The Department of State’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) has shortlisted nine design teams for the New Embassy Compound in Mexico City. The design/bid/build project, scheduled for construction in fiscal year 2015, is the first solicited under OBO’s new Design Excellence program. This holistic approach to project development and delivery seeks to utilize the best methods, technologies, and staff abilities to produce facilities that are outstanding in all respects. The overall strategy focuses on the integration of purpose, function, flexibility, art, safety, security, sustainability, and maintainability.
Continue reading for more information and to review the well-known shortlisted architects.
Understanding that environmental responsibility is an integral part of design excellence, Perkins + Will’s new Atlantic office, known as 1315 Peachtree, serves as an example on how current technologies can be used to achieve LEED Platinum Certification, meet the 2030 Challenge and help reduce toxic materials from our building products.
1315 Peachtree is an adaptive reuse of a 1985 office structure transformed into a high performance civic-focused building. Located in the heart of Midtown Atlanta across from the High Museum of Art, the new building continues to house the Peachtree Branch of the Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library and introduces a new street-level tenant space occupied by the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA). The Perkins+Will Atlanta office occupies the top four floors with office space for up to 240 employees. Continue reading for more information on the highest LEED score building in the Northern Hemisphere.
Thousands gathered Saturday to celebrate the grand opening of Santiago Calatrava‘s Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge that connects east and west Dallas seamlessly over the Trinity River. A parade of builders, including everyone from those to poured the concrete to Calatrava himself, were the first to march across the new Dallas icon, followed by nearly 16,000 other people. Although the bridge is still not quite ready for vehicular traffic, the city celebrated its commencement with an impressive display of fireworks. Continue reading for more.
Today, one of the leading exemplars of classic Modern architecture reopens after a two year hiatus. The freshly renovated Villa Tugendhat underwent a monumental restoration and rehabilitation, starting in January 2010, with the aim of preserving and conserving the original building substance and layout, including the construction details, materials and technical system. Renewal work also included the lavish interiors and lush garden. Continue after for the break to learn more about Mies van der Rohe’s renewed masterpiece.
eVolo is pleased to announce the winners of the 2012 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual competition recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution. This is also an investigation on the public and private space and the role of the individual and the collective in the creation of a dynamic and adaptive vertical community. The award seeks to discover young talent, whose ideas will change the way we understand architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.
Continue reading to view the 2012 winners and honorable mentions!
The Architectural Department of Moscow City Government (MosComArhitectura) has announced the shortlisted teams competing to design the strategy that will be used to double the size of Moscow. With an uneven distribution of working places throughout the Russian Federation capital, millions of residents are forced to commute each day to the over-populated, historic city center, thus causing serious transportation, ecological and social problems within the region.
The Moscow City Agglomeration Development Concept will see the city annex 150,316 hectares to its south-west in order to overcome its chronic space problems. OMA, Diller Scofidio & Renfro and McAdam Architects, lead by the well-known Russian architects Andrey Chernihov and Alexei Ginsburg, are a few names that appear among the ten shortlisted teams. Continue reading for more competition details and the entire shortlist.
ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the Young Architects Program (YAP) MAXXI 2012 in late February. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against UNIRE/UNITE. NAMI, which means “wave” in Japanese, is a project that reflects contemporaneity, aims to send a message about the importance of harmony, and to create a bridge between people and cultures. This proposal, designed by VeryVery Architecture Office, is very simple and essential: an airy space provided with shadow, movable sitting benches, and a space that can accommodate different types of events and activities. Imbued with an experimental spirit and a strong attention to sustainability, NAMI offers a chance to express the social and cultural values requested by the Young Architecture Program.
ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) in February. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy.Cameron Wu(Cambridge, MA) proposed Coney Inland, an architectural strategy which formally unifies and spatially modulates the challenging MoMA PS1 courtyard site. A series of developable surfaces (cones and cylinders) and their base structures normalize the contingencies of scale and shape of the three courtyard spaces, while their legible transformations register the idiosyncratic nature of the overall site geometry.
For generations of New Yorkers, Coney Island has served as the quintessential local retreat from the city. Unfettered access to sky, land, and sea makes it a clear contrast to the urban metropolis, drawing crowds in search of spatial and social release. Through the architectural translation of qualities inherent to this ocean-side precedent, Coney Inland imports the culture of casual beach leisure into the courtyard at MoMA PS1.
According to the national weather service, 30 tornadoes struck 6 Midwest states hit by a string a tornadoes. In many places there was a severe weather warning but no tornado alert. Harrisburg, a town in southern Illinois of 9000, was hit the hardest with 300 homes, 25 businesses and 6 lives lost. Illinois and Missouri declared state emergencies and are being assisted by relief organizations.
2011 was the worst tornado season since 1936 and the events of this week mark an early start to the Midwest’s storm season. More tornadoes touched down in Alabama Friday morning, destroying several homes and damaging a prison. More continue to touch down as this message is going out. Harrisburg was spared further damage this week, but storm season has just begun.
Currently, community members and the Red Cross are teaming to repair roofs, clear debris and provide emergency relief services in Harrisburg. Branson, MO, launched a similar cleanup. As lightly-damaged homes and households recover, attention will turn to long-term recovery. That’s where we come in.
Yesterday brought an impressive appeal for volunteer and fundraisings support, and Architecture for Humanity has launched the Midwest Tornadoes Recovery campaign with a fundraiser goal of $100,000.
Architecture for Humanity is calling all architects for help! If you are in the area, please consider volunteering. If you are not in the area but would like to help, just go to this link at Architecture for Humanity to donate and support architects volunteering in the Midwest.
As we have recently shared with you the third place winner of the international competition to design a Night Club Hotel in the dense city of Hong Kong, we now present to you the second prize winning proposal. Designed by the young, Marseille-based architecture firm vGH Company, BUBBLE X is an object of desire that promises “the existence of a carnal place where sensuality, eroticism and exhilaration prevail.”
Continue reading for vGH Company’s project description.
In 1995, Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza packed a few changes of clothes, some poetry books and a single sketchbook as he set forth to Peru. These few items were all he needed to record and interpret his voyage, allowing him to integrate his investigations into his architecture. More than a half a century earlier, Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi ventured into the peaks of Macchu Picchu were he captured a famous series of portraits of the ancient Inca ruins. His project was more political, it acted as a re-appropriation of the site by its locals, but the tools of Chambi and Siza are the same: the production of images to define a reality.
The Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) presents Alturas de Macchu Picchu: Martín Chambi – Álvaro Siza at work – an exhibit featuring thirty-five original sketches by Álvaro Siza alongside the historic 1920s photographs by Martín Chambi, now on view at in the CCA’s Octagonal Gallery until April 22, 2012. Continue reading for more information.
DS+R plans to redevelop the nineteenth-century Union Terrace Gardens with a Granite Web that intends to “fuse nature and culture into a vital social network at the heart of the city” with an “elastic web of three-dimensional interconnections” that spans across the six-hectare site. Continue reading for more information.
In memory of those persecuted in the seventeenth-century Finnmark Witchcraft Trials, the Steilneset Memorial rests along the jagged coastline of the Barents Sea in Vardø, Norway. Photographer Andrew Meredith has shared with us his photo series documenting this masterpiece created by a unique collaboration between the world-famous Swiss architect Peter Zumthor (Basel, 1943) and the influential contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois (Paris, 1911-2010).
Zumthor simply describes his collaboration with Bourgeois in an interview with ArtInfo as the following, “I had my idea, I sent it to her, she liked it, and she came up with her idea, reacted to my idea, then I offered to abandon my idea and to do only hers, and she said, ‘No, please stay.’ So, the result is really about two things — there is a line, which is mine, and a dot, which is hers… Louise’s installation is more about the burning and the aggression, and my installation is more about the life and the emotions .”
Continue reading to view the photographs and learn more about the Steilneset Memorial.
Tonight in Brooklyn, New York – Architect, alumnus and longtime Pratt Architecture Professor Theoharis David, FAIA, will deliver a lecture which will be introduced by visionary architect Lebbeus Woods reflecting on David’s 43 years as a teacher through the work of his former students, many of whom have gone on to become accomplished architects and teachers. The lecture will be followed by an opening reception for “Built Ideas: A Life of Teaching, Learning, and Action,” an exhibition of models, photos, and concept drawings by David that will be on view at The School of Architecture through March 30. The Pratt’s Department of Exhibitions are also presenting “An Architect Drawing,” an exhibition of drawings and texts from David’s architectural experiences through September 28.
Tonight’s lecture is open to the public; however please note that seating priority is reserved for members of the Pratt community at 5:30PM and members of the public will be admitted at 5:50PM. Continue reading for more information.
For the first time in history, the annual TED Prize was not awarded to an individual, but rather an idea that will greatly influence the future of our planet. TheCity 2.0 is the city of the future in which more than ten billion people are dependent on. Since the announcement in early December, visionaries’ world-wide have provided their input to help determine the city’s “one wish to change the world”. TED will provide $100,000 to help make it happen. Live, at the TED2012 Full Spectrum conference in Long Beach, California, the wish has been revealed! Continue reading to learn more.
As a follow up to last weeks coverage on the Rio Carnival 2012kick-off in Oscar Niemeyer’s newly renovated Sambadrome, we would like to share with you this stunning tilt-shift video capturing the essence of Rio de Janeiro and the colorful parade of the Carnival. You will also catch a glimpse of famous mosaic sidewalks of the Copacabana Beach Boardwalk designed by the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx.
Creators: Keith Loutit and Jarbas Agnelli Music: Jarbas Agnelli Special Thanks: Rede Globo, Liesa and Jodele Larcher
After Mayor Bloomberg, Cornell President Skorton and Technion President Lavie announced Cornell’s victory over Stanford to build an eleven acre state-of-the-art tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City, the team has now tackled their next step in choosing six high-profile architecture firms competing to design the schools first academic facility.
