President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama have selected Chicago's historic Jackson Park as the site of the Obama Presidential Library, the Chicago Tribune has reported. The park is located in Chicago’s South Side, the first lady’s childhood home and where Obama was first elected to office. Located at the eastern edge of the University of Chicago campus, Jackson Park beat out nearby Washington Park for the honor of becoming the library’s home. The design commission was awarded to Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects earlier this month.
Hou de Sousa (Nancy Hou and Josh de Sousa) has completed construction on Raise/Raze and Sticks, two competition winners for temporary installations in Washington, DC and New York, respectively.
Through Raise/Raze, the firm reused plastic balls from Snarkitecture’s “The Beach” at the National Building Museum to create an installation in DC’s Dupont Underground, a contemporary arts and culture space repurposed from an abandoned trolley station. Raise/Raze opened on April 30, and closed on June 1.
Located at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York, Sticks is a multi-purpose pavilion space made of standard dimension lumber and accented with scrap wood found on-site. The pavilion opened on July 9, and will close December 31.
The Brick Industry Association (BIA) has announced the results of the 2016 Brick in Architecture Awards, given to “the country’s most visionary projects incorporating fired-clay brick.” This year, there were a total of 32 medalists with Best in Class winners in seven categories: Commercial, Educational (Higher Education), Educational (K-12), Healthcare, Municipal/Government, Residential (Multifamily) and Residential (Single Family).
“These winners demonstrate the best of brick’s aesthetic flexibility, and as a material made from abundant natural resources, it’s a perfect strategy in sustainable design,” said Ray Leonhard, BIA’s president and CEO.
In this series by renowned financial institution Goldman Sachs, Talks at GS, some of architecture’s leading minds, including David Adjaye and Maya Lin, talk about how their careers have developed, their secrets to success, and what they are working on right now. The most recent video features Bjarke Ingels discussing his design approach and the development of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion. In addition to the videos, Goldman Sachs has also sat down with two other design leaders to talk about their careers.
Currently on display at the Storefront for Art & Architecture gallery in New York, Sharing Models: Manhattanisms is the latest exhibition put on the nonprofit organization, which asked 30 international and up-and-coming firms to answer the question: “How will the sharing movement of today affect the way we inhabit and build the cities of tomorrow?”
Each firm was tasked with creating a drawing and model of their vision for the future of a given slice of the island. When pushed together, the 30 pieces create a single composite figure, a collage of a shared Manhattan that is “simultaneously fictional and real, and one that opens a window to new perceptions of the city’s shared assets.”
CetraRuddy has been selected to design a new 18-story office building in Manhattan’s trendy Meatpacking District. With plans filed before zoning ordinances in the area changed the height limit to 130 feet, the project will feature an extra 140 feet, with a total height of 270 feet.
Located on West 15th Street near Ninth Avenue, the office building—which was previously designed as a hotel—will connect to a landmark district building on West 14th Street, which will be renovated as a part of the project. Together, the two buildings will feature 250,000 square feet of office space with a landscaped rooftop and an additional five terraces for communal work and relaxation areas.
Norway’s Public Roads Administration have begun conducting feasibility studies on the installation of what would be the world’s first floating underwater tunnel system. Norway is famous for its fjords, whose incredible depths make traditional bridge building a costly headache. Instead, the most common way to traverse them is through the use of ferries, a system that is both slow and subject to harsh weather conditions. As a result, engineers began looking for a new solution.
Now on display as part of CURRENT: LA’s Public Art Biennial is “The Waterfall Pavilion,” designed by Los Angeles architects wHY’s Objects Workshop division in coordination with contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. The temporary installation is located at the point where water from Lake Balboa flows via a waterfall into the Los Angeles River, and consists of an open pavilion and a water purification wagon, corresponding to this year's festival theme of 'Water.'
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected seven recipients of the 2016 AIA National Healthcare Design Awards, given to the year’s best projects in healthcare building design and healthcare design-oriented research. Projects were selected for displaying “conceptual strengths that solve aesthetic, civic, urban, and social concerns as well as the requisite functional and sustainability concerns of a hospital.”
The award is given in four categories: Category A: Built, Less than $25 million in construction cost; Category B: Built, More than $25 million in construction cost; Category C: Unbuilt, Must be commissioned for compensation by a client with the authority and intention to build (No projects were selected in this category this year); and Category D: Innovations in Planning and Design Research, Built and Unbuilt.
Perkins+Will has released plans for 98 Fourteenth Street, a 920 foot (280 meter) tall residential and commercial tower that, when complete, will become Atlanta’s second tallest building behind Pritzker Prize winning architect Kevin Roche’s Bank of America Plaza. The new tower is an integral piece of a planned development called the Midtown Art Walk, a half-mile pedestrian landscape featuring innovative architecture and interactive art elements between 2 transit stations in the district. The 74-story building will contain 382 luxury residential units and 180 corporate suites, as well as retail space on the ground level.
The Naomi Milgrom Foundation has released plans for Studio Mumbai founder Bijoy Jain’s design for the 2016 MPavilion, the Australian counterpart to London's wildly successful Serpentine Gallery Pavilion program. Continuing the concepts driving Studio Mumbai’s work, the pavilion will utilize a process Jain describes as ‘Lore,’ an exploration of handmade architecture and simplicity of building craft that centers on the relationship between making and human connectedness.
First Prize Winning Proposal "U-CAN" by I-Ting Chuang, Jing-Yao Lin, Takanori Kodama, Yu Han Wu. Image Courtesy of Bee Breeders
Through their international architecture competitions, Bee Breeders give young architects and designers the platform to question the social and political role of architecture. Their latest competition, a Cannabis Bank without a specified site, was an open-ended question into the role and relevance of the increasingly normalised substance. The judges selected three winners and six honorable mentions, all of which presented ideas that open up the discourse around cannabis and its integration into the built environment.
As the architecture of cannabis still remains undefined territory, it has historically been associated with refits of other building types such as tea houses, cafes, public houses or pharmacies. This ambiguity left the field open for entrants to be as fantastic and progressive as they desired, with respect to the impact of the program on their social context. The judges commented that the most successful projects presented a, "consideration of individual experience — medicinal, psychological, and spiritual; sensitive accommodation in space and circulation for both the intimate and social; clearly defined context and locale; and innovation of an undefined spatial, tectonic, and architectural typology."
Woods Bagot has released the plans for Glenelg Jetty, a redeveloped gateway and new tourist destination in South Australia. The 15-meter-wide by 400-meter-long public jetty project was born out of a study to help revitalize Glenelg and the City of Holdfast and is hoped to attract new visitors, including visiting cruise ship passengers.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has reported that the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) was positive in June for the fifth consecutive month. The June ABI score was 52.6, down from 53.1 the previous month, but still reflects an increase in design services, as any score above 50 indicates an increase in billings. The new projects inquiry index was 58.6, down from 60.1 the previous month.
“Demand for residential projects has surged this year, greatly exceeding the pace set in 2015. This suggests strong future growth for housing in the coming year,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit Baker, Hon. AIA, PhD. “While we expect to see a momentum continue for the overall design and construction industry in the months ahead, the fact that the value of design contracts dipped into negative territory in June for the first time in more than two years is something of a concern.”
The Miami office of Perkins+Will has unveiled the designs for 1212 Lincoln Road, a five-story mixed-use structure at the corner of Alton Road and the internationally renowned Lincoln Road Mall in Miami Beach.
The complex, which will span 140,000 square feet excluding parking, will feature 100 boutique hotel units, a European-style market, high-end retail space, as well as 450 parking spaces. The Market portion of the complex will contain fresh produce, as well as a variety of exotic eateries.
In this interview, presented in collaboration with PLANE—SITE, the creative directors of the Australian Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale discuss the motivation and execution of their design, "The Pool." In the short clip, Amelia Holliday, Isabelle Toland and Michelle Tabet provide insight into the cultural relevance of the pool within the Australian built environment and the emotional reactions they hoped to invoke in visitors. They explain the way these ideals are translated into the physical pavilion, which was intended to replicate "a place where people of different ages and backgrounds and abilities can all come together and be part of something."
Sparkling Natural Mineral Water company San Pellegrino has announced an international competition between 4 top architecture firms for the redesign of its flagship factory and bottling plant, located at the source of the mineral water, San Pellegrino Terme, Italy.
“This exciting endeavor aims to celebrate the heritage, special source and terroir of S.Pellegrino, while also promoting new standards of efficiency, environmental sustainability and compliance. Further, this project will support the revitalization of the historic region, harkening back to the golden age of San Pellegrino Terme, at the height of the Belle Époque, when the town served as an exclusive destination for European aristocracy,” a spokesperson for San Pellegrino said in a press release.
