit runs through 4 Jan.
This Art Deco-like piece, by Matt Seiler, is called Nested Cubes.
Filed under: events
Recent Comments