Good morning and welcome back to the start of a new week, one that marks the last of September. As the leaves change, pumpkins fatten, and cranes rising again, it seems that the design and construction industry is rolling into another pandemic winter with a fair bit of momentum.

Here’s what you need to know today:

Denmark converts discarded wind turbine blades into bicycle shelters

If wind power is touted as a sustainable step forward for the energy economy, why aren’t windmill blades recycled? The fiberglass fins are intentionally designed to be as strong as possible to withstand hurricanes and extremely long, making them hard to dispose of; a Bloomberg report from last year noted how the blades were piling up in landfills (or more accurately, buried beneath them).

The Re-Wind Network wants to change that. Instead of chucking old blades away once the turbine they’re attached to reaches the end of its life, Re-Wind is researching repurposing the blades as architectural elements. The group’s latest project is a bicycle parking shelter in Aalborg, Denmark, using the canopy formed from the structure’s wing-like shape to protect bikes below from the elements. It’s easy to see how the same blades could one day become bus shelters or other forms of novel urban intervention.

H/t to Designboom

Dia:Beacon and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston pool for a joint acquisition; is it the future of museums?

Plagued by financial fallout from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and facing furloughs and even deaccessioning in the most extreme cases, museums around the world are still grappling with how to move forward and best serve their guests. In the case of the Dia Art Foundation and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the solution was a joint acquisition and shared custody. In March, the two announced that Sam Gillian’s Double Merge, a billowing painting hung from the ceiling at Dia:Beacon for the last two years, had been purchased by both institutions and that the work would travel to Houston next year and remain on display for five years. Could this art sharing arrangement be the future for cash-strapped museums?

H/t to ARTnews

New York City pledges $2.7 billion to proof against extreme weather

This morning, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new report geared toward helping the city respond to severe weather events, and a $2.7 billion pledge to fund the program in the wake of Hurricane Ida’s disastrous touchdown across the Northeast earlier this month. The New Normal: Combatting Storm-Related Extreme Weather in New York City is a framework for educating the public about the dangers of climate change, strengthening protections for residents who live in basement units, rethinking the sewer system, and more. The full report (available here) lays out the importance of not only adaptation but climate change mitigation as well.

Preservationist Doris Diether passes away at 92

Doris Diether, a self-taught urbanist who stood with Jane Jacobs in the 1950s and beyond against Robert Moses’s numerous urban renewal schemes in New York City, has passed away at the age of 92. Born in Flushing, Queens, on January 10, 1929, Diether was a Greenwich Village stalwart. In addition to her vociferous activism, she served on Manhattan’s Community Board 2 for over 50 years.

H/t to the New York Times

Olafur Eliasson reveals a pavilion for a California vineyard

Sculptor Olafur Eliasson has tried his hand at architecture before through Studio Other Spaces, a collaboration with German architect Sebastian Behmann, and the Danish-Icelandic artist has unveiled plans for yet another structure. Studio Other Spaces will drop a wine tasting pavilion at the Donum Estate, a picturesque winery in Sonoma, California. The glass canopy of the pavilion will bathe patrons in flecks of  colored light, something akin to a smaller-scale, self-contained version of Your rainbow panorama.

H/t to The Art Newspaper

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport’s newest concourse is being built with prefabricated modules

The 80,000-square-foot new concourse at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport was assembled off-site in six modules, then rolled into place over a two-week period from August 26 to September 9. Each piece of the modular construction and delivery had to be carefully coordinated; ENR breaks down how the modules were fabricated and what the large-scale deployment could mean for the technique’s future viability.

H/t to Engineering News-Record