The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce holds the annual Building Brooklyn Awards. Currently accepting nominations for the 11th Annual Buidling Brooklyn Awards, the event is a signature real estate industry event that recognizes recently completed new, and renovation construction projects, that have a positive impact on the borough’s economy and quality of life.
The event honors individuals who have made significant contributions toward enhancing the business conditions and economic climate of Brooklyn. This year’s awards ceremony will be held on Thursday, July 14, 2011, at the Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
More information and images from last year’s winners after the break.
In the past few years, Bjarke Ingels’ architecture has slowly, but steadily, been gaining international attention. From housing projects to commercial entities to design ideas, Northern European countries have found themselves host to an abundance of angular geometries, bold forms, and straightforward approaches characteristic of Ingels. As we reported early last week, BIG will now take its signature style to Manhattan with a not-so-typical response for the design of a New York apartment building for client Durst Fetner Residential (be sure to read our coverage here).
After the excitement of seeing BIG’s fresh architectural idea respond to the character and context of New York, now, the harsh reality of board meetings and zoning regulations are the project’s next obstacle to overcome in the quest for final approval.
More about W57th’s approval process after the break.
Kate Orff shares her vision of ‘oyster-tecture’ utilizing oysters as an agent for urban change. Focusing on the New York Harbor, Orff, architect and founding principal of Manhattan based studio SCAPE, demonstrates how we can rethink our landscapes, both the green and blue spaces, linking nature and humanity for mutual benefit.
The young architecture firm of SM-arch has recently won a architectural competition for their Multigenerational building proposal in Gland, Switzerland. They are now engaged with the municipality for the execution of the project. Additional images and a brief narrative from the architects after the break.
mossessian & partners have won the MIPIM Architectural Review Future Projects “Overall Winner category” Award for their element of the Musheireb scheme, a sustainable downtown regeneration project in Doha, Qatar for the Dohaland development group.
Eero Saarinen’s decommissioned TWA Terminal has been slated for conversion into a boutique hotel. It seems as though the Port Authority’s plan is to use the landmark terminal as the gateway to a separate hotel building that will be squeezed into the crescent of space between Saarinen’s building and JetBlue’s Terminal 5. Along with this proposal, some might think that creating a boutique out of a classic could contradict what Saarinen had in mind. Many design challenges can arise from a simple, yet complex transformation. More on the news after the break.
This house is a contemporary version of an Earthship, an ecologically benign house type popularized in the 1970s by Mike Reynolds, founder of Earthship Biotecture. This version is similarly set into the earth, cut into a hillside facing Pike’s Peak. Because of its rural location, it relies on PVs and solar thermal energy for electricity and heat. It also has a shallow plan, south facing windows, and a finished concrete floor to maximize passive solar gains during winter months.
Following the success of last year’s competition, Architecture for Humanity Chicago, in collaboration with Archeworks, is proud to announce the Street Furniture Competition 2011. Read over the full competition brief after the break.
The 5th IABR calls for submissions of projects that advance innovative responses to today’s most pressing urban challenges. Municipal, metropolitan and national governments, cultural organizations, researchers, designers, and other parties are invited to submit design projects that rethink the existing interaction between politics, planning and design.
David Kohn Architects and artist Fiona Banner have been selected to design A Room for London, a temporary installation that will sit on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall at Southbank Centre, London and be part of the London 2012 Festival. ArchDaily has been showcasing selected entries to the competition for months now and can be seen here. For more information pertaining to David Kohn Architects and Fiona Banner‘s winning entry please follow after the break.
A while ago we visited Stephan Jaklitsch and Mark Gardner in New York. Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects, formerly Stephan Jaklitsch Architects, have made a name for themselves by designing buildings that engage their users and respond to their cultures. The conceptual framework of each project derives from the context, time and place of each project.
Headed for Palm Springs, California, BOOM Community is a new master-planned community costing $250 million and will provide an exciting new design for the desert that surrounds it. Collaborating to create this pedestrian friendly, neighborhood development are ten architecture firms, including Diller Scofidio + Renfro of New York. Envisioned for the gay community BOOM aims to provide an urban lifestyle promoting healthy living. Included within the masterplan: a boutique hotel, gym and spa, BOOM health and wellness center, and entertainment complex.
With our Building of the Year Awards entering our final days of voting, today’s selection of previously featured hotels includes the category winner for last year’s Awards. Check the complete selection after the break.
The Yas Hotel / Asymptote The Yas Hotel, a 500-room, 85,000-square-meter complex, is one of the main architectural features of the ambitious 36-billion-dollar Yas Marina development and accompanying Formula 1 raceway circuit in Abu Dhabi, UAE (read more…)
In 2005, an invited international competition was announced for a design of the reclaimed area above a tunnel holding a section of the M30 ring motorway immediately adjacent to the old city centre. The team proposed to resolve the urban situation exclusively by means of landscape architecture, and were the winning submission. The design is founded on the idea »3 + 30« – a concept which proposes dividing the 80 hectare urban development into a trilogy of initial strategic projects that establish a basic structure which then serves as a solid foundation for a number of further projects, initiated in part by the municipality as well as by private investors and residents.
London based architects, mossessian & partners, have shared with us their recent work, Al Barahat Square in the Musheireb development in Doha, Qatar. Additional images and a press release for this new civic space after the jump.
The team of BIG + TNT Nuuk + Ramboll Nuuk + Arkitekti have won the competition to design the new National Gallery of Greenland in the country’s capital Nuuk, among invited proposals totaling 6 Nordic architects. More images and complete press release after the break.
Evgeny Didorenko shared with us his project whose aim of a landmark was not to create a monument to the power of the industrial age and conquest of nature, but rather a monument to nature. Doing so would acknowledge the generous gifts nature has given us that was produced centuries and even millenniums ago. Brown coal – one of it’s gifts. More images and architect’s description after the break.
You can now see almost 40,000 photos in our Flickr Pool! And here’s our 33rd selection of it. As always, remember you can submit your own photo here, and don’t forget to follow us through Twitter and our Facebook Fan Page to find many more features.
The photo above was taken by d.teil in Berlin, Germany. Check the other four after the break.
Browsing Lapham’s Quarterly, I came upon an interesting little article under the heading, “Practice and Theory.” Then I noticed the date, c. 25 BC, Rome—hardly current for online content. I soon realized I was reading a passage from Vitruvius’ On Architecture, one of those texts in the canon of western architecture that I should be familiar with—or at the very least know about. The former I make not claims to. I’m afraid the latter is more the case.
This might come as a shock, but I have not actually read his entire ten-volume treatise. On another note of disappointment, the man’s life remains obscure and I have no intention of making it any less so here. Be that as it may, the passage reproduced here seems relevant in this era of increasing specialization, professional insularity, technology- and theory-driven practices, and unstable business models.
President Obama in his State of the Union address shared plans for making American businesses more energy efficient. Focusing on investing in innovative clean energy technologies, the ‘Better Buildings’ initiative aims to increase energy efficiency in commercial buildings by 20 percent over the next decade. Building on his other contributions, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and proposed “HOMESTAR” legislation, this series of incentives would hope to propel private sector investment to upgrade offices, stores, schools and other municipal buildings, universities, hospitals, and other commercial buildings.
YAJ Architects present a proposal for the future of industrial buildings in an atmosphere where environmental and sustainable practices are vital, yet largely focus on the construction of housing and offices. This design for the Future Train Depot focuses on a near zero energy performance by using ground water heating and cooling, solar panels, and sensor-driven natural ventilation.
Nominations are invited for the 2011 Harleston Parker Medal, which is presented to “such architects as shall have, in the opinion of the Boston Society of Architects…completed the erection for any private citizen, association, corporation or public authority, the most beautiful piece of architecture, building, monument or structure within the limits of the City of Boston or of the Metropolitan Parks District”.
Rotterdam-based office for urban design and landscape architecture West 8, in collaboration withSener & Gestec, have designed this entry for the Valencia Central Park Competition. Their proposal achieved a place on the competition shortlist. The design presented here is a concept for Parque Central inspired by the Valencian tradition of solid narrative and poetry.
More images and description of the project after the break.
