Architect Renzo Piano has been called upon to lead reconstruction efforts in towns left devastated by the earthquake that struck central Italy last week, and to mitigate against future disasters.

Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi asked Piano, 78, to play a leading role in the reconstruction of the towns of Amatrice, Accumoli and Pescara del Tronto, after they were hit by the 6.2-magnitude quake on 24 August 2016.

Renzi also asked the Genoa-based architect to help develop a plan for future disaster prevention, which could involve changing the laws on earthquake-proofing for housing and public buildings.

In an interview with the Guardian, Piano said changes in building policy must be made as soon as possible.

“We have to act quickly, with the utmost urgency,” he told the paper. “Anti-seismic requirements must be inserted in the laws of the country to make our homes safe, just as it’s compulsory for a car to have brakes that work.”

The 2016 Central Italy earthquake destroyed a number of major buildings in the region, as well as the homes of over 2,500 people.

Displaced residents are currently being housed in tent camps, but the aim is to move them into simple wooden structures before winter. According to local media, these cabin-style buildings are favoured over tents and shipping containers.

The plan outlined by Renzi calls for reconstruction to begin in the next eight months. Piano has looked beyond this, with a “subtle, scientific” plan to safeguard the towns for the next 50 years, reports the Guardian.

“We are speaking about the ridge of the Apennines, the backbone of Italy from north to south, an operation projected over 50 years and two generations,” said the architect.

“We are talking about millions of buildings, it is not impossible if you work through generations.”

One of the biggest challenges, he claimed, is the amount of corruption in Italy.

“It is not just corruption, there is bureaucracy and illegality,” added Piano. “Now there is a strong push against it and Italy is trying to do something about it. It is not impossible to overcome it, something new is coming.”

Piano was made an ambassador for heritage organisation UNESCO in 1995, and has previously worked on humanitarian architecture projects in Italy and Africa.

He is one of several Pritzker Prize winners that are involved in disaster relief. Shigeru Ban has famously worked on numerous reconstruction projects, including the recent Ecuador earthquake, while recent laureate Alejandro Aravena has worked on flooding mitigation in Chile.

The post Renzo Piano to lead recovery plan following Italian earthquake appeared first on Dezeen.

The Creative Industries Federation has warned that the UK could face a creative skills shortage, after the latest GCSE results revealed a drop of almost 10 per cent in students studying Design and Technology.

The latest GCSE results released last week show that the number of pupils that sat exams in Design and Technology (D&T) fell 10 per cent from 204,788 in 2015 to 185,279 in 2016.

The number of students sitting GCSE-level exams in Art and Design subjects also dropped by 6 per cent, from 194,637 to 183,085.

Meanwhile the number of students applying to sit AS level qualifications in Art and Design, traditionally taken a year after GCSEs, dropped by 26 per cent.

“This has worrying implications for the skills pipeline in Britain’s hugely successful arts and creative industries,” said Creative Industries Federation chief executive John Kampfner.

“We already have skills shortages in many jobs such as animation and special effects,” he added. “Engineering, which requires a similar mix of creative and technical skills, also has recruitment problems.”

The Creative Industries Federation said that the increasing focus on the new English Baccalaureate, or Ebacc, was leading to the sidelining of creative subjects.

The Ebacc replaces existing GCSEs, which are usually sat by students aged around 16, with five compulsory subjects – English, maths, science, geography or history and languages – and seven qualifications. Students can then opt to take further qualifications in other subjects.

Schools will be judged based on the number of students that pass the seven core Ebacc exams at grade C or above, meaning there is less incentive to encourage participation in creative subjects like design or art.

“Entries for GCSEs in arts subjects [overall] have fallen by 46,000 this year compared with last,” said the Creative Industries Federation, which was founded to lobby government on behalf of creative businesses, institutions, charities, organisations and individuals.

“This year’s loss is more than five times the size of the loss in 2015, when candidate numbers fell by 9,000,” it added.

“D&T has suffered some of the most extreme drops in take-up since the introduction of the EBacc – the loss of statutory status and current accountability measures have caused a 50 per cent fall in D&T GCSE entries from 2003 to 2014.”

Many designers and architects have expressed concern over the future supply of home-grown talent for UK firms – particularly in the event of Brexit – and industry bodies have pointed to the Ebacc as an indication of the government’s lack of roots-level support.

The Design Council is among those backing a campaign to reform or abolish the EBacc, and the Royal Academy of the Arts, the Creative Industries Federation and the Royal Institute of British Architects have all expressed concerns about the implications of the new system.

“Even in the announcement of the GCSE results, the government focuses entirely on the EBacc subjects, further encouraging the marginalisation of creative ones,” said Kampfner.

“Yet this traditional group of subjects is not enough to prepare pupils for some of the most exciting careers available to them in the UK.”

Earlier plans to make the Ebacc compulsory and remove creative subjects from the UK school curriculum were scrapped in 2013. But the government is now aiming to reach a target of 90 per cent participation in the Ebacc, and has been encouraging more widespread take-up in schools.

Designers and architects who attended Dezeen’s Brexit design summit in June described the state of education in the UK as “f*cked”.

The post Drop in number of UK children studying creative subjects could trigger skills shortage appeared first on Dezeen.

Canadian studio Bing Thom Architects has completed a community swimming pool building in suburban Vancouver, with a roof made from a series of giant trusses and skylights (+ slideshow).

Encompassing 6,967 square metres, the Guildford Aquatic Centre is an addition to an existing recreational facility in Surrey – a suburban community just outside of Vancouver.

The new building accommodates swimming, water polo and other aquatic sports and activities.

In addition to a 50-metre lap pool certified by the International Swimming Federation, the facility houses a leisure pool with a therapy area and walking lanes. It also contains a jacuzzi, a lazy river, a water slide, a sauna and a steam room.

Rectilinear in form, the building has exterior walls made of glass and multicoloured concrete – a pairing of materials that results in a “rhythm of solid and void”. Inside, the design team used a light colour palette that gives the space an airy and clean feel.

“The design is conceived as a magic box, with the pixelated precast concrete exterior acting in tension with the white-pearl natatorium interior,” said Bing Thom Architects, a Vancouver-based firm established in 1982.

Resting on a gently sloping site, the building is encircled by a fluid, choreographed landscape that contrasts with the building’s straight lines.

Terraced gardens — which are visible from the interior pool deck – help with stormwater management while also serving as a natural habitat. Above the gardens is a meandering pathway that leads to the main entrance.

Visitors pass through a reception area, with changing areas located below ground. They then step into an expansive pool house with a soaring ceiling.

An elevated glass-walled bridge stretches across the room. During the day, the space is bathed in natural light.

“Early in the design process, it was determined that lighting would be used as one of the principle elements of the natatorium,” the firm said.

“The desire was to maximise the impact of sunlight while acknowledging the heavy energy consumption notorious with this building type.”

A major challenge was figuring out how to incorporate glazing while minimising heat gain and loss.

The team opted to strategically place windows in areas where daylight would be maximised but glare at the water level would be reduced.

Windows at the pool-deck level provide framed views of the exterior, while skylights brings in light from above. Tint and gloss levels for wall finishes were carefully chosen, in order to achieve the right amount of reflectivity.

“The continuous ribbon of skylights allows beams of sunlight to streak across the walls and move with the time of day, enhancing the animation of the natatorium,” the architects said.

The main feature of the interior is a wooden truss system, a material choice that stemmed from a city initiative that encourages the use of wood. The system consists of 22 V-shaped trusses that were prefabricated and transported to the site.

“We worked closely with the design-builder to create a pre-assembled truss fully integrated with lighting, mechanical services and acoustic absorption,” the team said, noting that the trusses were installed with the services in place.

“This allowed for rapid, on-site assembly with no scaffolding.”

In addition to being a renewable material, the wood is easy to maintain and resistant to corrosion.

“As the prime architectural feature in the natatorium, the wood truss provides both economical and unique solutions to the structural and operational requirements of the facility,” the architect said.

Other community pool houses include a facility in Spain’s Basque Country clad in metal and glass and a renovated concrete natatorium in a Parisian suburb.

Photography is by Ema Peter.

Project credits:

Design Architect: Bing Thom Architects
Architect of record: Bing Thom Architects
Design team: Bing Thom, Michael Heeney, Venelin Kokalov, James Brown, Shinobu Homma, Ling Meng, Francis Yan with Lisa Potopsingh, and Apollinaire Au, Alexander Buss, Nicole Hu, Marcos Hui, Amirali Javidan, Johnnie Juo, Eileen Keenan, Arthur Tseng, Andy Yan
Associate architect: Shape Architecture
Structural: Fast + Epp
Landscape: PWL Partnership
Mechanical: Consultant AME Consulting Group
Electrical: Consultant Applied Engineering Solutions

The post Beams of daylight “streak across the walls” at Bing Thom’s aquatics centre in British Columbia appeared first on Dezeen.

The initial rate negotiated last fall between Tel Aviv-based freelancer Yardena Schwartz and Vice for a story about a Palestinian uprising and that event’s connection to the holy site Temple Mount was $500. However, following a personal emergency that disappeared her Vice editor for a week and undermined the topicality of the submitted item, she was offered a kill fee of just $75.

As Schwartz explains in a piece posted today on CJR, she had spent three full days working on the article. Since the decision to kill the piece had nothing to do with proper editorial considerations, she turned to her Alma Mater:

I typed up a quick email detailing what had happened and sent it to the Columbia Journalism School international alumni listserve. The subject line was, ‘Warning for freelancers re: Vice.’ Within minutes, my inbox was flooded with emails from other journalists who had suffered similar misfortunes with Vice. Most of the stories were worse than my own.

Not all of the journalists referred to in this story were approached this way. After hearing only negative anecdotes from former employees and freelancers, I tried to find people who had something positive to share about their experience with Vice. I put a call out on Facebook and within my network of other journalists… Out of 25 people I spoke to, emailed with, or interacted with through Facebook, three said they had a positive experience freelancing for Vice.

For the CJR feature, Vice separately put Schwartz in touch with three freelancers who it promised would have positive things to say about their experiences. Her article quotes two of these individuals, but here’s the catch: both journalists are based in the U.S.

Whereas pretty much all of the attributed scenarios cited by Schwartz, in addition to her own, are international. Two journalists in Paris; one in Morocco; another, unnamed, in Europe; and a bunch of grievances in Canada. As she writes near the top of her CJR report, Vice’s A/P department was recently reconfigured with a new invoicing system and the engagement of an outside payroll processing company.

Let’s hope Vice gets it together moving forward on the international freelancers front. Because there appears to be little doubt that Vice’s rapid growth left a lot of lot of those folks holding the bag.

Previously on FishbowlNY:
Vice Contributor Recalls Low Point of Iran Undercover Mission

New York-based comedian Dan Naturman discusses what it takes to be a good uncle, texting typos, and lying about his age in this funny stand-up routine from last night’s episode of Conan…(Read…)