December 26, 2009 | Broadcast | News
Gardens by the Bay: Landscape architecture designs released
Having won the international competition organised by Singapore’s National Parks Board, Grant Associates and Gustafson Porter recently released up to date images depicting their designs for the Gardens by the Bay, part of the next phase of the city’s masterplan. The gardens will occupy 101 hectares of prime land by the water and will become part of Marina Bay.
Bay South includes hectares of garden and a conservatory designed by landscape architecture firm Grant Associates while Bay East, designed by Gustafson Porter, includes water gardens, a Boat House Piazza and an education centre.
The first phase of the gardens is scheduled to open in 2011.
December 24, 2009 | Features | Magazine
Michael Lee Hong Hwee: National Columbarium of Singapore
National Columbarium of Singapore is an installation by local artist Michael Lee Hong Hwee featuring 100 lost Singapore architecture including 45 scaled models of demolished buildings, and those that are unbuilt or imaginary.
This work was commissioned for the Lost in the City exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore, on display till the 3rd of January 2010, in-conjunction with the Singapore Art Show 2009.
images and audio after the jump…
December 23, 2009 | Broadcast | News
Reclaiming the Taj
Mumbai - A year after 26/11, the Taj Mahal Hotel is not just reclaiming a past, but also creating a new identity - room by room. The hotel’s first reaction to the attacks was to just restore what was damaged, while it took the opportunity to restore the entire heritage wing. But the process has not been easy.
via Forbes.com
December 23, 2009 | Broadcast | News
Rescuing the mall situation
Dilapidation within a shopping mall, or shopping centres as we call them, would be a very unlikely sight where most of us live. In Singapore, malls have almost become part of the requisite kit of parts deployed in new towns, together or integrated seamlessly with Mass Rapid Transit stations, bus terminals, schools, hawker centres, and public markets. Yet have we ever asked the origins of this physical model of modern consumption? Mark Dery of the Design Observer brings us back to 1956 to Edina, Minneapolis U.S.A., where Victor Gruen invented what was the first enclosed, air-conditioned mall.
Supplying a broad overview of the goods and bads that malls have created in the past, especially in suburban America, Dery traverses into the near future, providing insight into a circumstance that many in Singapore would be hard pressed to imagine. Many proposals that have sprung up of late to address towns stricken with the dead mall syndrome, something we hope will never happen to places like Takashimaya, Marina Square, or Jurong Point; malls have become such a part of people’s lives here on sunny island to ever think of them as dead. Yet should that day come, Gery’s opinions against the demolition of dead malls is the most probable driving force for his argument; “visions of taking a wrecking ball to malls everywhere are satisfyingly apocalyptic. But sending all that rebar, concrete, and Tyvek to a landfill is politically incorrect in the extreme.”
via Design Observer
December 23, 2009 | Broadcast | Events
A Record of Change: Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture
A bamboo sculpture by sciSKEW comments on the city's urban growth
“At the top of Shenzhen’s Lotus Hill, a statue of Deng Xiaoping is frozen in purposeful mid-stride. From here he gazes down on this southern Chinese boom city, teeming with 14 million inhabitants, separated from Hong Kong only by a river and a border. Follow the path down the hill, through manicured gardens and past young families (the average age in Shenzhen is 30, the age of the city itself), and you reach the megastructure of the Shenzhen Civic Centre. Its overwhelmingly massive, blue undulating canopy evokes classical Chinese architecture, but is rendered in bold, postmodern, friendly style. It shelters Shenzhen’s governmental buildings, and a vast complex of indoor and outdoor public spaces. This un-forbidden city is currently playing host to the extremely ambitious, yet awkwardly titled, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, which attempts to document the pace of change in this unwieldy new metropolis.”
While most architecture biennales are unappealing cocktails of dodgy architectural art and dense technical presentations, this one has a more popular touch. More than 60 installations by artists and architects occupy an underground hall at the civic centre, the massive public plaza above it, and various spots around the city.
via The Guardian
FastCompany: “Architecture and Design’s New Hot Spots: Hong Kong and Shenzhen”
December 23, 2009 | Broadcast | News
Cities for Cycling: Creating Bike Friendly Streets
“Corbusier’s idea was to kill the streets. Thank God he failed.”
Cities for Cycling: Creating Bike-Friendly Streets: “Cities, Bicycles, and the Future of Getting Around,” at the Newseum in Washington DC, USA. Former Talking Heads’ frontman David Byrne and others discussed how to best integrate bike infrastructure into cities and build demand for biking…
via The Dirt/American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)
