The American Midwest is making a new name for itself. While cities like New York and Los Angeles are known as global design capitals, dynamic modern architecture has begun emerging across the country’s fly-over states. Advocating world-class architecture, sustainability, and craft, Kansas City has become a leader in great American design.
Sustainable architecture begins with designing for longer lifecycles and reuse. Looking to create more inclusive and viable futures, architects are exploring adaptive reuse as one of the best strategies to address the climate crisis and promote social justice. Reuse keeps the culture of an area alive, bridging between old and new as projects push the boundaries of circular and adaptive design.
Washington D.C. has earned a reputation for iconic architecture. Emerging from the L'Enfant and McMillan Plans, Washington’s cityscape includes wide streets and low-rise buildings that sprawl out from circles and rectangular plazas. From the White House to Lincoln Memorial, Washington’s architecture was built to symbolize the nation’s values. Today, new projects are designed to rethink the city’s morphology while respecting its identity.
Opening its doors last fall, Princeton University's Lewis Arts Complex by Steven Holl Architects and BNIM created a new campus gateway and state-of-the-art facilities for the arts. Expanding performance, rehearsal and teaching spaces, the complex has now been featured in a video directed by Spirit of Space. The footage shows how the building was designed to shape campus space while maximizing porosity and movement. Welcoming its second year of students, the complex is made to take the arts at Princeton to even greater heights.
Update: Steven Holl Architects has announced the topping out of the University of Iowa's Visual Arts Building, a commission they won in a competition in 2010. When complete, the new building will work with their Art Building West, which they completed on the University of Iowa campus in 2006, to provide a dedicated arts space for students. Read on after the break for our coverage of the design reveal from 2013, and for construction photos and up to date renders of the project.
When we introduced you to the Bancroft School in September, the topic of one of the SEED Network's awesome mini-documentaries, or SEEDocs, the revitalization project was still in development. However, this Saturday's ground-breaking ceremony means that this innovative community complex will soon be a reality.
The building, which was an elementary school from 1904 until it fell into disrepair and closed in 1999, is located in one of Kansas City's most neglected, lower income neighborhoods: Manheim Park. However, thanks to the joint-efforts of the Make It Right Foundation, BNIM Architects (the AIA’s 2011 Firm of the Year), and the Historic Manheim Park Neighborhood Association, the once asbestos-ridden school will soon be the center of a revitalization project to transform the urban landscape.
More on the Bancroft Project, after the break...
Design Corps and SEED (Social Economic Environmental Design) have released the latest installment of SEEDocs, their series of awesome, mini-documentaries that highlight inspirational stories of award-winning public interest design projects.
While June’s doc featured an incredible community garden in New Orleans, designed/built with help from the Tulane School of Architecture’s Tulane City Center, this month focuses on the revitalization of an abandoned, abestos-ridden school in Manheim Park, a low-income, neglected neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri.
Check out more images and info about this empowering project, after the break…
PaulWarchol.jpg?1537282894 "Lewis Arts Complex, Princeton University. Image © Paul Warchol")
