Arranha-céus: The Latest Architecture and News

Downtown Los Angeles’ skyscraper boom continues – this time straying south to the intersection of South Olive and 11th Street, where developer Crescent Heights has submitted plans for a new 70-story residential tower housing 794 apartment units. Designed by ODA, 1045 Olive is planned to top out at a height of 770 feet, which would make it Los Angeles’ tallest residential building and 4th tallest overall.

Unique to the structure (and fitting for Los Angeles) would be the massive amount of space dedicated to parking: 13.5 total floors would be dedicated to parking spots, including an above ground 8-story core that would be wrapped in apartments to visually conceal the cars within.

Zaha Hadid Architects have released new photos showcasing the ongoing construction progress of Leeza SOHO, a mixed-use office tower in Beijing's Lize Financial Business District. This twisting, contorted structural skeleton, which weaves together two separate sections of the tower and visually fuses them, will house the world's tallest atrium, rising the full height of the building.

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Updated renderings have been revealed for renowned architect Helmut Jahn’s 1000M, an upcoming 832-foot skyscraper that will take the place of a currently vacant lot on Chicago’s historic Michigan Avenue. Accommodating 323 luxury residences and over 40,000 square feet of amenities, the building will be clad in a green and blue glass curtainwall, with horizontal metal spandrels running across and dividing it. The roof terrace is covered by a hovering metallic mesh crown, which is shown in the new renderings.

Penda, collaborating with wood consultants from CLT-brand Tmber, has unveiled the design of ‘Tree Tower Toronto,’ an 18-story timber-framed mixed-use residential skyscraper for Canada’s largest city. Drawing inspiration from the distinctly Canadian traditional modular construction, including Moshe Safdie’s iconic Habitat 67, the tower is envisioned as a new model of sustainable high-rise architecture that can establish a reconnect urban areas to nature and natural materials.

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Los Angeles’ newest skyscraper, the Wilshire Grand Center, opened to the public this weekend, earning the crown of the United States’ tallest building west of the Mississippi River. Topping out at 1,100 feet, the building eclipses the nearby U.S. Bank Tower by about 82 feet, thanks to its glass crown and decorative spire that rise from above the 73rd floor.

Designed by AC Martin Partners, the structure also represents a major change in Los Angeles tall building design as the first skyscraper completed since the city’s 2014 decision to remove the stipulation that all buildings over 75 feet must feature a flat roof to serve as a helipad.

Herzog & de Meuron have completed construction of their latest project, a high-rise luxury residential skyscraper on 56 Leonard Street, New York City. Conceived as a stack of individual houses resembling a Jenga tower, the building is the tallest in its Tribeca neighborhood. With its tall and slender silhouette, 56 Leonard Street is the latest in a series of contemporary skyscrapers punctuating Manhattan’s skyline.

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SkyCity is pleased to invite architects, designers, artists, engineers, scientists, conservationists, ambient warriors, tribesmen, digital nomads, craftsmen or basically anyone with great ideas from around the globe to take part in SkyCity Challenge 17. Our climate is changing, squalor, nationalism, and inequality are rising, people are constantly moving into cities and the demand for a better and more sustainable living in urban areas continues to grow. The current ways are very limited and outdated and with the modern technology available we are able to create far better and more sophisticated spaces that could affect the very way of our living in the future …

A 1,400-foot-tall mixed-use skyscraper by Zaha Hadid Architects may be the next supertall structure to hit midtown Manhattan. Located at 666 Fifth Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Street, the project is the brainchild of Kushner Properties, who currently co-own the existing 483-foot-tall building with Vornado Realty Trust.

Estimated to cost up to $12 billion, the company is currently negotiating a multi-billion dollar deal with Chinese holding company Anbang Insurance Group to finance the project. If plans to buy out the building go through, Kushner would be in the clear to begin construction on the ZHA-designed tower, which would rebrand the property as 660 Fifth Avenue and offer 464,000-square-feet of residential space, an 11-story hotel, and a 9-story retail podium.

Professor Alan Short of the University of Cambridge has published a book advocating for the revival of 19th-century architectural ideas to address the crippling energy use of modern skyscrapers. The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture proposes an end to the architectural fetish for glass, steel, and air conditioning, instead drawing inspiration from forgotten techniques in naturally ventilated buildings of the 1800s. The book is a culmination of 30 years’ research and design by Prof. Short and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge.

Chicago may be about to receive a new supertall skyscraper in the heart of the Loop – but it would require the demolition of one of the city’s most polarizing buildings, the James R. Thompson Center, designed by Chicago architect Helmut Jahn.

Owned by the state, the postmodernist Thompson Center and its colorful glass atrium have been the subject of both criticism and adoration since its opening in 1985. But wear on the building throughout the years has led to an estimated maintenance bill of $326 million, prompting the state government to find ways to rid itself of the potentially crippling costs.

In its annual report, the 2016 Tall Building Year in Review, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has announced that 2016 saw the completion of a record 128 buildings 200 meters or higher. This number surpasses the previous record of 114 completions set in 2015. Eighteen of these buildings became the tallest in their city, country, or region, and ten earned the designation of supertall, at 300 meters and above.

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Many have walked by and wondered what purpose this vast, windowless skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan serves. 33 Thomas Street, also known as the "Long Lines Building" (LLB), is an impenetrable monolithic fortress amid canyons of glass and steel. Ostensibly an AT&T telecoms building, the New York Times have recently reported (based on investigative work by The Intercept) that this "blank face[d] monument to privacy" may in fact be a NSA (National Security Agency) listening post, hidden in plain sight.

Photographer Paul Clemence of ARCHI-PHOTO has shared images of 56 Leonard Street by Herzog & de Meuron. Nearing completion, the 60-story residential tower will be the tallest structure in Tribeca when it opens later this year. The concept of 56 Leonard Street is to disrupt the monotony of typical high-rise city buildings with a more varied articulation achieved by stacking recognizable individual houses. Shifted floor slabs create differentiated corners, cantilever, and balcony conditions that provide apartments with their own unique characters. Developed from the inside out, the pixelated rooms are arranged such that the base of the tower reacts to the street conditions and ripples upward to merge with the sky.

Read on for the full photo set.

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The career of Japanese architect Kenzō Tange features a curious anomaly: he received the same commission twice. In 1952, during the early stages of his career, Tange designed an administrative building in Yūrakuchō, Tokyo, for the city's metropolitan government. Over thirty years later, when the government relocated to Shinjuku, Tokyo, he again won the commission to design its administrative building. Completed in 1991, this would be one of his last, and most ambitious, projects. The second incarnation now dominates the city’s skyline, its highly distinctive design guaranteeing it landmark status. Nicknamed Tochō (an abbreviation of its Japanese name Tōkyō-to Chōsha), its architectural references to both tradition and modernity act as a visual metaphor for the eclectic city over which its inhabitants govern.

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The past ten years have seen a new twist in tall building design: buildings that rotate as they rise, either for engineering or purely aesthetic purposes. Inspired by this recent trend, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has produced a new graphic entitled Tall Buildings in Numbers “Twisting Tall Buildings” to analyze the “recent proliferation of twisting towers creating a new generation of iconic buildings throughout the world.”

The infographic compares the buildings by height, along with the tightness and total degrees of their rotation. Continue after the break for the full graphic and links to the projects on ArchDaily.

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.

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