Chicahgo, Illinoiz: “Three conceptual designs for a new memorial planned for Grant Park have advanced to the second and final phase of a competition launched to celebrate Daniel Burnham’s impact on Chicago. The finalists are David Woodhouse Architects of Chicago, Hoerr Schaudt of Chicago, and Boston-based Sasaki Associates.” [Bustler]

Jolly Old, England: “US practice Tina Manis Associates has won an open competition to design a pavilion to sit outside Marks Barfield’s Lightbox gallery in Woking, Surrey. The competition for the Art Fund Pavilion was launched last December by the Architecture Foundation, Tent London and the Lightbox.” [BD]

Dublin, Ireland: “The President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, presented the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland’s (RIAI) Gold Medal to the architectural practice Gilroy McMahon. The project for which the medal was presented was Croke Park Stadium.” [Irish Architecture Foundation]

Vienna, Austria: “Vienna practices Span and Zeytinoglu have won a competition to design the Austrian pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai, China.” [Dezeen]

The compeitial is over—long live the competitial! Picking through the manifold entries, pouring in from every corner of the known world, one fact became manifest: That architects, taken on the whole, are batsh*t insane.

The competition, as you will recall, was to design a universal green room, a fantastical routing center for the laid-off architects of the world: a place where they could do such things as architects do—or find new things that architects should do in order to reorient the profession for these Globally Pigf*!ked times. The elicited responses ran the gamut: One contestant, deserving special mention, simply sent in Polaroids of Grant’s Tomb; another sketched plans for an indefinite series of hyper-mediated baby cribs (“networked hibernation modules”); still another built a model of a perfectly charming mid-century suburban living room, complete with conversation pit, accompanied by a legend describing the scale as approximately 1:100,000,000,000—making the living room roughly the size of Oakland. We thank all these entrants with the rest—but to the victors go the tacos.

The winner, one of whose images appears above, is “WARD aka Come on IN”, submitted by Meredith Baber, Terry Surjan, and Shota Ba of C U P, a design research group based in Blacksburg, VA. More of C U P’s winning images, along with our speculative critical ruminations thereon, appear after the jump—along with a look at runner-up Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, an engineering outfit based in New York. Congratulations to both.

Washington, D.C.: “Frank Gehry has been selected to design the national memorial to President Eisenhower on a site off the Mall.” [Washington Times]

El Cajon, CA: “San Diego-based Ledcor Construction has been awarded the $40 million contract for a new public safety center in downtown El Cajon, CA.” [Architect Buzz]

Abu Dhabi, UAE: “Leeser, an architecture firm based in New York City, has taken first prize in a competition for a five-star luxury hotel in the Zayed Bay in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Leeser’s design is called the Helix Hotel.” [Shopping Blog]

Asia, Generally: Kay Ngee Tan Architects have been selected to design the Singapore Pavilion for World Expo Shanghai 2010. [ArchiCentral]

Seattle, Washington: “Seattle’s Wing Luke Asian Museum, designed by Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects has received awards in two major national design competitions: a Great Places Award given by the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm, and Metropolis magazine; and the International Interior Design Association’s (IIDA) prestigious 36th Annual Interior Design Competition. [tips(at)edificial(dot)com]

Back in the day, flush with the selection of six teams who’d been shortlisted to design Washington, DC’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, we speculated as to what kind of proposals might come from the mouths of the babes at DiScoFro (teamed with KlingStubbins) or Pei Cobb Freed & Partners (& Devrouax & Purnell) or Safdie (and Sultan Campbell Brit & Associates) or David Adjaye (with Davis Brody Bond and the Freelon Group) or Moody Nolan and Antoine Predock or Lord Norm and URS. We found highlights in each of them, mostly to do with prior track records and/or hilarity of names. Today, we can actually look at their designs.

Highlights from each of the contestants’ entries:

From the Pei team, with points for emotional heartstrings: “It would have a roof garden with landscaping inspired by a pattern on one of the architects’ grandmother’s quilt.”

From DiScoFro & Co, in keeping with their Lincoln Center-style shenanigans:“a table-shaped building wrapped in glass.”

From Adjaye, etc: “a museum with two of the above-ground stories shaped like wide baskets.”

From Norm’s (architecture) Dorm: “At the top of the four stories, visitors enter an area of “celebration” and face a huge window, looking out at the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.”

From Mad Eye Moody (Nolan + Predock): “Its glass roof features etchings echoing Yoruba ancestral arts.”

From Moshe: “a section called “Freedom Bridge,” on the top level, would include exhibits on music and sports.”

Let’s give it up for literalism. We’ll see you a Jewish Museum and raise you one Yad Vashem.

Architectural Firms Compete to Design African American History Museum [Washington Post, via Unbeige]
There Is No “I” in Team: Finalists for NMAAHC Announced [Edificial]

Atlanta, Georgia: “The Freelon Group, a Durham architectural firm, and partner HOK of Atlanta were named Thursday as the architects of record for the Center for Civil & Human Rights in Atlanta.” [Business Journal]

Nummy Nummy, The Tummy: “Finalists have been announced for the design categories in the 2009 James Beard Foundation Awards. Thomas Schlesser of Design Bureaux (a finalist for both The Publican and Bar Boulud) will battle it out with Philippe Starck and friends (The Bazaar by José Andrés) in the restaurant design category, while JNL Graphic Design (also for The Publican, which really must be something to see), Korn Design (The Corner Office), and Steven Solomon (Terroir) are finalists for restaurant graphics.” [Unbeige]

Reggio Calabria, Italy: “Rome-based studio aka Architetti has won the first prize in the “Ce.Te.S” international competition for an experimental television cultural/didactic center in the former Italcitrus packaging plant in Reggio Calabria, Italy.” [Bustler]

Beirut, Lebanon: “Italian architect Alberto Catalano has won the international competition to design Lebanon’s new Arts and Culture House, Culture Minister Tammam Salam announced Monday.” [Zawya]

Just in case we’d hoped that the finer particulars of architecture—the structural detailing, the joinery, the rebars—were impossible to outsource, lest we rest on our laurels of developed world construction methodology, should we entertain the possibility that we’re not entirely replaceable, allow us to be of service in passing along the latest wave of assistance offers to hit our stateside architecture pals. This just in, sent specifically to a friend on internet [sic] and in the, er, industry (Gold Star to you, Sir!), with a subject line reading Structural Detailing @ USD 10.00 Per Hour!!!:

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Blogging is totally New York-specific, Lat, we swear. Totally.

London, England: “The UK’s Art Fund has announced four finalists in their London Pavilion Design Competition. The finalists are Area, from Greece; Feix&Merlin, from the UK; In & Edit, of France; and Karim Muallem, of the UK.” [Architecture List]

Madrid, Spain: “The first edition of the BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Prize in the Arts, sponsored by the Spanish bank BBVA, has been awarded to American architect Steven Holl in the amount of 400,000 euros.” [Architectural Record]

Delft, Netherlands: “Three practices have won an ideas competition to recreate the architecture faculty at the Delft University of Technology, 10 months after it was devastated by fire. Dutch practices Laura Alvarez Architecture and Gijs Raggers and French practice Marc Bringer Architecture triumphed over more than 450 entries from 50 countries in the competition.” [BD]

Knowsley, England: “Ian Simpson Architects with Adams Kara Taylor Engineers and Hoare Lea Engineers has been announced as winners of the competition to design a new innovative, architecturally striking educational, conference and seed production complex at the National Wildflower Center in Knowsley, part of the Liverpool City Region.” [ArchiCentral]

In between checking out Dror for Tarjay and pondering the mysterious relationship between Storefront for Art & Architecture and the ultra-luxe Dellis Cay development, we slipped in for coffee with Official Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven and watchable person Jerry Helling, Bernhardt Design mastermind and ICFF mascot. He was in town to introduce the design world to his company’s latest Global Edition piece, in this case a sofa produced by Claudia and Harry Washington, two lovely and delightful El Salvador-based designers who won a local competition last year, went to ICFF through a USAID program, and got snapped up into Jerry’s flock. Which has, just to put it into context, included Fredrikson Stallard, Ross Lovegrove, and XO designer Yves Behar. Which pretty much explains the Claudia/Harry high-five vibe we were picking up.

The sofa, called Calibra, is kind of based on the idea of a ballerina pig. In that it’s a really sturdy body on tiny little legs. Which are shiny. Which we like. We talked to Jerry about having furniture on the floor (we got a ew-face in response) versus having it raised up on legs (and dunk), and Calibra’s cast-aluminum ones create just that right amount of distance. Best of all is the V-shaped notch on the side, which gives this otherwise big—“it’s really really huge,” Claudia told us, bright eyes wide—mass a little bit of a visual and practical breather.

A breather is exactly what this year’s lead-up to ICFF needs. We’ve been hearing murmurs about party cancellations here and there (speaking of Bernhardt, word is their usual fancy-flash dinner is off) and it seems like this year’s going to be far less of a three-day bacchanal and far more of the trade show it always is once you’re actually inside Javits. Claudia and Harry are perfect for this iteration: humble, interested in furniture, focused on one and one thing alone. Furniture, and its creation.

See you at ICFF. And in the meantime…

Washington, DC: “The State Department has announced four finalists to design the new American Embassy in London, England. The finalists are New York-based Richard Meier and Partners, Santa Monica, Calif.-based Morphosis Architects, Kieran Timberlake of Philadelphia and PEI Cobb Freed and Partners of New York.” [AP]

London, England: “Architecture practice DSDHA has been chosen to redesign Waterloo City Square near London’s South Bank arts quarter.” [Transport Briefing]

Zhejiang, China: “Cannon Design has won the design competition for the Zhejiang University Medical Center in Zhejiang, China. [WAN]

Atlanta, Georgia: “Sovereign, a residential tower in Atlanta designed by Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart, has been selected for the Best of the Best Award in McGraw-Hill Construction’s national competition, which recognizes design and construction excellence in residential projects.” [Design Taxi]

Knock us over with an alliterative alligator. It’s Della Valle Bernheimer and ARO’s R House, winner of the Innovative Green Homes competition, and it’s a delicate doozy of design. Slated to be slapped up in Syracuse, the R House is all about size, super-insulation, and sensibility, which leads to a 71% savings in energy output. Which means that the house requires the same amount of energy for heating as a hair-dryer. Which… means that a hair-dryer is equivalent to 29% of a standard Syracuse’s house’s use?

We’ve never been more grateful for our opt-out.

Update. Our brother-from-another-mother over at the Architect’s Newspaper asks us if we’ve ever heard of google. OK. So it’s not quite revealed. So much as looked with a new pair of glasses. We’ll always have zaniness on you guys. Always!

R House by ARO [Wallpaper.com]
Green Goes the Neighborhood [Architect’s Newspaper]

In today’s edition of confusing corporate language—it’s not quite a LingoWatch but not every day can be spectacular day—the DesignIntelligence Compensation and Benefits survey reports that architects’ salaries have actually been, gasp, rising. In that they are higher this year than they were last. You know, despite the fact that far fewer architects even have jobs now. Or buildings to build. Or construction sites to finish. But their headline says that the “compensation of designers and architects remains healthy.” That’s a big argument to slip in there—that the compensation remains healthy—when everyone knows compensation is completely disproportionate to the amount of work it takes to actually invent and then see through the construction of a not-necessarily see-through building (something our beloved Josh Prince-Ramus vociferously argued against at a recent Rockwell talk), and it’s a nice try at a little sugar-coating. Sort of like we were all screwed before, and we’re all still screwed, but at least some of us, spread out over a scant 460 firms, are okay, for now, or were, last year.

It’s the kind of data that doesn’t lend itself well to the kind of keen statistical analysis rampant assumptions we like to make around here, but it’s good to take a $69.99 bite out of the middle and see what you get. For us, it’s sort of like a mustard-and-jelly sandwich. Yeah. You feel that. Right?

London, England: “George Oldham, Colin Brock, Ruth Brennan, Bernard Wyld, Andrew Mortimer, Gordon Gibb and Sarah Lupton are the seven architects elected to serve on Britain’s Architects Registration Board for the next three years. The election represents a partial victory for the ARB’s Reform Group, five of whose representatives are among the new board members.” [BD]

Leicester, England: “Engineer Buro Happold and Explorations Architecture have won the design competition for a new bridge over the River Soar in Leicester.” [Building]

Liverpool, England: “London-based architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris were today announced winners in the competition to restore Liverpool’s Royal Court theater.” [The Liverpool Echo]

Stockholm, Sweden: “French firm archi5 has been announced winner of the International Master Plan Competition for Stockholm’s Nya Årstafältet neighborhood. Archi5’s winning proposal ‘Arkipelag’ has been a collaboration with landscape architect Michel Desvigne.” [ArchDaily]

Imaginationville, Toyland: “Trad Play Fort, by designers Josue Gamonal and Vicente Porres won the Third Industrially Produced Designer Furniture Award. The theme of the awards was ‘The Child’s Universe.’” [Inhabitots]

Gotham City, USA: “Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone’s Tweet-a-watt walked away with top honors at New York’s 2009 Greener Gadgets Expo.” [Engadget]

The Winterhouse Writing Awards are here! The Winterhouse Writing Awards are here!

Every March, we brush off the files and scour through the archives, hoping against hope that we’ll find three experimental works, fiction pieces, works of journalism, essays, reviews, bits of history and theory, poems, plays, screenplays, or proposals for any kinds of projects in which writing about design comes into play that might be good enough to knock our judges’ (Pentagram-designed?) socks off. This year is no different. Except that we’re here. Sharing the prospects of glory and all.

Previous winners include 2008’s David Barringer, whose I.D. story called “Raining on Evolution’s Parade” sent us reeling all over the image-saturated continuum, West Coast Metropolis legend—all three of her submissions were first published there, making it just as much a win for the magazine—Jade Chang, and inaugural winner Thomas de Monchaux, an official Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven and eerily on-target all-rounder, the kind of Renaissance writer as at home with Mr. St. Laurent as he is with Frank.

Judges have included twitterer Kurt Andersen, change-happy Julie Lasky, worker poet Meghan O’Rourke, reader Allison Arieff, apertured Melissa Harris, visionary Bruce Sterling (!!), short essayist Michael Bierut, PAP publisher Kevin Lippert, and New Yorker Judith Thurman. People to buy this year’s gift baskets for are: typographist Rick Poynor, object teacher Alice Rawsthorn, The Sorkin, and chair William Drenttel, co-founder of both the necessary Design Observer and competition-running and world-of-design-changing outfit Winterhouse.

Competition opens today, with a deadline of June 2 and an award amount of $10K. So don’t mind us for the next few months. We might be a little distracted by the reformatting of our every last keyword into 8.5-layout Courier 10. Because it’s on.

Winterhouse Writing Awards [AIGA]

Earlier this week, our brothers from another mother over at Curbed showed off the newest iteration of Soho’s 27 Wooster Street. Designed by KPF as an update of a “reworking” (what?) of an original plan developed by Smith-Miller + Hawkinson, this one has less apparently offensive glass.

OK so. One architecture firm thinks up a way to design a building, that falls through, and another architecture firm picks it up. Kind of a strange segue from Smith-Miller + Hawkinson to KPF, though—like switching up from the kid who sort of hung around the fringes but once you saw their notebook you experienced mind explosion to the local quarterback—but we can roll with it. Or we could, until we discovered that the segue had a break in the middle, a moment we can only ascribe to wishful thinking or outright bonkers-ness. (Ah, developers.)

It seems, according to Henry Smith-Miller, according to an Eavesdroplet, developer Axel Stawski talked to Prince of Darkness Thom Mayne for half a second. They’ve already ed note: commented on that weirdness, but we need to call this out here. Because going from Smith-Miller + Hawkinson to Thom Mayne to KPF is, to our minds, sort of like going from Anastasia Dualla to Donnie Darko to Mike Dexter.

Developers aren’t generally known for their on-target choices, but this trail speaks of something greater than mis-directed enthusiasm. It speaks, friends, of Illusionation.

Shenzhen, China: “Steven Holl Architects have been selected as the winning firm for the design of the master plan of the “Shenzhen Four-Towers-in-One” competition.” [Bustler]

Helsinki, Finland: “French firm Beckmann-N’Thépé has just won a competition to redesign the Helsinki Zoo.” [Wired]

Randers, Denmark: “The director of the Randers Museum of Art announced 3XN as the winner of a competition to design the museum’s new home. The firm was chosen from a group of 5 teams including Zaha Hadid, Behnish Arkitekten, CoopHimme(l)blau and entasis a/s.” [WAN]

Amsterdam, Netherlands: “Schiphol Airport has announced the winner of the ‘Create a Barrier of Silence’ design competition. The winning design for an innovative noise-reduction facility at Runway 18R-36L is the ‘Ecobarrier’ submitted by Toine van Goethem.” [Bustler]

Skibbereen, Ireland: “Dublin-based studio Donaghy + Dimond architects has been selected from a field of 216 applicants as the winner of the West Cork Arts Centre’s architectural design competition. The centre will house a number of local galleries, studios, performances spaces and workshops.” [DesignBoom]

While anyone has yet to break into Hans Ulrich Obrist’s fecund brain to see plans of SANAA’s forthcoming plans for the Serpentine Pavilion, mere lack of facts on the ground has never stopped either us or, we learn now, anyone of our colleagues—particularly those to the other side of the pond—from rampant speculation. We called it for ethereal boxiness/boxy ethereality, and it seems we’re on point. The Guardian’s Jonathan Glancey clocks into our critical meter with a first-word-in-a-list description of their work as “ethereal” (score 1!) while over at the Evening Standard, Rowan Moore kicks his speculation off with a line about boxes (score 2!).

Glancey focuses his lovestruck attention on the architectural success of the New Museum while Moore seems quite taken with Sejima’s quietly powerful ego (she once refused to put on a hat - oh and also her architecture is baller), but they’re in line with both appearing a zillion percent behind the SANAA selection. We’ll wait for pictures before dropping the Official Edificial endorsement, but let’s just say our vertigo isn’t the only thing that has us leaning.

Introducing the Serpentine’s secret weapon [The Evening Standard]
Serpentine turns to Japanese architects for 2009 pavilion [The Guardian]

Things, we are starting to learn, are not always what they seem. Take the Architectural League of New York. Headquartered—along with the Municipal Arts Society and Urban Center Books—in the Madison Avenue Palace Hotel complex, one could be led into thinking that this was another meet-and-greet fostering social club, a place for Charlotte Moss to drop by and try on William van Alen’s Beaux Arts Ball costume (sure to be floating around the offices), a joint for Alex Gorlin and Paige Rense to chill.

One would be utterly wrong.

The League is so on it it hurts, in a good way. Take this year’s recently released Emerging Voices, a yearly line-up of architects just starting to step out of the fray and into the limelight. Winners have to actually have built stuff, and well. From Minneapolis-based landscaper Shane Coen to Mexico City’s ultra-clear Ordos 100-sanctioned at103, this year’s winners—aside from hometown favorites Leven Betts (who emerge in our book for their Pattern Recognition nod which we know is all about Gibson, right guys?) and Andrew Berman Architect—are a whole crop of designers we should know about and are glad the League does. To give a sense, past Emerging Voices include the oh-so-kinetic National Design Award winner Tom Kundig (they called it in ‘04), Office dA (Oh-Three, Oh-Three, Oh-Three!), and WorkAC (last year.)

The lecture series, two firms to a talk, starts March 5. We’ll be there. Wearing, uh, well, it’s sort of like a concept more than a building, it’s, umm… so that’s the… “model.”

Image [New York Times]

Word comes from the Architect’s Journal that Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, shifters of matchboxes and designers of crazily-multi-roomed houses in a Plum Grove, have been tapped to design the next Serpentine Pavilion. The temporary structure, which will go up this summer and hang around Hyde Park’s Hans Ulrich Obrist-co-directed Serpentine Gallery for a few months, will be SANAA’s first in the UK, and joins a lineage that includes Frank and Rem, Balmond and Siza. Oscar. And, since we have to, Danny and Zaha. Given that backdrop it’s a pretty clear sign of faith that SANAA has—in big thanks to the New Musem—made the jump from beloved-insiders (we’ll never forget a review-gone-astray circa 2004 in which the critics seemed to want nothing more than to out-Sejima-drop one another) to big guns. In the meantime, we’ll be staying tuned for something in the ethereally boxy/boxily ethereal arena.

Sejima and Nishizawa of SANAA to design Serpentine Pavilion [Architect’s Journal]

Shenzhen, China: “Chinese firm Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ) has received first prize in the competition to design the Shenzhen Media Group, directly adjacent to OMA’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Shenzhen, China.” [DesignBoom]

Shenzhen, China: “Austrian architects Coop Himmelb(l)au have won a competition to design the headquarters for the China Insurance Group, directly adjacent to OMA’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Shenzhen, China. [ArchiCentral]

London, China: “The Alrov Group has appointed David Chipperfield Architects to design their new luxury five star hotel on the site of the Café Royal on London’s Regent Street, directly adjacent to OMA’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Shenzhen, China.” [WAN]

Shenzhen, Denmark: “Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects of Denmark has been selected as the winner of a competition to transform a former slaughterhouse into a mixed-use master plan. The building site is located in the town of Horsens, Denmark, directly adjacent to OMA’s Shenzhen Stock Exhange in Shenzhen, China.” [DesignBoom]

Yesterday was, barring today, the greatest day of our lives. Mostly because Grimaldi’s was right around the corner from ARCHDL V’s Galapagos location, but mostly actually because of the duel. Stay tuned for an incisive IM post-game, but in the meantime, a run-down of what went down, with pictures.

The brief was to design a spaceport that could and would launch white-collar criminals to the Diller + Scofidio ARCHDL I-winning moon prison. The location was Coney Island. The materials were five monopoly boards. The costumes—Front Studio’s Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita dressed like accountants, Weiss/Manfredi’s Justin Kwok and Alice Chai like baller-bankers complete with W$M bling—were tremendous.

First round, thirty minutes of sketching. Most greatest was to watch the difference in communication—Yen and Michi sat on the same tiny chair (for a while) and talked semi-quietly while they drew, totally mind-melded, while Justin and Alice moved around a lot and seemed like they were throwing out way more ideas—and starting to watch the architecture hit. We’d asked both of the teams beforehand if they thought architecture could be made in an hour and a half, and they both said yes. So we were interested to see how. Short break, then an hour of model-building. That’s where there’s magic.