The Mayor's Office of Greater London has finally approved the Wilkinson Air cable car project over the Thames, reports The Architects' Journal. For the 2012 Olympics, it will connect the Excel Exhibition Grounds with the Richard Rogers O2 Arena in Greenwich (both of which will be used for the competition). For the sum of 25 million pounds, Londoners will receive a system that will carry 2,500 passengers per hour at an altitude of 50 meters above the water. After the end of the games, the cable car will come in handy for the townspeople hurrying to and from work.
The Architizer portal has presented a selection of buildings of recent years, where supergraphics are used in the broadest sense of the word: for example, in the building of the Utrecht University of the Bureau "Notelings Reidijk" huge letters support the building itself.
Shigeru Ban has proposed a new design for temporary partitions for the Japanese displaced by the recent earthquake: most of them are housed in gyms and it is unclear when they will be provided with more comfortable housing. In the meantime, it is important to give them at least some degree of privacy, and for this are partitions made of fabric with a frame made of cardboard tubes loved by Ban; the floor is lined with thick cardboard. The architect is asking for the financial assistance needed to supply these structures to all victims.
In Duisburg, the problems of a different kind, according to the portal DerWesten.de: the synagogue, built there 10 years ago by the project of Zvi Hecker with a budget of 9 million euros, without losing its architectural expressiveness, is already badly dilapidated and requires renovation. The problem is the insufficient thermal protection of a part of the building, which was the reason for its rapid destruction. Moreover, the cost of reconstruction is so high that the leaders of the Jewish community are considering selling the building (it is located in the prestigious area of the Inner Harbor, one land plot under it can bring 5-7 million euros) and the construction or purchase of a new building.
Another competition project of the spiritual and cultural center of Russia in Paris (which, however, did not make it to the final) is presented to readers by the Archdaily website: the French bureau Ameller & Dubois Associés presents this complex as a combination of a five-domed church and a cross-shaped concrete "box" with titanium cladding, where this temple is submerged to the very domes. The most interesting thing is the wide front staircase, which gives the building a resemblance to a transport aircraft or a warship landing troops.
Domus talks about the renovation of a school in Porto by architect Ricardo Bak Gordon. Despite the difficult financial situation in Portugal, there is a program of reconstruction of secondary schools, a significant part of which were built in the 1970s, immediately after the establishment of democracy. Now they are creating new libraries, computer labs, etc. Buck Gordon inserted between the main building of the school entrusted to him and its gymnasium a narrow building with a library, a cafe, an auditorium, laboratories and a lobby. Using concrete, from which old buildings are made, he painted it in a rich red, and also turned to simplified monumental forms.
The British bureau PRP presented its project of the future center of the media industry in Manchester with the help of an animated video, only unlike most similar videos, there is the main character - the droid ahd168. It was borrowed from a minifilm far from architecture, which described his hard life as a tramp in Manchester's Salford district. Now, as conceived by the architects of PRP, he found work in the complex they had designed.
And the Austrian newspaper Der Standard published data from a survey of its users, which was conducted by the dating site ElitePartner.at. The site owners were interested in what profession people are most valued by the opposite sex. Architects (32%) ranked first among women, followed by doctors (31%) and journalists (28%). At the same time, men are much less interested in women architects: doctors (the same 32%) and journalists (25%) are in the lead. In general, the professions of the top ten for both sexes are almost the same.
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