2015 AIA/HUD Secretary Awards Honor Housing Projects

The American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Housing Knowledge Community, together with the Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), has announced two selections for the 2015 AIA/HUD Secretary Awards, which recognize innovative housing projects with excellence in design. This year’s projects were selected in the Excellence in Affordable Housing Design and Creating Community Connection categories.

The Excellence in Affordable Housing Design Award was awarded to Brooks + Scarpa for their Step Up project in Santa Monica, California, which embodies the award’s recognition of “architecture that demonstrates overall excellent design responses to the needs and constraints of affordable housing.”

Gossens Bachman Architects was announced as the winner of the Creating Community Connection Award for their Co-op Plaza Redevelopment in Brattleboro, Vermont. This award “recognizes projects that incorporate housing within other community amenities for the purposes of either revitalization or planned growth.”

Bel Canto Residence

by Studio William Hefner

Carlo Scarpa

One of the most enigmatic and underappreciated architects of the 20th century, Carlo Scarpa (June 2, 1906 – November 28, 1978) is best known for his instinctive approach to materials, combining time-honored crafts with modern manufacturing processes. In a 1996 documentary directed by Murray Grigor, Egle Trincanato, the President of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia for whom Scarpa renovated a Venetian palace in 1963, described how “above all, he was exceptionally skillful in knowing how to combine a base material with a precious one.”

Born in Venice, Scarpa spent most of his early childhood in Vicenza, before his family moved back to Venice after the death of his mother in 1919. Scarpa studied architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, and from 1932 until 1947 he was director of the Venini Glassworks. It was here that he first displayed his appreciation for craft, often working with the Venini glassblowers late into the night to perfect new designs.

It was not until after World War II that Scarpa began to be recognized internationally for his architecture. This recognition led to a series of commissions in and around Venice – many of them involving the renovation of existing buildings, which became something of a trademark for Scarpa. Perhaps most famously, Scarpa’s renovation for the Museo Castelvecchio completed in 1964 carefully balanced new and old, revealing the history of the original building where appropriate. A revelation at the time, this approach has now become a common approach to renovation, perhaps most notably exhibited by David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum.

 

Carte Blanche: Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France, by Gehry Partners

Frank Gehry’s sketch of the Fondation Louis Vuitton

Sectional renders of Fondation Louis Vuitton by Gehry Partners

Fondation Louis Vuitton by Gehry Partners and photographed by Iwan Baan

ArchitectualReview.com

Bamboom: Elora Hardy’s TED Talk on Bamboo’s Exploding Popularity

Perhaps the most surprising thing about bamboo – besides being an entirely natural, sustainable material with the tensile strength of steel that can grow up to 900 millimeters (3 feet) in just 24 hours – is that it’s not more widely recognized as a fantastic construction material. Like many traditional building materials, bamboo no longer has the architectural currency that it once did across Asia and the pacific, but the efforts of Elora Hardy may help put it back into the vernacular. Heading up Ibuku, a design firm that uses bamboo almost exclusively, Hardy’s recent TED Talk is an excellent run through of bamboo’s graces and virtues in construction, showing off sinuous private homes and handbuilt school buildings.