Architecture – SpecNews

This week’s biggest architecture and design stories on Dezeen

The cover of David Bowie’s Blackstar album, released just days before his death, was designed to reflect the musician’s mortality, according to his graphic design collaborator Jonathan Barnbrook.
This week on Dezeen: the designer behind David Bowie’s Blackstar album artwork revealed its true meaning in an exclusive interview and we looked ahead to the era of the “megatall” skyscraper.
More architecture | More interiors | More design | More news
Rotterdam-based architecture firm OMA also released images of its renovation plan for Berlin’s KaDeWe department store.
Rotterdam is fast becoming a centre for innovation, according to architects we interviewed this week.

Tributes after leading architect Gareth Hoskins dies aged 48

TRIBUTES have been paid to the Scottish architect Gareth Hoskins, who died at the weekend aged 48.
Scottish architecture is much the lesser with his parting.”
Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Europe and External Affairs, said: “Gareth Hoskins was an outstanding architect.
She tweeted: “Very sad to hear of the death of Gareth Hoskins, one of Scotland’s finest architects.
Hoskins trained as an architect at the Glasgow School of Art and at Florence University.
Hoskins Architects issued a statement confirming his death, adding: “It is with great sadness that we confirm that Gareth Hoskins OBE, the founder and Managing Director of Hoskins Architects, has died.
“Gareth, who was 48, took ill at an event in Edinburgh on Sunday 3rd January and, despite receiving the best care possible in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, he passed away on Saturday.

“Everyone at Hoskins Architects is deeply shocked and saddened by this untimely loss.

2016: A year of grand designs

The branding of 2016 as the Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design, follows this 2015’s Year of Food and Drink status, and 2014’s Year of Homecoming.
VisitScotland’s involvement signals the belief that there’s a tourism buck to be made out of selling Scotland’s architecture – both historic and new – as an attraction.
WHEN fire tore through Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building on 23 May, 2014, the shockwaves spread far beyond the confines of the creative community.
Turning the festival – and the entire Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design – into a financial success is the responsibility, ultimately, of the quango.
Contemporary structures add a new layer to our built environment, taking inspiration from and sometimes reacting against past achievements in design.

How to Dimension with Revit > ENGINEERING.com

Unlike CAD programs, Revit will not allow you to override a dimension value with another dimension value without changing the geometry.
He is a member of AUGI, Club Revit, the UK Revit Register, the Los Angeles Revit Users Group and the Southern California Revit Users Group.
A listening dimension is a form of temporary dimension that appears as an element is being sketched inside or outside the sketch mode.
When this is clicked, it turns the temporary dimension into a permanent dimension (see Figure 15).
Diameter: The Diameter dimension tool measures the length of a straight line segment that passes through the center of a circle.

London Met’ Protests Intensify

The protesters are campaigning against the sale of London Metropolitan University’s Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design which, is expected to gain the London University a minimum of £50m.
It followed a night of visual protests, which saw hundreds of students standing as silhouettes in the university windows as sunlight left London.
With the university seeming under increasing fire in recent years, the board of Directors has decided that a single, Holloway Campus in 2017 is a decision that best suits the university, however, many students of London Met staunchly oppose that opinion.
“We believe this will benefit our students, who will enjoy an enhanced student experience, and our staff, who will have more opportunities to collaborate”
The student protests have been led by protest group Occupy The Cass, and Turner prize-winner Jeremy Deller, who is a visiting professor at the Cass, has been seen on Twitter showing his support for the cause.

Will Wiles on the “real” architecture of Foster and Aravena

Opinion: while many architects are designing slippery “architexture”, Norman Foster and Alejandro Aravena are unlikely allies in the pursuit of real architecture, says Will Wiles.
What could we call the new, expanded, discipline that Foster and Aravena both appear to have in mind?
Perhaps we don’t need a word for it at all – it’s architecture, behaving as architecture should.
Architecture as surface and appearance, architecture that is camouflage and alibi.
Aravena calls for a rethinking of the role of the architect, and new language to express that role.

Does architecture need to be original?

Lawrence argued that the “non-verisimilitude” of rooms paradoxically preserved the intention of the original architecture at the level of aura.
How can authorship work to expose hidden value judgments or latent potential in a so-called “original”?
The commercial and social value of “new” and “novel” and even “original” are, arguably, products of modernity.
What constitutes authorship when architecture almost always involves the evolution of existing typologies?
What does it mean to preserve or destabilise “original” authorial intent?

Don’t destroy the Sir John Cass Faculty – a wonderful part of creative learning and life

The Cass is named after Sir John Cass, who established one of London’s oldest education charities with a historical mandate to found a polytechnic institute at Aldgate to serve the population of east London.
As Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, has said, it is essential to develop the skills of making through hands-on learning.
We should know by now that learning is not restricted to the purely academic: making is also learning.
We, the undersigned, call on London Metropolitan University to review its current strategic plan, One Campus, One Community, in light of its consequences for the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design.
We call on London Metropolitan to pursue a two-site solution that keeps the education of art, making and design alive and kicking where The Cass began – in London’s East End.

Fashion, Trends, Beauty Tips & Celebrity Style Magazine

Architecture, art, design, fashion, cultures, some of the vintage pieces and people all create an image in my head for a design.
Q. The fashion item you most want to buy now?
Q. If you weren’t a jewellery designer, what would you be?
Architecture and jewellery design were and are my dreams.
When we meet she reveals that architecture and design have always been her real passions.

Party with the Eameses! Inside the modernist masters’ riotous home

As Charles Eames used to tell his staff: “Take your pleasure seriously.”
The Eameses playful mischief is still evident in their home studio, the smaller pavilion that stands across a small courtyard from the house.
New employees of the Eames Office would be set the daunting challenge of rearranging the keys to make a new tune.
As the British brutalist architect Peter Smithson, an Eames-admiring contemporary, put it: “They made it respectable to like pretty things”.
A replica features in the exhibition, providing an appropriately anarchic plinkety-plonk soundtrack to the riot of ideas.