Public Facilities: The Latest Architecture and News

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Populous' has released plans to redevelop Jacksonville, Florida’s riverfront Shipyards district into a massive recreation and entertainment hub. Unveiled by the Jacksonville Jaguars' team owner Shad Khan and president Mark Lamping, the property will be injected with life to better stimulate economic activity in the area and make the forgotten plot a bustling destination for locals and tourists alike.

Read on after the break for more information and an animation of the Shipyards vision.

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Spanish-Kuwaiti firm AGi architects has been awarded second prize in a competition to design a new courthouse in Qatar’s capital, Doha. The restricted competition, organized by the Government of Qatar, challenged 30 participants, of which four were shortlisted to compete in the final round.

AGi’s proposal was based off of two grids - the immediate site’s and the larger city - resulting in a “floating,” canopy-like structure that metaphorical “protects” its inhabitants. View the complete proposal, after the break. 

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The United States’ diplomatic presence in Cuba is housed in a severe, early-1950s office building perched on the shoreline over Havana Bay. Walled off from the city and pulled back from the street, the building has the uneasy presence of a haunted castle – shunned and maligned by its neighbors, but subjected to the unending scrutiny of suspicious eyes and intrigued gossip of the locals. With its regimented orthogonalities and the unmistakably foreign imprint of modernist efficiencies, both the embassy's architecture and the optimistic political spirit it embodies seem to belong to another era, a cooperative past no longer conceivable in the wake of a half century of underhanded diplomacy, calumnious propaganda, and failed attempts to restore relations between the embattled countries.

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