Showing posts from category: architecture
The buildings commonly referred to as "green" could actually be hazardous to your health, according to a new report. (AP)
The buildings commonly referred to as “green” could actually be hazardous to your health, according to a new report.
That’s one of many warnings out of a new report from the Institute of Medicine, which tracked the potential impact of climate change on indoor environments.
The report cautions that climate change can negatively and directly affect indoor air quality in several ways. But the scientists behind the study warn that homeowners and businesses could also be making the problem worse by pursuing untested or risky energy-efficiency upgrades.
“Even with the best intentions, indoor environmental quality issues may emerge with interventions that have not been sufficiently well screened for their effects on occupant safety and health,” the report said.
To save costs and cut down on emissions, building owners typically find ways to seal off potential leaks and conserve energy. But in “weatherizing” the buildings, they also change the indoor environment.
By making buildings more airtight, building owners could increase “indoor-air contaminant concentrations and indoor-air humidity,” the report said. By adding insulation, they could trigger moisture problems. By making improvements to older homes, crews could stir up hazardous material ranging from asbestos to harmful caulking — though that problem is not unique to energy improvements.
The report did not dissuade homeowners and businesses from making the energy-efficiency upgrades. Rather, it called for a more comprehensive approach, urging organizations to track the side effects of various upgrades and minimize the “unexpected exposures and health risks” that can arise from new materials and weatherization techniques.
Hat tip: AP
Steve Jobs gave a speech to the Cupertino City Council to get approval for a new Apple campus. It looks like “a spaceship just landed there,” Jobs said.
And indeed it’s a very ambitious thing. It’s one giant building that would hold 12,000 people. The building is circular with “not a straight piece of glass”–all curved.
It’s also interesting to see Jobs in “pitch mode” outside of the regular keynote speech setting. He’s much more low-key, because he knows the city council can screw his project if they want to. He’s still salesy, but doesn’t use words like “magical” or “insanely great.”
And yet you can see his tough streak. When a council member asks if Apple plans to give the city free wi-fi, he says: “We’re the largest taxpayers in Cupertino, so we’d like to continue to stay here and pay taxes,” which is like the perfect veiled threat. We wonder if that’s how meetings go at Foxconn.
Other highlights:
- The campus would use its own natural gas generator as its primary source of power and the city’s power grid only as a backup. Weird.
- The building includes an auditorium for conferences, and Jobs suggests that’s where Apple could hold its big events instead of renting out space in San Francisco.
- Apple wants to break ground next year, and move in in 2015.
We put together a slideshow of pictures and charts about the amazing new campus. Click through for the pictures and the video of Steve Jobs’ pitch.
Jobs presentation to Cupertino board
Continue reading and viewing images at Business Insider
The new Ravensbourne campus, a university sector college innovating in digital media and design, at London’s Greenwich Peninsula was just recently one of the winners in the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Awards 2011 (previously on Bustler). From a shortlist of 55 schemes, Ravensbourne’s building, designed by Foreign Office Architects, won through in the education and community category. Only recently, Ravensbourne has moved fromLondon’s suburb Chislehurst to this new building next to The O2, formerly known as the Millennium Dome.
Ravensbourne’s new building in Penrose Way opened to students at the end of October 2010 following a £70 million investment including £3.5 million from the London Development Agency (LDA), £5.5 million from the Department for Communities and Local Government and further investment from the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), Greenwich Council, Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Skills Funding Agency. The European Development Fund also provided £1.5 million to create low carbon incubator space, incorporating new technologies and a suite of environmentally sustainable features. Ravensbourne had been based in Chislehurst in Bromley since 1976.
Professor Robin Baker OBE, Director of Ravensbourne said: “We are delighted that Ravensbourne’s new building is a winner in this prestigious awards scheme. We are very proud of our stunning new campus, and for it to be recognised in this way confirms the quality and ingenuity of Foreign Office Architects’ design. This new building has positively transformed Ravensbourne, enabling us to develop both as a higher education institution and as a dynamic destination for innovation and enterprise meeting the demands of theUKeconomy.
Alejandro Zaera Polo, Foreign Office Architects said: “‘We are both delighted and humbled by this recognition for a project which we feel is mostly due to the ambition and courage of Ravensbourne, who dared to embody an alternative form of education in design and media, and was prepared to take this ambition into an unprecedented architectural embodiment
All we had to do was to listen to these ambitions and act as an architectural midwife as best as we could into this birth. We hope that our research for this project will open new perspectives to a new breed of higher education facilities. All the crowns go to Ravensbourne.”
Photo credits: Morley von Sternburg
Source: Bustler
Eduardo Souto de Moura
WASHINGTON—
President Barack Obama led the list of A-listers at Thursday’s gala dinner to award the Pritzker Architecture Prize to a Portuguese architect, 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
As South Korea’s economy stabilizes, its ambition to be recognized as a major international business hub is leading to a bold building strategy. Ann Lok Lui investigates how Korea aims to impress the world not only with its tall towers but its large-scale sustainable planning.
The KPF-designed Northeast Asia Trade Tower will be Songdo's landmark on the skyline.
Buzz and hype have surrounded China’s recent building boom, but to the east, South Korea is becoming the next hot spot for international architecture.
Far from deferring to China’s hectic development, South Korea is positioning itself to be the East Asian country that grows not only faster but also smarter. In 2010, Engineering News Record ranked Seoul as home to six of the 75 top international contractors—a significant number for a nation so small. The juxtaposition of major construction corporations side-by-side with government support and a growing national interest in architectural design is producing opportunities inevitably attractive to international players.
From big corporate firms from the United States to young, internationally-trained Koreans, architects are capitalizing on opportunities in the East Asian nation and particularly Seoul as it rises to compete with China and assert itself as a business hub for northeastern Asia.
After generations of political turmoil, South Korea can now guarantee a degree of economic stability. As a result and on a grand scale, Korean companies that went abroad to build some of the tallest buildings around the world (Samsung led construction on the Burj Khalifa) are now looking to field monuments on their own native soil. Even at the grass-roots level, there is a growing interest in avant-garde architecture and design—home-brewed as well as imported—providing opportunities for small firms and young designers to have an impact on the street by designing art galleries and small homes.
Off the coast of South Korea and not far from Seoul, Songdo represents a new kind of large-scale planned city. A joint venture between Cisco Systems, Gale International, and the New York City office of Kohn Pederson Fox, New Songdo City could be the prototypical aerotropolis—a city defined as much by its proximity to an airport as by its livability—as described by authors John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay in their new book Aerotropolis: How We’ll Live Next.
Since 2001, when Gale International signed a $35 billion dollar loan from Korean banks to develop a city right by Incheon International Airport, Songdo has grown rapidly on landfill in the Yellow Sea. Today, it’s home to the tallest building in the country —KPF’s 68-story Northeast Asia Trade Tower—and it’s still growing. Construction on KPF’s masterplan will be completed in 2015. Fitting to the city’s mission to attract foreign business, its architecture includes work by multiple American firms: KPF’s own nine buildings in the central business district include a convention center and an international school, and there are also six residential towers and a hotel by HOK.
An evening view of Asymptote's World Business Tower.
Songdo is intrinsic to the South Korean government’s vision of the future, according to Richard Nemeth, a KPF principal: “[They] realized that to compete with China, they needed a platform to work internationally. [Songdo] is connected to the new airport, one of the busiest in the world.”
If its proximity to an international airport gives Songdo the futuristic moniker “aerotropolis,” its vast scale represents a first in international sustainability. Under the USGBC’s LEED for Neighborhood Development Pilot Program (KPF engaged with USGBC to certify the masterplan and develop a new LEED category), Songdo boasts a central non-potable water canal, electric vehicle charging stations, and a city-scale co-generation plant—elements that operate on a larger scale than traditional single-building LEED certification. The city also takes some of its literally green inspiration from American roots: a large public park in the middle of Songdo is named Central Park. The city also attempts to offset the effects of massive new construction by recycling 75% of construction waste and using local materials to minimize transportation costs.
Continue story: The Architects Newspaper
Sixth Annual National Design Week to Be Held Oct. 15–23
The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum will celebrate outstanding achievement in design this fall with its 12th annual National Design Awards program. Today, Cooper-Hewitt Director Bill Moggridge announced the winners and finalists of the 2011 National Design Awards, which recognize excellence across a variety of disciplines. The award recipients will be honored at a gala dinner Thursday, Oct. 20, at Pier Sixty in New York.
“As the nation’s design museum, Cooper-Hewitt raises awareness that design is everywhere,” said Moggridge. “The work of this year’s National Design Awards winners represents extraordinary solutions to the design problems central to the landscape of daily life, from how we dress, shape our personal and private spaces, frame communication and interact with the world at large.”
First launched at the White House in 2000 as a project of the White House Millennium Council, the National Design Awards were established to promote excellence and innovation in design. The awards are accompanied each year by a variety of public education programs, including special events, panel discussions and workshops. First Lady Michelle Obama serves as the Honorary Patron for this year’s National Design Awards.
The call for National Design Award nominations was extended this year to the general public, broadened from the select committee solicited in past years. Nominees must have at least seven years of experience in order to be nominated, and winners are selected based on the level of excellence, innovation and public impact of their body of work. This year’s jury of design leaders and educators from across the country convened by Cooper-Hewitt reviewed the nominations and chose Lifetime Achievement and Design Mind recipients, and selected winners and finalists in the Corporate and Institutional Achievement, Architecture Design, Communication Design, Fashion Design, Interaction Design, Interior Design, Landscape Architecture and Product Design categories.
Cooper-Hewitt’s sixth annual National Design Week will be held Oct. 15–23. Educational programming surrounding the 2011 National Design Awards, which includes the Educator Open House, the Teen Design Fair in New York and the Teen Design Fair in Washington, D.C., are sponsored in part by Target.
Media sponsorship provided by Fast Company.
National Design Week is made possible in part by the generous sponsorship of Target.
The 2011 National Design Award recipients for architecture, interior design and landscape architecture are:
Architecture Design: Architecture Research Office
The Architecture Design Award, which recognizes work in commercial, public or residential architecture, is given to Architecture Research Office, a New York-based firm led by Stephen Cassell, Adam Yarinsky and Kim Yao. Its work spans from strategic planning to architecture and urban design. Since 1993, the firm has worked with leading universities, cultural institutions, global corporations, government agencies, international fashion labels and nonprofit organizations using research and analysis to drive the design. From a prototype for 1,000-square-foot low-income sustainable housing to a proposal to reinvent the role of ecology and infrastructure in New York, ARO uses design to unite the conceptual and the pragmatic within a strong, coherent vision.
Finalists in the Architecture Design category are Dan Rockhill, a distinguished professor of architecture at the University of Kansas and executive director of Studio 804, a graduate design studio that builds affordable designs in neglected Kansas neighborhoods, and Weiss/Manfredi, a multidisciplinary practice known for the dynamic integration of architecture, art, infrastructure and landscape design.
Interior Design: Shelton, Mindel & Associates
The Interior Design Award, recognizing an individual or firm for exceptional and exemplary work in domestic, corporate or cultural interior design, is awarded to Shelton, Mindel & Associates. Established in 1978, Shelton, Mindel & Associates is a leader in architectural, interior and product solutions for corporate, cultural, academic, retail, recreational, hospitality and residential clients. Founding partners Peter Shelton and Lee Mindel have applied their passion for building unified environments to the firm’s portfolio of projects, which includes the design of the Polo/Ralph Lauren headquarters. The firm is a member of the AD 100 and has been honored for its simplicity and strong, elegant designs with numerous awards, including more than 30 AIA awards. Shelton and Mindel were recognized as the Deans of American Design in 2005, and both have been inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame.
Finalists in the Interior Design category are Clive Wilkinson Architects, a Los Angeles-based firm that covers the full spectrum of architecture and interior design with a focus on research and strategy, and Aidlin Darling Design, a multidisciplinary firm that bridges the demands of artistic endeavor, functional pragmatics, environmental responsibility and financial considerations.
Landscape Architecture: Gustafson Guthrie Nichol
The recipient of the Landscape Design Award, which is presented for work in urban planning or park and garden design, is Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, a Seattle-based landscape-architecture practice that works throughout the Americas and Asia. Founded by partners Kathryn Gustafson, Jennifer Guthrie and Shannon Nichol, the firm offers special experience in designing high-use landscapes in complex, urban contexts. The landform of each space is carefully shaped to feel serenely grounded in its context and comfortable at all times, whether bustling with crowds, offering moments of contemplation, or doing both at once. Gustafson Guthrie Nichol’s prominent projects include the Lurie Garden in Chicago, the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard at the Smithsonian’s Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, which houses the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the new Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Campus in Seattle.
Finalists in the Landscape Design category are Tom Leader, principal of Tom Leader Studio, a collaborative design office based in Berkeley, Calif., with a focus on building communal places for real people, and Margie Ruddick, whose work integrates ecology and culture, infrastructure and art, as realized in benchmark projects such as the Shillim Institute and Retreat in India and the Living Water Park in China.
Additional winners categories
Source: PR Newswire
Port Authority approves historic lease Wednesday under which Condé Nast will become the anchor tenant of lynchpin tower at reborn World Trade Center site.
1 World Trade Center is slated to land an anchor office tenant Wednesday. Photo by Buck Ennis.
After months of intense negotiations, the board of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey approved a deal on Wednesday that paves the way for Condé Nast Publications to become the anchor tenant of 1 World Trade Center.
The Port, which owns the World Trade Center site, is also expected to complete its deal to sell a stake in the 1,776-foot-tall, 104-story tower to the Durst Organization for $100 million. Sources have estimated that would buy about 10% of the building, but a Durst spokesman said the stake’s value can only be determined after the 3 million-square-foot building’s worth is fully established.
Under the leasing deal, the publisher of Vogue, The New Yorker and other publications, will pay $1.9 billion over the course of a 25-year lease for 1 million square feet of space on 21 floors of the tower. The building is slated for completion in 2013. The transaction is widely seen as a boon for the downtown market, where commercial vacancy rates have remained higher than in other areas of New York since the recession. The deal is another major sign of the rebirth of the trade center site, where redevelopment plans struggled for years to get traction and the tenth anniversary of the terror attacks approaches.
“From travel to fashion to cultural critiques, the Condé Nast imprint lends authority to any subject. The same can be said with real estate,” said Port Authority Executive Director Christopher Ward. He called the company a “trend setter,” and noted that its previous move to Times Square in 1999 helped solidify that once-seedy district as a proper corporate address.
In a statement released by the Port, Condé Nast chairman S. I. Newhouse Jr. said the company has thrived in New York “in part due to the city’s indefatigable energy, power and vitality.”
“We are proud to be taking part in the revitalization of lower Manhattan,” he said.
Sources said that under the deal, Condé Nast will pay an average of $60 a square foot for the first 10 years of the 25-year lease. However, that is before receiving $5 a square foot in various tax incentives, which the publisher will receive for the first 750,000 square feet of the lease. There is also a raft of other tax incentives available to tenants at the site, including lower real estate taxes and sales-tax exemption on items bought to outfit the offices.
The Port was anxious to lure the prestigious firm to the tower. As part of the deal, the agency will agree to take responsibility for the remaining years of the lease at Condé Nast’s current headquarters at 4 Times Square.
This is the second corporate tenant for One World Trade Center. Last year, China-based Vantone Industrial Co. signed a lease for nearly 191,000 square feet. Rents will start at $80 a square foot and increase over the course of the lease, which extends for nearly 21 years.
Meanwhile, federal and state agencies have committed to leasing about 1 million square feet in the tower.
Source: AP & Crain’s New York Business
Winning the chairmanship of the Metropolitan Museum hasn’t slowed developer Daniel Brodsky down. Architect John H. Beyer of Beyer Blinder Belle revealed the Brodsky Organization’s proposed plans for the next phase of its remake of parts of the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea into a new condo community. The historic brownstone-and-brick oasis was founded in 1817 as the first seminary of the Episcopal Church. DNAinfo reports that the “news sparked concerns around Chelsea because the landmarked institution’s grassy enclave, bounded by Ninth and Tenth Avenues and 20th and 21st Streets, is a rare pocket of serenity in lower Manhattan.”
All things considered, the community was pretty gentle in criticizing the makeover of the WASP landmark. In fact, they found Brodsky’s approach artful and the little bit of sniping hardly stung at all. A new six-story building with two duplexes and elevator equipment plunked above, to be erected over a portion of the yard now used as a tennis court, drew scorn as looking “funky” and “out-of-scale,” but generally, commenters at Community Board 4’s landmarks committee meeting on the plans praised them as thoughtful and consistent with the seminary’s overall design. Committee chair Edward Kirkland even agreed with the developers’ plan to remove ivy covering–and damaging–the decrepit West Building, the oldest in the complex, prior to restoring it. “This is not an Ivy League institution, so the ivy is an intrusion,” he said. The plans must still be approved by the Landmarks Commission, though, so reports of the ivy’s demise may be premature.
Source: Curbed
