Hasta La Ideas

News: the second proposal from Danish architecture firm BIG to extend the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah, has been thrown out by planning authorities for failing to meet strict local preservation guidelines.

Following a city hall meeting held last week, council members have ruled that the new concrete structure proposed by Bjarke Ingels’ firm for the former mining town does not conform to the Old Town planning guidelines.

The existing Kimball Art Center has been a local landmark in the town since 1976, but the non-profit organisation wants to double the size of its existing premises with a new building at the intersection of Main Street and Heber Avenue.

BIG’s competition-winning first proposal – a wooden structure built from railway sleepers – never made it to City Hall. It was dropped early on, after being widely criticised by locals for being out of character with the historic setting.

The latest design, which features a more streamlined concrete form, was understood to have been more popular based on a vote that indicated two thirds of the public were in favour.

However, a notice signed by city preservation planner Anya Grant and planning director Thomas Eddington confirmed that the planning application has been rejected.

Eddington told local newspaper Park Record that the expansion did not relate to the historic Kimball Art Center building “aesthetically, visually or historically.”

He also claimed the proposal would not be compatible with the historic streetscape, but maintained that a solution could be achieved on this site.

“There was a lot of effort put into this building,” Eddington said. “Everyone wants for the Kimball to be in this location.”

The arts organisation has ten days to appeal the decision – a window that ends on 2 September.

“Our board of directors is surprised and disappointed with the city’s decision, but we will move forward with evaluating the most viable options for keeping art thriving in and around Park City,” said Kimball director Robin Marrouche.

“This outcome is not what we had hoped for, but we respect the process, and we will take time to determine our next steps.”

Park City’s government has strictly regulated buildings along Main Street for years, in an attempt to preserve the architectural character of the mining-era town.

BIG’s design, with concrete walls cast against wooden formwork to create the look of a log cabin, was described by the firm as being “like the lovechild of the present day volumes of the existing Kimball’s modern day architecture and the sloping roofs of the classic mountain chalets”.

It was intended to provide 1,400 square metres of additional exhibition space.

BIG declined to comment when contacted by Dezeen.

The post BIG’s second Kimball Art Center
proposal rejected by city planners appeared first on Dezeen.

For anyone interested in emerging artists and musicians working outside the mainstream, the internet is a goldmine. While the underground music scenes of past generations required word-of-mouth knowledge, today we can all, in theory, find exactly what we want to listen to—anytime, anywhere….

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News: a shopping centre that replaced an iconic Brutalist car park and a controversial tower beside the River Thames are among the six projects on the Carbuncle Cup 2014 shortlist for the UK’s worst new building.

British architecture magazine Building Design (BD) has announced the shortlist for its annual award for the worst building completed in the UK in the past 12 months.

After four months of public nominations, the final list was selected by a judging panel including the magazine’s editor Thomas Lane, former Royal Institute of British Architects president Owen Luder and Hank Dittmar, urbanist and advisor to the Prince’s Trust – the charity run by the Prince of Wales.

The building that received the most public nominations was Trinity Square in Gateshead, designed by 3D Reid and developed by Spenhill Developments. The shopping centre replaced an iconic Brutalist car park designed by Carbuncle Cup judge Owen Luder, which features in the 1971 Michael Caine film Get Carter.

“The first principle of demolition should be to put up something that was better than was there before,” said Luder. “Whatever you thought of the car park, this project is much worse.”

Another of the shortlisted nominations is Vauxhall Tower, a 50-storey round building that occupies a site on the banks of the River Thames by London’s Vauxhall Bridge. Tony Pidgely, chief executive of developer, Berkeley Group, conceded that the project “could have been better” but said the company would learn from its mistakes.

The other four on the list are: Woolwich Central by Sheppard Robson, a residential development in south London; the Chancellor’s Building – an education centre for the University of Bath by Stride Treglown; an east London student housing scheme by BDP called Unite Stratford City; and another block of apartments designed by CZWG on a site near the Arsenal Emirates football stadium in north London known as QN7 flats.

Originally launched as a critical counterpoint to the Stirling Prize, the Carbuncle Cup aims to focus attention of the vast numbers of buildings across the country that fall well below the design standards of the projects generally featured in the architectural press.

“Good architecture should provide decent places for people to live and work, enhance our towns and cities, be enduring and ultimately uplift the spirit of everyone who interacts with those buildings,” said BD editor Thomas Lane.

“The sad reality is that far too much new development falls short of these basic tenets of good design. Some buildings are unforgivably bad and deserve to be named and shamed which is where the Carbuncle Cup comes in.”

The 2014 winner of the Carbuncle Cup will be announced next week.

The post Carbuncle Cup 2014
shortlist announced appeared first on Dezeen.

The latest Julia Roberts-fronted issue of InStyle is more than a fall fashion blockbuster—it’s also a celebration of the Time Inc. magazine-cum-brand’s twentieth anniversary. The 700+ page-September book is brimming with retrospective morsels along with expanded takes on signature features that strike the signature InStyle balance of inspirational and attainable. We recently sat down with creative director Rina Stone to discuss her (extensive) responsibilities, the evolving InStyle brand, and the making of the mega-issue. Snagging Roberts for the cover was “a real coup,” Stone told us. “Ariel [Foxman, InStyle editor-in-chief] felt there was no one better to celebrate our 20th anniversary. She’s such an InStyle girl. Putting that shoot together, we wanted to do a fashion story—obviously, because it’s the September issue—but we also wanted to make sure that we left with something that was iconic and memorable—some pictures that would last forever. She loved the concept, and she has such personality. I think some of these portraits, you can put them in a time capsule, take them out in 20 years, and they’ll still be relevant.”

Read the full interview on FishbowlNY: So What Do You Do, Rina Stone, Creative Director at InStyle?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I don’t know what you thought of your local weather reporter when you were growing up, but for me, he played a bigger role walking in the city parade than as an accurate forecaster. I know it’s not necessarily their fault—each meteorologist is at the mercy of a green screen and pre-determined satellite information. I guess we should all be happy that the digital push has literally put weather reporting in the hands of the people. Still, there are some days my pseudo-trusty weather app promises sunshine and cloudless skies and I’ll get home drenched by an unexpected downpour, throwing me back to this 2-second Family Guy clip that I find myself going back to time and again:

We’ve got your back, German-speaking readers

It sends me into giggles every time. But thanks to BloomSky—a crowdsourced weather information system that’s looking to restore our trust in forecasting—I may not have to resort to silly YouTube clips to relieve my unexpected weather rage. The package comes with a outdoor module and an app, with the option to buy add-ons like a solar panel, extended battery life, an indoor module and mounting supplies. The personal weather station has all kinds of cool capabilities built in: a rain sensor that can tell when rain starts and stops, down to the minute; weather pattern push notifications; a wide-angle HD camera that turns on a dawn and off at dusk for capturing weather scenes; an automatically created timelapse video come each sunset; and the ability to subscribe to other BloomSky stations for weather updates around the world.

The crowdsourcing weather station recently saw crowdfunded success (see what I did there?) on Kickstarter, surpassing its $75,000 initial goal and reaching its stretch goal of $100,000. Here’s a video highlighting all of its bells and whistles:

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