Norris and Partners’ “ugly ducking” in Victoria, racism in architecture and why renderings need more than computer generated humanoids, in today’s news digest.
“The 1961 design by Norris and Partners was never appropriate, except in raw terms of street scale. It is an ugly duckling, a building struggling for recognition in a region where grand buildings live alongside the Windsor — such as the Old Treasury building and the Victorian Parliament — so it will be no loss.”
The Age
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“This is a grade I-listed building, and you are talking about building two metres away from it. We are certainly not against contemporary design, but not this design and not in this location. It looks like an airport building designed in 1983.”
BD Online
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“I find these figures disturbing but not surprising, considering that only 2% of architects are black. When you are a student it is important that you see the possibility of progression. If you look around and there is no one like you, you think ‘what is this system that I am walking into?”
BD Online
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“Considering that government bureaucracy is the opposite of design — metastatic, inelegant, inefficient — the design professor Elizabeth Tunstall has given herself a nearly impossible task. Tunstall is trying to persuade the U.S. federal government to enact a national ‘design policy’ … Like reforming health care, it’s a marvellous idea, but pulling off something so radical yet sensible is like trying to hog-tie a whale. Where on earth do you start?”
Change Observer
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“Graphic representations of architectural plans either depict architecture sans people, or architecture surrounded by computer-generated humanoids with all of the “realism” of “Second Life” avatars or video-game characters.”
ArchNewsNow.com
Full article
