Octagon Displays Restored World Trade Center Model Exhibit
Washington, DC, Sept. 10, 2003 - Richard Moe, President of The National Trust for Historic Preservation and Co-Chair of Save America’s Treasures (SAT); Ron Bogle, President and CEO of the American Architectural Foundation; and Henry Moran, Executive Director of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, previewed an exhibit featuring the newly-conserved original presentation model of the World Trade Center at the Octagon Museum, located at 1799 New York Ave, NW in Washington, D.C. The exhibit will be open to the public September 25 – December 3, 2003.
Originally built by the office of architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986) between 1969 and 1971 for presentation to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the World Trade Center model vividly reflects the sheer size and mass of the original site. Measuring eight by ten feet at the base with the twin towers rising just over 7 feet, the detailed representation has undergone an extensive conservation process of repair and stabilization to reverse the deterioration and loss of original materials. [ red more ] >>
The Octagon Museum web site >>
World Trade Center images >>

St. John's University, Jamaica Queens NYC will be hosting a series of lectures by guest speakers including one of the leading voices for architecture revision, James Howard Kunstler.
James Howard Kunstler is author of such books as The City in Mind, Home from Nowhere and The Geography of Nowhere. In his writings Kunstler has focused on youth and their neighborhoods, both in the city and the suburbs. In vivid details he describes how so much of our living spaces (homes, parks, neighborhoods, stores) are carbon copy replicas that create a lifeless often indistinguishable residence. He connects class and race to much of the formation of our cities and suburbs. Yet he also pays special attention to the environment and the depletion of natural resources. Kunstler has called for a re-construction of the American Living Space where mass production is defeated as an idea for communities, as a whole. Sponsored by the student run publication, The St. John's University Humanities Review and the St. John's College English Department
St. John's University web site >>
The City in Mind, Home from Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler >>

Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900
Traces of India explores how 19th century European photographers captured the great architectural sites of India, reflecting imperial attitudes to travel, archeology, and the politics of memory. The exhibition presents more than 200 master photographs, as well as drawings, books, artifacts, and a selection of popular imagery from contemporary India that situates them in a changing political culture
The interdisciplinary book investigates the roles played by representations of Indian architecture made between the late eighteenth century and the present day. This handsome volume discusses how photographs can be read not just as records of an architectural past but as complex artifacts of the cultural and political forces shaping colonial India. The diverse contributors to the book, from post-colonial theorists to museum curators, examine the connections between photography and architecture through the visual culture of colonialism. The volume explores subjects ranging from representations of landmarks of India from picturesque views to travel mementos, photographs as memorials of historical events, and contemporary popular images. Illustrated with some 180 photographs, many rare or little known, the book offers an appealing and fresh view of colonial images as seen through postcolonial eyes. The volume also includes an extensive bibliography of literature of nineteenth-century photography in South Asia.
CCA - Canadian Center for Architecture web site >>
Traces of India: Photography, Architecture ... by M. A. Pelizzari >>

Significant Objects from the Modern Design Collection
On display is a rotating selection of approximately 30 works in all media spanning the period from the late 19th to the early 21st century. Examples of furniture, metalwork, silver, ceramics, and glass—by designers such as Christopher Dresser, Josef Hoffmann, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Carlo Scarpa, Peter Shire, Ettore Sottsass, and Wendell Castl are shown for their significance, both in art-historical terms and in the context of the Museum’s collection.
Metropolitan Museum of Art >>

New Hotels for Global Nomads
A provocative exhibition that spotlights contemporary hotels as the crossroads of our connected yet nomadic society and underscores their role in cutting-edge architecture and design.
The modern hotel not only offers a place to sleep, but, through its design, amenities and sense of theater, it also provides its guests with the ultimate escapist experience. Examining over thirty real and conceptual examples, and complemented by an authoritative text and stunning photography, this book provides a compelling answer to the question, "What is the purpose of the modern hotel?" From The Venetian in Las Vegas, an outstanding example of the gambling capital's new generation of scenographic hotels, to the sail-shaped, "seven-star" Burj-al-Arab fantasy in Dubai, the designs are fully explored.

Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum >>
New Hotels for Global Nomads by Donald Albrecht >>

The Howard Gilman Archive of Visionary Architectural Drawings
What would it be like to live in R. Buckminster Fuller's hexagonal Dymaxion House? To visit Arata Isozaki's project for Hiroshima? To grow up in John Hejduk's Wall House? There are only fictional answers to questions such as these, but what imagination wouldn't ponder them upon seeing the drawings assembled in The Changing of the Avant Garde? Featuring 165 expertly reproduced visionary architectural drawings from The Museum of Modern Art's Howard Gilman Archive, this collection brings together a selection of idealized, fantastic, and utopian architectural drawings mainly from the 1960s and 70s. This publication, the first to consider the drawings since the archive was established in 1998, is accompanied by essays exploring the significance of the works, and an interview with Pierre Apraxine, the former curator of the collection. With visionary drawings by visionary architects > Raimund Abraham, Emilio Ambasz, R. Buckminster Fuller, Peter Cook, Yona Friedman, John Hejduk, Ron Herron, Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas, Leon Krier, Alessandro Mendini, Gaetano Pesce, Walter Pichler, Cedric Price, Aldo Rossi, Massimo Scholari, Ettore Sottsass, Friedrich St. Florian, Superstudio, Michael Webb, Elia Zenghelis, and others.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York web site >>
Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection >>