The Art Institute of Chicago has tapped Zoe Ryan to be the Neville Bryan Curator of Design. For the past six years, Ryan has been curator at the Van Alen Institute in New York City.
Benjamin Moore & Co. announced the winners of its 2006 Hue Awards, which recognize exceptional use of color in architecture and interior design: Lifetime Achievement: Ettore Sottsass (Milan, Italy); Contract Exteriors: SMC Alsop (Toronto); Contract Interiors: Saia Barbarese Topouzanov Architechtes (Montreal); Residential Exteriors: Ibarra Rosano Design Architects (Tucson, Ariz.); Residential Interiors: David Ling (New York); and Social Responsibility: Gary Wang (Cambridge, Mass.).
Witold Rybczynski, the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, has been awarded the National Building Museum’s eighth Vincent J. Scully Prize. A popular architectural critic and essayist, Rybczynski will receive the award at the museum on Jan. 17, after which he will give a lecture on 20th century American urbanism.
The terminal that the Richard Rogers Partnership designed for the Barajas Airport in Madrid, Spain, has won the 2006 Stirling Prize, given annually by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The competition jury praised the building for “the sheer scale and complexity of what has been tackled and achieved.” This is the first Sterling Prize for the firm, whose National Assembly building in Cardiff, Wales, was also on this year’s short list.
Bill Stumpf, a principal at furniture-design firm Stumpf Weber + Associates, died on Aug. 30. He was 70. A longtime contractor for Herman Miller, Stumpf is perhaps best known for designing the Aeron chair in collaboration with industrial designer Don Chadwick.
Architect and preservationist Richard Blinder, a founding partner of Beyer Blinder Belle, died on Sept. 7. He was 71.
On Sept. 27, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted former Bosnian Serb leader Momcilo Krajisnik of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to 27 years in prison. Some of the evidence used to convict him came from András Riedlmayer, bibliographer of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University’s Fine Arts Library. Riedlmayer has documented the destruction of churches, mosques, and libraries that occurred in the Balkans during the 1990s, producing at least two reports for the tribunal, as well as other documents and publications.
According to the Oct. 7 issue of New Scientist, the real estate mantra “location, location, location” has been backed up with a mathematical model. By adapting a theory of magnetism, physicist Pablo Jensen of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, has been able to calculate a number (Q) for shops based on the nearness of attractive and repellant businesses. The higher the number, the better the shop’s location.
