Happy 75th Birthday, Golden Gate Bridge. Learn about the festival highlights on Sunday, May 27, and check out a photo essay chronicling the bridge’s history.
The bridge's management is planning a celebration on Sunday that includes music, art shows, lectures, a new book and a new visitor center. But one thing won't happen: Nobody gets to cross the bridge on foot on the big day.
Via PBS Chinese Architect wins Pritzker Prize. Wang Shu is the recipient of the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize, one of the most prestigious honors in architecture. He was praised by the Pritzker jury for work that blends traditional Chinese elements with modern lines and attention to the environment.
The award has a symbolic second winner – Hyatt Hotels. The $100,000 prize is sponsored by the Hyatt Foundation, a separate entity from the business, Hyatt Hotels, which has no role in picking the winner. The company's link to promoting Chinese culture abroad may give the Hyatt name a boost with status-conscious government officials and some of the public.
Via Washington Post
Six Firms Compete for Urban Future Award. Architects participating in Audi's Urban Future Initiative are considering what "mobility" might look like in cities in 2030.
The 2012 firms were selected for their track records of researching the urban environment and their relationships to one of six metropolitan areas: CRIT (Mumbai); Höweler + Yoon Architecture (the Boston-Washington corridor); NODE Architecture & Urbanism (Pearl River Delta); Superpool (Istanbul) and Urban Think Tank (São Paulo); and Junya Ishigami + Associates (Tokyo).
A City Rises, Along With Its Hopes. New York Times architecture critic visits Medellín, Colombia, to see the ambitious and photogenic buildings that have gone up, but also to find what remains undone.
Medellín has lately become a medical and business center with a population of 3.5 million and a budding tourist industry, its civic pride buoyed by the new public buildings and squares, and exemplified by an efficient and improbably immaculate metro and cable car system. Linking rich with poor neighborhoods, spurring private development, the metro, notwithstanding shrieks elsewhere in Colombia over its questionable construction cost, is for residents of Medellín a shared symbol of democratic renewal. –Michael Kimmelman
Via New York Times