It’s that time of the year. Architectural Record has published their list of Top 250 architecture firms. The companies are ranked according to revenue for architectural services performed in 2009 in $ millions.
The list is compiled from a survey conducted for Engineering News-Record’s annual Top 500 Design Firms Sourcebook. As last year, number 1 was for AECOM Technology Corporation, an engineer-architect firm from Los Angeles, California.
The firms classify themselves by:
A = Architect AE = Architect-Engineer AP = Architect Planner EA = Engineer-Architect AEC = Architect-Engineer-Contractor
Ozel Office, a practice based in both LA, California and Istanbul, Turkey, has designed a competition proposal for an Opera House for Izmir, a port town off the Aegean Coast. The competition challenged participants to see architecture as a “catalyst” that could potentially help the city re-center itself as a hub of economic activity and source of cultural significance. The collaborative effort within the office, especially led by Guvenc Ozel and Erdim Kumkumoglu, produced a proposal where the ”architecture becomes a catalyst that reinforces the relationship between the old city, the new city, the waterfront and urban culture. In short, our vision is a synergy of spatial, cultural as well as practical and contextual aesthetics.”
More images and more about the project after the break.
New Zealand architect, Tim Stephens, shared his HuntingtonUrban Farm design with us. The farm responds to the lack of support for the sustainable practice of growing and cultivating one’s own food source, an important issue Stephens sees as becoming more prevalent as our population increases. The farm provides convenient access to individualized plots of land where users can produce their own food right in the middle of the town.
Check out this video we found by Yellow Line Pictures and the 2010 MoMA/MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. We’ve been documenting SO-IL’s Pole Dance quite extensively and we feel that this video is a good addition to our coverage. We hope the film’s fun take on demonstrating how to use the project will make you even more excited to visit the PS1 schoolyard if you find yourself in the New York area. What do you think of the noise making poles? And, how about the fact that the project can be affected by an iPhone app ?
Similar to their identifiable products, the Apple stores require a sleek, almost instantly recognizable, aesthetic. As keepers of the latest technology, the buildings’ minimalist interiors boast a calm and sophisticated demeanor, complimenting, yet not overshadowing, their prized possessions. It may come as a surprise that the leading architects behind the stores are Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ), a firm that had never designed a retail store before Apple and whose principal, Peter Bohlin, winner of the AIA Gold Medal, ironically doesn’t use email.
Bohlin has awed us in the past, especially with Apple’s second Manhattan retail store located on Fifth Avenue. Turning a tough retail space into a successful masterpiece, the store’s iconic cube, a 32-foot glass structure, marks the store’s entrance and beckons customers down to the retail level which is illuminated with natural light. And now, BCJ has just unveiled their latest Apple store, and the first of its kind in China which seeks to emulate similar design decisions as the Fifth Avenue project.
C.F. Møller Architects just won a shared first prize in the competition for the new Opera and Culture Center in Norway, entitled Kulturkvartalet. This new Opera Center will house the country’s oldest opera in Kristiansund, the capital of the region of Nordmøre. The site proposes an interesting challenge as the new design must integrate two existing buildings with the proposed new urban center, and the most critical component becomes the shared urban space between the old and the new which will ultimately connect the Opera and Culture Center with pedestrian streets and a nearby park.
This past week, we’ve featured several of Jeffrey Durkin’s videos, such as Lindsay Brown’s ideas for the SD Waterfront and Miki Iwasaki’s philosophy on furniture design, architecture and society. This video highlights Jonathan Segal, a San Diego developer and architect, who focuses on urban projects such as high-density residence, mixed use, and live/work units.
A few days ago, we introduced Junya Ishigami’s Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop, a lightweight studio space with an interesting interior due to 305 slender columns. Our friend, Brandon Shigeta, shared his photos with us that illustrate Ishigami’s technique of using column distribution as a space generator. Although the slender columns appear randomly distributed, the architects’ seemingly scattered order has created defined zones that subdivide the large studio workspace.
More images and more about the columns after the break.
We have told you in the past about Brad Pitt´s Make It Right Foundation. They have been working with a group of international architects to redevelop the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans, after hurricane Katrina. The name of the foundation addresses the desire of Pitt, architecture enthusiast, to design these houses the best way and not just as a temporary solution, in a process that also included working not only with these renowned firms, but also very close with the community, with a focus on sustainable development.
Recently, we were invited to see Sir James Dyson’s newest technology in the Pomegranate Gallery. Perhaps the name sounds familiar, and rightly so. The company continually makes innovative products that remain at the top of their market, such as their Dual Cyclone which became the fastest selling vacuum cleaner ever to be made in the UK, or their washing machine with two rotating drums which move in opposite directions, or even their hand dryer which produces an air stream flowing at 400 mph. With a background in industrial design, Dyson’s work combines modern engineering with an aesthetic undertone, all in an effort to achieve energy efficiency. Their creativity comes to life within their Malmesbury headquarters, a long span structure topped with an undulating roof designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects.
Our friends from Studio One Eleven have just broken ground on Long Beach’s newest urban farm. The design is an extension of the New City School, a charter campus within the Long Beach Unified School District, that will teach children important lessons about the environment and nutrition.”The need to grow locally, provide affordable organic foods, and reconnect people to the land is an issue we are very passionate about at Studio One Eleven. All of our projects…represent our interest in improving the natural and built environment while creating a better community,” explained Michael Bohn, principal of the firm.
More images and more about the urban farm after the break.
Jeffrey Durkin, founder of Breadtruck Films, has documented the ongoing efforts of the architect + developer movement to revitalize San Diego’s urban waterfront. In a city where a tree, let alone a patch of grass, is hard to come by, architect Lindsay Brown has proposed a public park along the edge of the city to break the monotonous hardscape of buildings and highways that dominate the area.
More about the design, including renderings from the architect.
We featured Chilean firm Supersudaka several times previously on AD because we enjoy their architectural philosophy – especially their claim that, “We don’t want to change the world with architecture, we want to change architecture with the world.” For their Mirage House, the client could not make a decision about what to build on his 5000 m2 plot, leading Supersudaka to think up an interesting solution.
Check out Junya Ishigami and Associates‘amazing studio + workspace where students of the Kanagawa Institute of Technology get to spend their days designing. The studio is about the closest you can get to the feeling of working outside while being indoors. The floor-to-ceiling glass makes the building appear weightless and elegant, and the open plan preserves the building’s sense of transparency as the viewer’s eye can shoot directly across the uninterrupted space. 305 columns of various sizes support the stripped roof of skylights, yet their white color keeps the focus on the space and the view, not the structure. The columns, although seemingly random, as specifically placed to create the sensation of zoned spaces, but their nonrestrictive quality provides a flexible layout to suit the changing needs of students.
Our Cities Ourselves: The Future of Transportation in Urban Life has just kicked off its worldwide tour starting in New York at the Center for Architecture. The exhibit shows the visions of ten of the world’s developing cities from ten of the world’s leading architects. Over the next 20 years, these places will experience urban growth on a grand scale and the urban planning efforts will create successful cities through better transportation.
We are loving the fact that as Field Operations and DS+R’s High Line keeps developing, new residential and commercial entities are following suite, popping up adjacent to the tracks, over the tracks, and even under the tracks. And now, Konyk Architecturewill join in the urban renewal which is unfolding in the Meat-Packing District with their new event space that will rest underneath the High Line adjacent to Neil Denari’s HL23 Condominium (previously featured on AD).
More about the winning event space after the break.
