Month: April 2009

  • 33rd Pritzker Prize winner: Peter Zumthor

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        He is not a celebrity architect, not one of the names that show up on shortlists for museums and concert hall projects or known beyond architecture circles. He hasn’t designed many buildings; the one he is best known for is a thermal spa in an Alpine commune. And he has toiled in relative obscurity…

  • Easter Architecture

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    While Easter has huge significance for those of Christian faith with the story of death and rising again, for the rest of largely heathen New Zealand Easter mainly seems to mean gorging on chocolate and doing a spot of shopping. Do chocolate and architecture mix? Well, almost. Here is the world’s largest easter egg (in…

  • “Something Awful being built” – or not as the case may be.

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    Astute venue of architectural criticism, the Capital Times (8-14th April 2009) came up trumps recently via comic strip “Jitterati”‘s social commentary. With one foul swoop (or more accurately four comic strip frames) local building, the recession, class politics, and architectural disillusionments ensued. One cultural giant was pitted against the merits of another, as the comic…

  • Film : Rem Koolhaas – A Kind of Architect

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    When: 3.45pm Friday 10 April & 1pm Sunday 12 April Where: Paramount Theatre, Courtney Place As part of the World Cinema Showcase 2009, this documentary by Markus Heidingsfelder and Min Tesch, discusses the ‘whirlwind career’ of Koolhaas: architect, filmaker, journalist, urban theorist. “The climax comes with his first skyscraper, the amazing “loop in space” of…

  • Lecture and film screening of Oscar Niemeyer’s “Life is a Breath of Air”

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    When : 6.00pm, Wednesday 8th April 2009 Where : LT1 Faculty of Architecture and Design VUW 139 Vivian Street, Wellington niemeyer-poster

  • Every Recession needs its Architectural Show Ponies

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    It’s a big scarey world at the moment: Side-lining RMA trauma, capitalism getting egg on its face, the planet going down the climatic toilet, and Memorial Park on hold. Let’s not even mention the National Library. It’s in times like these that irresponsible flippancy becomes one of the few critical tools left unshakable.

  • RMA submissions – due today

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    Submissions on the RMA Streamlining Bill is due today. I’ll refrain from comments about politics and streamlining – or streamlining and design – you can check out Christina Cogdell’s Eugenic Design for that one. But the Bill proposed raises important issues about how the public might be included or excluded from the RMA process. The…

  • Architectural reasons for dumping the Monarchy…?

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    Unfortunately the Guardian article that brings this rather strange contemporary building to our attention is dated 31st of March – so I have to assume that it isn’t some April Fool’s Day prank. This is, according to the article, the Prince of Wales’ first attempt at architectural design – a fire station in that weird…

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