Slideshow: Allianz Arena – by Herzog & de Meuron – Munich, Germany

The Allianz Arena, designed by Pritzer Prize winning architects Herzog & de Meuron, is an elegant stadium design yet I wouldn’t say its one of their best projects. Groundbreaking for its unique, bubble skin, the facade is it’s most riveting feature as it changes color with a system of lights that reflects those of the team playing within. Once you slip past this innovative facade, however, the building becomes just another stadium, with typical concrete structure. Other than the facade I really didn’t find that much intrigue in this design. One other aspect of the design is the parking garage that is located below a large landscaped plaza – leading from the train station to the stadium. I was rather disappointed with the experience as it was really quite far and the grounds were not well maintained. Of course the experience might be different on a game day when the plaza is full of fans pre-drinking for a big match but for most of the time it is just a desolate wasteland.

A New Year Update

Happy new year, readers. Thanks for being a part of a wonderful year of writing, learning and sharing ideas. I appreciate all of the emails, comments and contributions I’ve received throughout 2009 and hopefully 2010 will see the site and community continue to grow. If there is anything you think would be a great addition to the site – content or site improvements – please send it along and I’ll post it or integrate it into the site design.

I have also started a fund raising campaign with the goal of hiring a professional web designer to redesign the site to make it more intuitive and interactive. Specifically I would like a better way to find previous content and a smoother interface to search through and watch the posted videos. I am also aiming to pay the writers who contribute articles to Talkitect. As of now, Talkitect.com doesn’t have a steady source of funding since the advertisements were removed from the site (they were annoying and didn’t bring much revenue anyway). A small stream of revenue comes from our Amazon Associates program (please help by buying books and items from Amazon.com by following the links from this site), but not nearly enough to cover the costs of running the site and paying writers.  I would appreciate it if you would visit the following link and most importantly forward it to your friends, family, colleagues and contacts: http://www.indiegogo.com/Talkitect – feel free to post it to facebook, tweet it, email it to people, post to forums and any other way to get the word out there.

Lastly, The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity with a new freelance job, a trip to Paris
for the Holidays and working on future plans and ideas. Talkitect has been rather quiet, especially with written articles. I have a list of articles waiting to be written and should get some up over the coming weeks. There are also more videos I will be posting and a whole bunch of new photo albums on our connected Photo Site.

Don’t forget to follow us with google friend connect (located on the left hand column), on twitter, and join the Talkitect Facebook Page. Also check out and subscribe to our Google Reader shared items page to see what we are reading.

Sincerely
Lucas Gray

Talkitect.com News and Update

Hello readers. You may have noticed that our site has been changing recently. I want to update you all on a few of the things we have been working on at Talkitect.com over the past couple of months. Along with the slight redesign of the website, we are now branding ourselves as an Online Magazine, hoping this will give us a little more credibility than being just another blog. We have been slowly growing over the past year, and we hope this move will help us grow faster going forward. Yes, this is just a branding/marketing move and not a real change to the site, but it is important none the less.

We have also started a group on Facebook (click here). We would love it if you would all become fans and invite your friends! Feel free to add your comments and post interesting photos, links and other design related content. We are also looking for administrators for the group. Let us know if you would like to get involved.

You can also follow us on twitter (by clicking here). We will be posting interesting thoughts, ideas and links a few times a day. Our goal is to be one of the most followed architecture and design groups on Twitter. Please help us grow our followers.

Talkitect.com has recently joined the Amazon.com Affiliate program. We get a small percentage of all sales that we refer to Amazon. Check out our store (click here) to see books that we recommend. You can also follow one of the links off our site (like this one) and then order any product offered through amazon.com. You may also have noticed that we are featuring related books below our posts. This is a great way to find out more information on the designers, artists, and topics we write about.

You can help talkitect.com grow by subscribing to our feed (thank you to the many of you who already do) and by clicking the “Follow” button on the Google Friend Connect widget in the left hand column. We also love hearing feedback so leave comments after the articles and videos you find interesting. We promise to respond.

As always, we are looking for new contributors to the site. If you have an idea, a complete article, a research paper or an interesting video that is in need of some exposure let us know.

Finally, check out our picasa web albums for photographs of great architecture from around the world. There are albums for many of the buildings we write about as well as other interesting places we have visited on our world travels. We will be adding photographs from a recent trip to Copenhagen over the next few weeks.

Thanks once again for reading Talkitect.com.

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Articles

• Admiration for Gehry
• Architecture of Antoine Predock
• Building a Future
• Chapel of Reconciliation – Berlin
• designBridge – University of Oregon
• Empire State Plaza – Albany, NY
• Firehouse and Police Station – Berlin
• Glenn Murcutt Masters Class: Part I
• Glenn Murcutt Masters Class: Part II
• Glenn Murcutt Masters Class: Part III
• Glenn Murcutt Masters Class: Part IV
• Holocaust Memorial – Berlin
• Kansai, Japan Architecture Tour
• Low Tech Design in Berlin
• Nationalism in Italian Modern Architecture
• Nordic Embassies – Berlin
• Notre Dame du Haup – Ronchamp, France – Le Corbusier
• Peter Zumthor wins the 2009 Pritzer Prize
• PROGRAM: initiative for art + architecture
• Solar Decathlon, 2009
• Steven Holl Wins Glasgow School of Art and Design Competition
• The High Line – New York City
• The Jewish Museum – Berlin
• The New Cooper Union – New York City
• The Reichstag – Berlin
• The Sustainability of an Architect
• The Transportation and Livability Group
• The Warsaw University Library
• Tokyo, Japan Architecture Tour
• Webcasting to a Global Classroom
• What Makes a City Beautiful?

About

Talkitect.com is an online magazine dedicated to the discussion of contemporary international architecture, art, and design. The site presents articles critiquing new designs and showcasing research on contemporary issues in the design world. It is also a repository for interesting videos, links and other relevant information we stumble across on our wanderings through the world wide web.

Created in 2008, Talkitect.com has rapidly grown into a community of people interested in the built environment. This site keeps us engaged in the dialogue of international design while giving us an outlet to express ideas, review buildings, and do research above and beyond our daily work. From time to time we might feature a sponsored post that will be relevant to the general focus of this blog. This is necessary to pay the bills since we have removed the annoying pay per click ads from the site. However, our true reward is engaging with you, the readers, and thus we appreciate all of your comments, ideas and suggestions.

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For questions and comments or if you are interested in becoming a contributor of Talkitect.com please send us an email at the address below. We will do our best to get back to you as soon as possible. You may also leave us a message in our GUESTBOOK. Thanks for your interest and support.


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