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HOK has been selected to design Porsche Cars North America’s new headquarters in Atlanta, following an intense design competition. This innovative development includes a contemporary workplace, a Technical Service and Training Center, and a Customer and Driver Experience Center with an integrated road handling track. The nearly 200,000-square-foot complex will accommodate up to 400 employees under one roof on a high-profile, 26-acre Aerotropolis site near the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The headquarters will provide Porsche a strong foundation for continued growth in its largest market worldwide.
“Our vision for our new U.S. corporate home is to create a bold and energizing environment where the physical elements are as memorable and moving as the Porsche driving and ownership experience,” said Detlev von Platen, president and CEO of Porsche Cars North America. “HOK has perfectly interpreted this vision into a dynamic design that is as emotionally charged as Porsche automobiles.”
“Our design goal was to capture the essence of the Porsche brand and performance,” said Todd Bertsch, director of design at HOK in Atlanta. “We have designed a movement-filled building with the same high-energy feel and performance as Porsche automobiles. By integrating the track into the lower levels of the office building and weaving in subtle motorsport-related cues, we can immerse employees, dealers and customers in the Porsche experience.”
HOK’s design will create a single home for the Porsche North America family by bringing together office, training and driving functions while creating a unified brand experience. An interior “Main Street” and courtyard area showcasing the vehicles will function as the heart of the facility. From this courtyard space, customers and employees will be able to interact while watching the action on the track below.
“We’re delighted to work with a client like Porsche,” said Bertsch. “Its design philosophy and culture are very similar to HOK’s. We each emphasize integrity, simple elegance and high performance. We are approaching the design of Porsche’s North American headquarters much like they approach the design of their automobiles. We want to create a high-performing, low energy consuming building while emphasizing a superior customer experience.”
Reflecting Porsche’s commitment to the environment, HOK is designing a highly sustainable building and targeting a minimum of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver certification. Energy conservation measures include fine-tuning the building orientation and creating a highly efficient building envelope. The team will explore opportunities for natural ventilation and on-site energy generation and green roofs that reduce the heat island effect and filter rainwater before it returns to Atlanta’s water system.
Employees will enjoy a contemporary light-filled workplace that promotes collaboration and inspires creativity. Central café areas, team rooms and huddle spaces will support Porsche’s cooperative, transparent culture.
HOK’s integrated design services for the project include architecture, interior design, workplace strategy, sustainable design, high-performance building engineering, environmental graphics and landscape architecture.
Porsche Cars North America, Inc. (PCNA), based in Atlanta, Ga., is the exclusive U.S. importer of Porsche sports cars, the Cayenne SUV and Panamera sport sedan. Established in 1984, it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Porsche AG, which is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, and employs approximately 220 people who provide parts, service, marketing and training for 196 dealers. They, in turn, work to provide Porsche customers with a best-in-class experience that is in keeping with the brand’s 63-year history and leadership in the advancement of vehicle performance, safety and efficiency. At the core of this success is Porsche’s proud racing heritage that boasts some 30,000 motorsport wins to date.
HOK is a global architectural firm that provides planning and design solutions for high performance, sustainable buildings and communities. Through its collaborative network of 25 offices worldwide, the firm delivers design excellence and innovation to clients globally. Founded in 1955, HOK’s expertise includes architecture, engineering, interiors, strategic facility planning, consulting, lighting, graphics, and construction services. In 2011, DesignIntelligence ranked HOK as the No. 1 role model for sustainable and high performance design.
HOK projects include the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia; the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida; King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia; and the New Doha International Airport in Qatar.
Source: PR WEB
Last spring, developer Related Cos. became disenchanted with the design of the first phase of Hudson Yards, the gargantuan project on top of a train storage yard along the Hudson River.
The original design of Hudson Yards had three straight boxy towers.
“I could tell that Stephen wasn’t in love with it,” recalls Jay Cross, who oversees the project for Related, referring to the developer’s chairman, Stephen Ross. “He felt he wanted the buildings to be more dramatic. And we found that the marketplace was looking for bigger buildings.”
That made for a busy summer for Related and its architect William Pedersen, one of the name partners at the firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. The result, which was recently unveiled, is an improvement in terms of the interactions of the buildings if not in the aesthetics of the buildings themselves.
With 26 acres and more than 12 million square feet of potential developable space overtop Hudson Yards competes with the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site as New York’s current, highest-profile development effort. Related has signed a deal with handbag-maker Coach Inc. to move its headquarters into 600,000 square feet in the south tower.
A new rendering shows two jagged towers
Kohn Pedersen’s original first-phase design called for three boxy steel office towers, the shortest one in the middle, along the east side of the site. Each building had the same square-jawed look of consternation: renderings showed stacks of long, plain blocks of steel and concrete arrayed to look like a cubist abstraction, or a screenshot from Tetris, the old block-stacking video-game. In between was to be four stories of retail space centered around a large glass box with a cyclone-shaped structure.
The design wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t the sort of arresting, statement-making architecture that one would expect a next-big-thing type of project. KPF’s early designs for the buildings were like Buckingham Palace bobbies: standing straight and erect, faces constant, but not saying much of anything at all.
The new plan for phase one, recently unveiled, describes a much different composition. The 30-story middle building is gone. New renderings show two jagged towers—the more northerly one 67 stories and sloping diagonally toward the city, the other, 51 stories and angled towards the Hudson—that slash through the skyline. Connecting the two buildings will be eight stories of retail and trading-floor space.
Hudson Yard’s New look Slideshow
The two office towers are disappointing as stand-alone buildings. Like most modern office towers they are brash and arrogant instead of being noble and poised. Their form is shard-like: all harsh angles with a jaggedness that evokes crystals or canyon rock formations.
But the new design helps make up for this in the way the office buildings interact. The mirror-image slopes of the two buildings, which would regard one another differently from nearly every angle of viewing, give viewers the sensation of two dancers in the midst of a paso doble. The southern building, which would house Coach, is, sensibly, the female of the pair —slightly shorter, with the atrium manifested as a slit in the dancer’s ball gown, giving a glimpse of a flash of leg underneath.
Mr. Pedersen talks frequently of the “responsibility of tall buildings” to interact rationally with the urban context around them. The towers, through their interplay, emphasize the presence of a long, open, park space—set to run east-west from the towers to the river—that will go in between them.
“The buildings have to be able to, by their internal biology, create social connections,” Mr. Pedersen says. “Too many buildings around the world have independent, sculptural shapes. The effect here is to connect the building directly to the city.”
This intent is certainly palpable in the design. And if Related eventually ends up landing another signature tenant for the north tower, the plan will be realized, and the two buildings will go ahead and dance their way around the fabric of the city’s newest cluster of statement-making skyscrapers.
Source: WSJ
Architecture has come a long way since 1885, when William Le Baron Jenney built what is widely considered the world’s first skyscraper. His eight-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago was designed with metal columns and beams instead of heavy masonry, leading the way for even taller constructions to come. In January 2010, SOM’s Burj Khalifa smashed the world record for tallest skyscraper in the world. The smooth steel stalagmite towers half a mile above Dubai, with its very tip often obscured by clouds.
These days, the claim of being the tallest building in the world is never held for too long. With skyscrapers going up at seemingly breakneck speeds, one would think that things have changed dramatically since Jenney’s architectural revolution in Chicago, and there is no doubt that they have. But Kate Ascher exposes the inner workings of these modern marvels in her new book The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper, and it turns out that contemporary design solutions are sometimes more primitive than one would think. She sat down with Fresh Air host Terry Gross to answer a few questions, for instance, what happens when you flush a toilet on the top of the tallest building in the world? Click to learn more.
What Ascher immediately assured NPR listeners was that even after digging for dirt on these unbelievable feats of engineering, she feels safe taking the elevator to a triple-digit floor. But she does provide some intriguing food for thought for our next trip to an observation deck. For one, she told Gross that engineers purposefully design buildings to sway back and forth in order to alleviate pressure caused by wind currents. Even more jarring is the fact that there is no precise formula behind the amount of sway in a building but only a maximum fraction of the building that is permitted to sway (one-500th).
An excerpt from The Heights, via NPR.
She also explained how some skyscrapers are designed with large pools of water or some other material stored at the top of the building. These high-altitude tanks, called tuned liquid dampers, work to counter the sway from strong wind currents, functioning under basic laws of physics: when wind comes from one direction, the water will subsequently rush back in the other direction, working to keep the building in place.
As for the toilets thousands of feet in the air, we were told that flushing a toilet from the top of a skyscraper is not too different from flushing a toilet in a house. Water from toilets one or 100 floors above ground run into a septic system usually plugged into the city sewer systems, with the only real difference being the need for sophisticated twists and bends in the plumbing inside tall buildings to prevent waste from accelerating at terrifying speeds.
The most surprising fact was that despite the Burj Khalifa’s sophisticated design, the ultra modern high-rise is plugged into a city that has relatively outdated sewage infrastructure. Ascher remarked that for a number of Dubai’s skyscrapers, wastewater doesn’t deposit directly into the city sewer system. Instead, it gets trucked out to treatment plants and placed on a queue for sometimes up to 24 hours. The same goes for tall buildings in India and presumably other countries. Though Ascher foresees these countries investing in a more comprehensive, interconnected sewage system, right now it’s quite a paradox imagining a half-mile tall building requiring a half-mile long queue of wastewater-carrying trucks.
Source: Architizer Blog
Frank Gehry, designer of Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, is seeking projects in Asian countries including China and India as slower U.S. growth crimps development in the world’s largest economy.
The architect said he’s competing to plan a museum in one of China’s fast-expanding metropolitan areas, as well as a “very spiritual kind of a building” in India. He declined to give further details. Gehry designed an aquarium as part of the recent redevelopment of the Ocean Park attraction in Hong Kong.
Gehry, 82, is turning to Asia as developers start few projects in the U.S. The Architecture Billings Index, an indicator of American construction, plunged to 46.9 last month from 51.4 in August, reflecting lower demand for design services, according to the American Institute of Architects. Any score less than 50 indicates a decline in billings.
Meanwhile, “there’s an art explosion in China,” Gehry said in an Oct. 25 interview at Bloomberg’s Los Angeles offices. “It’s really great — very exciting.”
He expects to sign a contract within three to four months should an agreement be reached for the Chinese museum. One challenge of designing in a country such as China is the lower pay for projects, Gehry said. Architects get paid a percentage of construction costs, which in China are about a third of what they are in the U.S., he said.
“If you take a percentage and you work with western salaries, you can’t make it work,” Gehry said. “So it almost forces you to open an office in China and work with local people.”
Gehry said he would prefer to travel less and focus on projects in California or New York. The lack of development in the U.S. along with employees at Los Angeles-based Gehry Partners LLP who depend on him are forcing him to look elsewhere, the architect said.
“I have over 100 people in my office,” he said. “At my age, I would love only to work in Los Angeles, maybe Santa Monica, maybe Beverly Hills.”
Construction of one of Gehry’s projects abroad, the 450,000-square-foot (42,000-square-meter) Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum, was halted earlier this month by Tourism Development & Investment Co. as the emirate scales back plans made before the 2008 financial crisis.
“The Abu Dhabi building we’ve been working on in the last five to six years has been stopped, and that’s painful,” said Gehry, who also has a contract for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington.
Gehry, who designed a Manhattan apartment building on Spruce Street that opened earlier this year, also is seeking to win contracts by cutting construction waste, which often accounts for 30 percent of a development budget. His Los Angeles-based Gehry Technologies Inc. employs the same type of computer-aided, paperless, three-dimensional design used to build Boeing Co. (BA)’s 777 airliner.
“With two-dimensional drawings there’s a lot of room for error,” said Gehry, the 1989 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. “It creates so-called clashes that will result in costly change orders.”
There were few such conflicts at the 76-story Manhattan tower — called New York by Gehry, and developed by Forest City Ratner Cos. — even with its rippled and curved bay windows, according to Gehry. Almost 600 units of the 900-apartment building have been rented, he said.
“You’ve got to respect budgets because people are investing and building and have certain finite resources,” Gehry said. “So it behooves us to respect that.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Nadja Brandt in Los Angeles at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kara Wetzel at [email protected]
While the economy has stabilized in some regards, architects are still suffering.
Just when it seemed that the architecture industry might be pulling out of its tailspin, some key economic indicators are suggesting that a recovery might take longer than expected.
The Architecture Billings Index, a measure of the industry’s health compiled by the American Institute of Architects, has dipped below 50 for three consecutive months, posting scores of 47.6 (April), 47.2 (May), and 46.3 (June). Those dips came after five straight months of the ABI hovering at or above 50, a sign of increased activity.
Moreover, Engineering News-Record’s Construction Industry Confidence Index—based on surveys sent to contractors, subcontractors, engineers and architects—fell five points in the second quarter of 2011, from 51 to 46.
That data doesn’t surprise architect Charles Dalluge of the Omaha-based firm Leo A. Daly, which has 31 offices around the world. Even though some architects were publicly predicting that “it would be heaven in 2011,” he says, a lot of firms are still suffering.
And he might know. In June, his firm laid off 50 employees from various offices, including architects and engineers. Dalluge defends the move as part of a “strategic repositioning” that will result in the hiring of 50 workers with specialties in areas of growth, such as healthcare. The firm now has 900 employees.
But even a healthcare focus may not be enough to keep some firms alive. In June, Karlsberger, a Columbus, Ohio-based healthcare-focused firm, closed after 83 years in business. None of the firm’s managers would comment on the shuttering, which is believed to have resulted in 40 job cuts. A statement on its website, however, blamed the state of the market for its woes. “Our level of revenues are insufficient for us to meet our ongoing obligations,” it says.
Karlsberger’s former president, Mitchel Levitt, who resigned in April 2010 after 31 years, told RECORD that the firm lost a major lawsuit that made it difficult to go on. The suit was brought against Ohio State University, one of Karlsberger’s largest clients, over the school’s termination of a contract for a $1 billion medical center expansion; the lawsuit was dismissed in December. “It probably hurt them,” Levitt said in an interview conducted in June. “But I thought they had done what they needed to do to continue to operate.”
While the new office building market may show few signs of turnaround, especially while jobs are scarce, a bright spot appears to be college work. Many schools’ endowments were wiped out in the recession but are now being replenished by a robust stock market, which means that many stalled university projects are back on track.
Indeed, the economic downturn suspended a renovation of Yale’s 1928 Swartwout Building, designed by Egerton Swartout. But that project recently resumed, says Richard Olcott, partner at New York-based Ennead Architects, which is overseeing the renovation. Olcott adds that his firm didn’t lay off any workers during the recession; in fact, it hired 40 people in the last year, including architects, for a grand total of 160 employees.
Even public universities, once hurt by dwindling tax-collection revenues, are restarting projects, according to Ayers Saint Gross, a Baltimore design firm at work on a once-stalled science building for the University of Delaware.
The firm added 18 people last year and is now looking to hire five more, including architects. It now has 130 employees, its highest-ever headcount, said Adam Gross, a principal. “I think the indicators are pretty serious,” he said, referring to the ABI and other worrisome data, “but not as serious as we experienced” in the fall of 2008.
Source Architectural Record
A project by: Jun Mitsui & Associates Inc. Tokyo, Japan
This project is a formation of two different buildings; the main building has a limestone curtainwall façade of slit-windows that angles rhythmically like a folding screen, and in contrast to this, the smaller corner building is an entirely glass volume. Together with its very prominent neighboring building, Prada, the buildings form a core complex for the Miyuki Dori area. The corner building, surrounded by its larger neighbors, is set off as a centerpiece and creates a very strong identity for the complex as a whole and for the Minami Aoyama area as well.
The different appearance of the two buildings helps to enhance their relationship; the main building’s limestone façade creates a cohesive background to contrast with the entirely glass surfaces of the corner building, while also revealing activity of the shops behind through its slit windows. By dividing the project into two buildings, this provided the opportunity to create an open plaza space in the center. This space creates an extra circulation zone at this central intersection, pulling people through the complex, and making a dynamic space at the tenant’s entry space. As people pass through, the intent is to evoke a response through the impact of the building design, and create interest in entering.
Set beside the stoic blue crystal volume of the Prada building, the warm yellow limestone façade changes with the moving perspective as people walk by. With this contrast, the intent is to ultimately compliment the surrounding buildings by creating an animated street experience.
Source: Architizer – see more photos
Eduardo Souto de Moura
In truth, he and first lady Michelle Obama made but a brief appearance at the black-tie gala, leaving Mayor Rahm Emanuel, top White House aides Valerie Jarrett, Bill Daley, Austan Goolsbee and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to fill them in on the menu offerings (caviar, cheese scones and steak), the music (Mozart and Haydn from a string quartet) and the requisite representative of Hollywood (Richard Gere).
“There was a time when I thought I wanted to be an architect, where I expected to be more creative than I turned out, so I had to go into politics instead,” President Obama told the crowd.
He paid homage to both the Pritzker family, whose foundation awards the international prize, and to some of the architectural giants whose work stands tall in Chicago: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry (the latter a dinner guest).
Obama pointed out that his 2008 campaign headquarters in Chicago was in a building based on a Mies van der Rohe design, adding: “And for two years, we crammed it full of hundreds of people working around the clock and surviving on nothing but pizza. I’m not sure if that’s what Mies had in mind, but it worked out pretty well for us.”
The first lady, at his side on stage as he spoke, wore a sleeveless, backless gown by designer Reed Krakoff.
The Pritzker Prize, awarded internationally to a living architect, is sometimes called the Nobel Prize of the architecture world. The prize was founded in 1979 by two Chicagoans, the late Jay A. Pritzker and his wife, Cindy, who made the rounds at the soiree, through their Hyatt Foundation.
Their niece, businesswoman and philanthropist Penny Pritzker, was national finance chair for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign and co-chair of his inaugural committee. She is an informal advisor to the 2012 re-election bid, Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said.
Souto de Moura, 58, best known for the Braga Municipal Stadium in Portugal, has designed homes, a cinema, shopping centers, hotels, apartments, offices, art galleries, museums, schools, sports facilities and subways, according to The Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the prize. Judges lauded him for three decades of work and for buildings that convey “power and modesty, bravado and subtlety, bold public authority and a sense of intimacy — at the same time.”
The soiree was in the capital’s Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium.
Quite possibly only one single guest seemed more pleased than Souto de Moura.
That would be Rahm da Mayor.
Just sworn in last month, Emanuel, who was on hand with his wife Amy Rule, told a Tribune reporter that his is “a great job. It is better than I imagined–it is 10 times better than I imagined.”
Picture above: Simmons Hall at MIT
Virginia Commonwealth University has announced plans today for the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), a state-of-the art building planned to be one of the signature buildings for VCU. The new building, specifically intended for the university’s School of the Arts, a consistently top-ranked public graduate arts program in the country, will be a 32,000 square-foot facility located on the corner of Broad and Belvidere and will house approximately 8,000 square-feet of gallery space, a 210-seat auditorium with tiered seating, classrooms, gift shop, a café with a catering kitchen, as well as a room to accommodate exhibitions, installations, and social events. VCU hopes that the ICA “will provide a cultural connection between the university and the community offering an innovative, open, welcoming space and exhibition venue for interdisciplinary arts programming for a broad and diverse audience,” said VCU President Michael Rao, Ph.D.
From the 64 architecture firms from around the country that competed, Steven Holl Architects was selected to design the ICA. Holl’s previous projects have included Simmons Hall for MIT (Cambridge, Mass.), the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Herning, Denmark), and is, perhaps, best known for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, which Paul Godlberger, architecture critic for The New Yoker, said was “one of the best [buildings] of the last generation.” Coll’s designs utilize existing cultural components and historical structures, as well as sustainable building and site development.
“The enterprise is elevated with our choice of architect,” said Joseph Seipel, dean of the VCU School of the Arts. “We are excited to have Steven Holl, internationally recognized as one of the most-inspired and significant architects of our time. With Holl leading this endeavor, I am confident the ICA is destined to become an iconic building for VCU and the city of Richmond.”
The ICA will be funded by private donations, a process that is currently underway. The ICA is expcted to open in Spring 2014.
Source: RVANews
An office building in the Bronx Zoo seems as natural to the site as the surrounding parkland and accommodates multiple programs with minimal resources. Staring out the window is part of the job description.
Employees on their lunch break at the Center for Global Conservation (CGC) recently paused to observe wild turkeys roaming in front of the building. In the northwest corner of the Bronx Zoo’s 265 acres of New York City parkland, this display isn’t a rare occurrence. Nor is the sight of Inca terns swooping in the seabird aviary across from the CGC headquarters. Muskrats and goldfinches visit, too. Perhaps these creatures continue to treat the turf as their own because the rectangular, elongated three-story building — which achieved LEED Gold Certification in 2009 — seems as natural to the site as the two rock outcroppings it bridges.
The CGC, designed by FXFOWLE, houses several Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) programs. WCS operates the largest network of wildlife parks in the world, including the Bronx Zoo, New York Aquarium, Central Park Zoo, Queens Zoo, and Prospect Park Zoo, and operates over 500 conservation programs in more than 65 countries. Until the new headquarters was completed in 2009, WCS employees were scattered in buildings across the Bronx Zoo. FXFOWLE, which had previously renovated the zoo’s Lion House in 2008, consolidated various programs with diverse needs at an unused edge of the park. After looking at various configurations, the firm designed the building to intrude as little as possible on the landscape, even inflecting it to save two trees. WCS employees now benefit from chance encounters. “It’s really changed our relationship. Proximity is everything,” says Susan Chin, vice president of planning and design and chief architect for WCS.
Continue story at source: Architectural Record
