Just last week, during the moment in which we, respectively, signed our dental care receipt (no insurance for us!) and toodled around the Arctic Circle, where we live, we discovered that Edificial was, in fact, being cut loose. Shut down, Alec Baldwin style, by which we mean to say “put on hold.” We heard via friendly corporate-y mumbo-jumbo-y email that it was something to do with “the awful (and perhaps worsening) economy,” to which they responded with our typical semantic flair: “Although we’re sad to see the blog go, we understand Breaking Media’s decision. If, at some point in the future, the investors should want to resurrect it, they have our blessing.”

Let’s break it all down. Edificial was beta-launched in early January, hidden behind a complicated website screen sort of thing, and soft-launched on February 1. Readership was in the legions from the very first post, and continued to grow through the introduction of features like LingoWatch, Monday is Mean Day, Thursday is Cute Day, House&HomeWatch, and the random charticle lists we suddenly found ourselves rocking. Edificial was billed as an alternative to the “lively and on-the-ground discussion forums” that so frequently put us to sleep, and we will say that we found reading it to be an often slightly amusing experience that led us to mostly chuckle and occasionally guffaw.

We’re not sure what’s going to happen with Eva and Ian, who will remain at the site through Friday. We asked them, and they looked at us like we were bending the space-time continuum. We sort of were. Then we asked them again, and they slapped us quickly across the collective face, told us to get the frak over ourselves, and do that collaborative nexus of collective nexuses project they’d always been talking about. Something about a book? An exhibition? Architecture-themed luau? Reporting not being our forte, we neglected to write it down.

Still, we were glad they gave a shot.

We’re glad we gave it a shot.

A tipster (tips[at]edificial[dot]com) served up the following dish this morning—a few pointers on how to get ahead now that you’re out on your pipig pursuing some free-lance projects. Start by rubbing your hindquarters with your dominant hand in a gentle, circular motion, scowling over your shoulder at the heartless project manager who just kicked you into the street. Then dust yourself off and listen to what Australian business magazine Anthill has to tell you.

Author Kelly Magowan, in the great tradition of Aussie opportunism, wants you to know that the Global Pigf*!k is really just a smile turned upside down. You, sh*tcanned architect, can make the recession work for you—by thinking like an entrepreneur!

While some are concerned about job security and are adopting the strategy of sitting tight and crossing fingers to weather the storm, others are feeling more empowered and see the market as ripe with opportunities for them to advance their careers.

Bear with the bullet points.

An Entrepreneurial Approach to Job Seeking in a Recession [Anthill]

You’d think things couldn’t get any worse for poor Jan Kaplicky. Back in October, the Czech-born visionary architect split with his longtime special lady, Amanda Levete, dividing between them their shared Future Systems practice. Meanwhile, the London firm’s most prominent project, the Czech National Library, was facing serious opposition from assorted mayors and ministers for its globby, blobby irreverence. And then came the unkindest cut of all: Kaplicky died.

Tough break—but it ain’t over yet. Yesterday it was announced that Levete, who’s commandeered what remained of Kaplicky’s half of the office, has laid off a good portion of its remaining staff. The three dismissed studio hands were working on the library scheme, which would appear to indicate that so far as Levete’s concerned, the project is perma-junked. Levete claims that she and Jan had agreed prior to his death to see the staffers off; Kaplicky’s Czech supporters ain’t buying it.

Oh, and there’s one remaining complication: the Future Systems brand is still owned by Kaplicky’s widow. “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones…”

Levete Confirms Kaplicky Job Cuts [Building Design]

It’s a bad time to be an editor. Yesterday we brought you the news that Anne Guiney, editor-of-thoughts and shaper-of-ideas at the Architect’s Newspaper, would no longer be bringing her shining light of reason to the muddle of dynamicalization that is architects trying to write good. Today we hear that Michael Silverberg, former fact-checker (his dulcet tones asking us just how sunny it was that day in Philadelphia made the usually tooth-extracting fact-checking process more like Cute Day), assistant editor (his dulcet tones assigning every starving freelancer a Metropolis Observed piece made the tooth-extracting subsistence process more like Really Cute Day), and, since last summer, copy chief at Metropolis, has been laid off. It’s not like there was a lot of extra running around the Metropolis offices—their 23rd Street headquarters (right next to the Freemasons, incidentally) always seemed to us a tightly run ship of magazine production—so we’re wondering just what will happen. We’ll miss Michael because, with the magazine in a constant struggle between “lively dialogue” (somebody break out the eyelid-propping toothpicks) and “actually being interesting and engaging,” Silverberg always brought it down to the latter. Some highlights, like his obscenely brilliant “Poetry or Architecture?” post on the POV blog he helped launch, or the bold “In Defense of the Boring Park,” always made the sometimes-stodgy magazine much more appealing to those of us allergic to the stuff. It doesn’t take piles of speculation to figure out why Michael’s salary might have been just too much for the magazine to support—our last issue felt awfully thin—but we’d heard that things were picking back up post-late-08 freak-out. Guess we heard wrong, and sad that we did. But Michael, in case it helps: there’ll always be a place for you on our softball team.

We’ve been kept busier than a one-armed paper hanger just trying to track the thousand natural shocks to which Lordless Norman Foster has been heir these past few weeks. A lost peerage, a lost project, another lost project, a lawsuit—land sakes! The Pritzker Prize-winning architect and aspiring James Bond villain has had a rough go of it by any measure.

And now it’s time to spread the pain around a little. Foster + Partners has announced that it’s laying off nearly a quarter of its global workforce, some 300 to 400 employees. (The applicable briticism is the excruciatingly polite “redundancies”.) Cuts will be especially cutting in the firm’s eastern European division headquartered in Berlin, which office is closing entirely—a fact that jives with our earlier suspicions about their business in Moscow. Mind you, this is coming from a firm that just yesterday was reported to have the fastest growing profits of any private equity backed architecture firm in the world, and from an architect who explicitly disavowed layoffs not four months ago. Just shows to go you. Things are tough all over.

Foster’s to Make 300 to 400 Redundancies [Building Design]

In between yesterday’s floor-surfing and Antivert-hounding, we received a missive announcing editor Anne Guiney’s departure from the Architect’s Newspaper. We were—and this even aside from the severe vertigo—floored. Guiney, to many, is the Architect’s Newspaper. There in various and always-increasing capacities (freelancer, part-timer, then full-time editor) since shortly after the semi-gossipy ultra-reporty buildings-and-those-who-build-them rag was founded by Bill Menking, his wife Diana Darling, and their friend, editor Cathy Lang Ho, in Menking and Darling’s Lispenard Street loft, Guiney’s sensibility—funny but at the same time excruciatingly well-informed and thoughtful—and style—laid back but totally on it—was part of what made the Newspaper, in the words of one architect, “the only publication everyone reads, cover to cover.” Ho left in 2007 and, a few weeks later, the consonant Julie V. Iovine stepped up as executive editor, with Guiney stepping up to New York editor. By this point the Newspaper had an actual office, on Murray Street, and an actual readership way beyond people who were friends with Menking and Darling and Guiney and Ho, and it was serious business, and serious news. But never self-serious.

And now, as a clear residual of our Financial Pigf*ck of Epic Proportions, Guiney’s been laid off. Which leaves, essentially, three employees and an Eavesdropper. And that, friends, does not a newspaper—or a Newspaper—make. Anne, check in every so often, let us know what you’re up to. First round of goats is on us.