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Daily digest: Stephen Breyer will remain on the Pritzker jury, Design Miami/ 2022 has a new Curatorial Director, and more

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Daily digest: Stephen Breyer will remain on the Pritzker jury, Design Miami/ 2022 has a new Curatorial Director, and more

Paris will host its first edition of Design Miami/ this October (Alexander Kagan/Unsplash)

Good afternoon and welcome back to the last news roundup before the weekend. If you’re on the East Coast and staring down a foot (or two, or potentially more) of snow, this is the perfect time to stock up on reading material.

Here’s what you need to know:

Stephen Breyer retires from the Supreme Court but remains on the Pritzker jury

United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is stepping down from the bench of the highest court in America but will remain on the Pritzker Prize jury. Breyer has been a member of the (currently) nine-person panel since 2011 and previously served as the jury chair in 2019 and 2020.

H/t to the New York Times

Design Miami/ will debut in Paris this year, with Maria Cristina Didero as Curatorial Director

Design Miami/ will launch a Paris offshoot for the first time ever this October, timed to coincide with Art Basel at the Grand Palais. The new 2022 Curatorial Director Maria Cristina Didero, a Milan-based author, design curator, and consultant, will replace Wava Carpenter. The theme of this year’s international fairs set out by Didero is “The Golden Age,” and as she described it in the announcement:

“The Golden Age is an idea shared by different cultures across time and space. Whether projected onto an idealized past or a utopian future, The Golden Age envisions the world at peace, in which advancements in the arts and technology precipitate unprecedented ease, cooperation, pleasure, and beauty; a time in which every living creature on Earth coexists in harmony.”

Projects from the American Society of Landscape Architects will be preserved in the Library of Congress

The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and Library of Congress have launched an indefinite collaboration to preserve the ASLA’s Professional Award winning projects. Although the library already holds a collection of projects and papers from landscape architects and the ASLA’s 1899-1966 archives, the new initiative will see the society’s most lauded projects added to the archives every year going forward.

A federal judge cancels a federal oil and gas lease in the Gulf of Mexico over climate change impacts

The Biden administration was moving ahead with plans to lease land for gas and oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico despite its climate change and emissions reduction pledges, but yesterday a federal judge invalidated the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Lease Sale 257 which would have opened 80 million acres of the gulf up for extraction.

The reason? Judge Rudolph Contreras of the United States District Court of the District of Columbia agreed with plaintiffs who had brought a suit against the federal government, arguing that the Interior Department failed to conduct an environmental analysis that took climate change into account. The department is currently reviewing the decision and may appeal and there is no indication whether it will slow future plans to lease offshore lands for drilling.

H/t to Reuters

NYCHA challenges designers to build a better heat pump

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has issued a challenge to the design community to design a better heat pump for more than 24,000 housing units across the city. With NYCHA stock rapidly aging and the city looking to transition to electric heating, the agency is searching for a solution that can be window mounted, built for $3,000 maximum, and installed in only two hours.

H/t to Archinect

To cope with climate change, Paris could uncover a buried river

Paris, like other major metropolitan areas, is heating up as the climate warms. To help combat the urban heat island effect, which already sees the city several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside, Parisian authorities are looking at uncovering the Bièvre, a river that had grown so polluted that it was paved over 100 years ago. Aside from better reflecting incoming sunlight, the uncorked waterway will help deal with stormwater runoff.

H/t to TIME Magazine

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