Showing posts from category: architecture
The controversial 52-story skyscraper just north of the World Trade Center has finally been fully leased. Developer Larry Silverstein announced Monday that MSCI, a provider of investment decision support tools, would occupy the remaining floors 47 through 49, the AP.
Bernstein had long had troule attracting tenants in part because Seven World Center came under fire for opening too quickly at the site of the old World Trade Center Building 7 — the last building to collapse in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
But the site was also the focus of many conspiracy theories, all of which pointed out that Building 7 was the first known building to collapse as a result of uncontrolled fires, and some of which claimed that the U.S. government had been behind the attacks.
The building also cost a pretty penny, with tenants paying the highest prices ever paid downtown — several above $70 a square foot.
Source: The Washington Post
architecture, architecture jobs, buildings, Hiring trends, Interior design, jobs, Landscape Architecture, modern architecture, new buildings, recession, unemployed architects
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Larry Silverstein, Seven World Trade Center
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President Barack Obama has appointed Teresita Fernández, a MacArthur Award winning visual artist, to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a federal panel that advises the President, Congress and governmental agencies on national matters of design and aesthetics. Fernández lives and works in New York and is represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
Members of the arts panel play a key role in shaping Washington’s architecture by approving the site and design of national memorials and museums; advise the U.S. Mint on the design of coins and medals; and administer the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs program, which benefits non-profit cultural entities that provide arts programming in Washington. Seven commissioners appointed by the President serve four-year terms.
Past members have included architects, landscape architects and artists, including Daniel Chester French who sculpted the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., whose projects include the National Mall, Jefferson Memorial and the White House grounds.
Teresita Fernández (b. 1968) is a visual artist best known for her prominent public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Fernández’s work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by landscape and natural phenomena as well as diverse historical and cultural references. She is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and has received many prestigious awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, an American Academy in Rome Affiliated Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Grant.
Fernández’s large-scale commissions include a recent site-specific work titled Blind Blue Landscape at the renowned Benesse Art Site in Naoshima, Japan. She is the youngest artist commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum for the recently opened Olympic Sculpture Park where her permanently installed work Seattle Cloud Cover allows visitors to walk under a covered skyway while viewing the city’s skyline through optically shifting multicolored glass.
Ms. Fernández’s works are included in many prominent collections and have been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo in Malaga, Spain, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Fernández is currently on the board of Artpace, a non- profit, international artist’s residency program.
She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from Florida International University.
For further information please contact Bethanie Brady at 212 254 0054, [email protected], or visit our website www.lehmannmaupin.com.
Read more: http://broadwayworld.com/article/White-House-Appoints-Teresita-Fernndez-to-the-US-Commission-of-Fine-Arts-20110919#ixzz1YVmSsR6a
Cornell University’s new Milstein Hall for architecture studies, designed by Rem Koolhaas
It’s not entirely finished yet, and it’s been under the radar in terms of press coverage. But Rem Koolhaas’ new Milstein Hall, tucked behind the Arts Quad at Cornell University, has opened for the new school year, providing much-needed studio space and meeting areas for students in Cornell University’s architecture program.
This highly anticipated, 47,000-square-foot facility is part of a sudden burst of starchitects on the Ithaca campus: I.M. Pei, Richard Meier and Thom Mayne, all Pritzker Prize winners, are helping to shape my alma mater for the 21st century.
The I.M. Pei firm’s mostly underground addition to the Johnson Art Museum opens next month. You can get a sneak peak at its exterior at the beginning of my video, below, which focuses chiefly on the Koolhaas project.
Meier’s massive, Lego-like life sciences building, Weill Hall, opened in 2008. It strikes me, both inside and out, as antiseptic, almost hospital-like, unrelieved by the graceful curves that make other Meier buildings (including those at the Getty Center) more enticing:
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Watch inspirational video of Richard Meier talk about things that make architecture so exciting….(5:31 long)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPDHq7qgXXU&feature=player_embedded]
Source: Architects Talk
Anthony Schirripa, Chairman of Mancini Duffy, an architectural and design firm in New York.
I DECIDED at a young age to become an architect after watching my father, who had a small construction company. I wanted to learn the business, but he said that he didn’t want me to have calluses on my hands, and that I should go to college.
I attended Brooklyn Technical High School, which had an architecture program, and in the summers I was a bricklayer’s laborer at my father’s company and learned to operate a backhoe.
I started in the community college system in New York and transferred to Texas A&M, graduating in 1973 with a bachelor’s of environmental design and a bachelor’s of science in building construction.
My first job was at William B. Tabler Architects, which specialized in hotels. I stayed four years, worked briefly at another architecture firm and then ran my own firm for a year. After that, I joined an architecture group at Gibbs & Hill, an engineering company that designed nuclear power plants.
From 1980 to 1995, I worked for Gensler, another architecture and design firm, where I became a partner. One project I worked on, the Goldman Sachs building in Manhattan, was a half-million square feet. The indirect lighting for the trading floor was trend-setting.
I joined Mancini Duffy in 1995 as a partner, and five years later was named C.E.O. When Ralph Mancini retired in 2006, I became chairman and C.E.O., and in 2010 I passed C.E.O. responsibilities to Michael Winstanley, whose firm merged with ours in 2009.
One of Mancini Duffy’s most challenging projects was consolidating the headquarters for Wachovia Securities, now Wells Fargo Advisors, in the Seagram building on Park Avenue in 2005. That building is a landmark. The lobby and the first 15 feet of the perimeter had to be kept in their original form while we transformed Wachovia’s portion of the structure. We had a tight schedule. At one point I thought it might not be possible to meet the deadline, but we did.
On Sept. 11, 2001, we were located on the 21st and 22nd floors of 2 World Trade Center, the south tower. When the first plane hit the north tower, I was peering out the window at the plaza below while listening to my voicemail. A man was walking toward the north tower when he looked to his right and started running. I heard a pop, thought I smelled diesel fuel and wondered if an emergency generator had exploded in a test. (Later, I knew it was jet fuel.) I decided we should evacuate.
After all our employees left the office, I headed for the stairs. Then I recalled what happened in 1993, after a truck bomb exploded at the trade center: many of our belongings would disappear, and we’d never know what happened to them. So I returned and locked the doors. Then I took the elevator to the lobby. I’m lucky I made it out.
Once on the ground, I looked for our employees, who had all left. I finally got a view of the south tower. Until then, I had no idea that a plane had hit it. I saw that columns were missing on the building perimeter and realized the tower might collapse. I ran into a health club and saw the news on TV.
Our company lost everything, from equipment to records, but we were up and running again in less than a week. JPMorgan gave us temporary space on Park Avenue right after the towers collapsed. And a construction company leased 30 computers for us for a month. Since then, we’ve moved to Midtown and set up more robust back-up and recovery for our I.T. operations.
We’re lucky that everyone in our firm survived. I still get emotional about all the lives that were lost that day. Occasionally, I run into someone I know from the World Trade Center. We look at each other and realize we both survived. It’s a weird feeling.
As told to Patricia R. Olsen.
Source: NYT
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xBfiJkratE&feature=player_embedded#!]
Studio 360 host Kurt Andersen and architect Michael Arad visit the new 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan and talk about what inspired Arad’s design.
In the decade since 9/11, lower Manhattan’s most visible tribute to the thousands killed there has been a pair of ethereal light beams that cut through the night sky on the anniversary of the terror attacks each year. The glowing columns, echoes of the toppled Twin Towers, draw eyes upward, away from what has been derided as a massive “pit” filled with heavy construction equipment.
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On Sunday, however, all eyes will be on the ground.
The unveiling of a tangible, permanent monument at the World Trade Center on the 10th anniversary will at last transform part of the site into a space of remembrance, capping a decade of painstaking planning and progress stunted by conflicting visions, financial disputes and controversy.
DAVID BERGELAND/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Workers at the World Trade Center site’s memorial plaza recently. It opens to victims’ families Sunday and the public Monday.
“There were periods of time when my wife and I thought it wouldn’t happen,” said Tom Acquaviva of Wayne, whose 29-year-old son, Paul, died in the north tower. “My son’s body was never found. That area, Ground Zero, is in essence his burial ground. So to me and my family, that’s sacred ground. It’s our cemetery.”
“I’m just happy there is finally a place to go,” he added.
Open to public Monday
On the 10th anniversary, family members will gather on the plaza, along with President Obama, former President George W. Bush and a handful of other officials, to read the names of victims and observe moments of silence. The memorial will be opened to the public the following day. Millions are expected to visit the 8-acre plaza each year, even as work continues on the rest of the more-than-$11 billion World Trade Center project.
On a recent tour, the memorial appeared nearly ready for the ceremony: The massive voids shaped in the footprints of the original towers held shallow pools of water. The protective blankets covering the nearly 3,000 victims’ names etched into bronze parapets had been removed; a worker was waxing the metal surface. And new plant life added vibrancy to the plaza’s stone floor: All 225 swamp white oak trees had been planted, and landscapers were touching up freshly laid stretches of lush Kentucky bluegrass and beds of ivy, all of which withstood the winds and storm surge of Hurricane Irene.
“Everything is coming together,” the memorial’s designer, architect Michael Arad, said. “This is going to start a new chapter in the life of the site.”
More than 350,000 people have already reserved free passes to the memorial through an online ticketing system, said Joe Daniels, president of the 9/11 Memorial Foundation. Public access will be limited to 1,500 visitors at a time.
“The demand we’ve seen to date has blown us away,” he said.
Visitors will see water cascading into two 1-acre pools that hold a combined 1 million gallons. The country’s largest man-made waterfalls, powered by enough electricity for 800 homes, are ringed by the memorial’s emotional focal point: a ribbon of victims’ names on temperature-controlled bronze panels. A free mobile-phone application will provide visitors with information about the lives of the victims and an audio-visual tour of the site.
The placement of the names will hold significance for many victims’ families, Arad said. The memorial foundation received about 1,200 requests from family members to place a loved one’s name next to another victim’s, a relative or a co-worker. One example: A woman asked that her father, a passenger on Flight 11, be placed next to her best friend, who was in the building the plane hit, Arad said.
“You have chains of connection and meaning that will be invisible to the naked eye, but if you’re a family member, you’ll know,” he said.
Although the parapets were exposed during a recent tour of the site, blue signs posted on fencing around the site asked that photos not be taken of the names to ensure that families are the first to see them on the 10-year anniversary. Family member Sally Regenhard, a vocal critic of the memorial and of plans to store victims’ unidentified remains in a medical examiner’s office built under the plaza, said the memorial is extravagant and not what many family members wanted.
“It’s just an egregious example of waste,” said Regenhard, whose firefighter son, Christian, died on 9/11. “I have real concerns about the cost of maintaining this going forward, and I think it’s going to be problematic.”
Planners have said the memorial will cost about $60 million annually to operate. The majority of the nearly $700 million in construction costs for the memorial and an underground museum will be covered by private donations, they have said. Regenhard said she would have preferred a “simple” tribute that displayed the image, age and other biographical information about each victim. She will attend the ceremony on Sunday, she said, but it is likely to be the last time she visits the site.
Tower rising
Just to the north of the plaza, the steel beams of One World Trade Center now rise to 80 floors – beyond the 1,000-foot mark that officials set as a goal for the 10-year anniversary. The rising crown of the building – called “the top of the house” by construction workers – is visible miles away. When completed in late 2013, it will be the country’s tallest building at 1,776 feet.
Laborer Frank Stephan of Wayne said he was proud to take part in its construction.
“We’re not going to see something like this in another 100 years, so it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said while sitting on a stack of construction materials on the 74th floor, looking out over New York Harbor.
Others are critical of the extraordinarily complex project. Motorists, mostly from New Jersey, will finance much of the construction through steeply higher tolls to cross Port Authority bridges and tunnels, starting Sept. 18.
At a series of public hearings on the toll hike proposal last month, some questioned why the Port Authority, the bi-state agency that owns the World Trade Center site, is in the business of building office towers.
Agency officials have said they have a moral obligation to rebuild the site of the deadliest terror attacks on U.S. soil – and that the tolls and PATH fare hikes are needed, in part, to complete the project. Governor Christie has cited cost overruns and mismanagement of the project, but he signed off on the higher tolls and fares last month. There are also doubts about the financial viability of the new World Trade Center office buildings. One World Trade Center alone will add 3 million square feet of office space. Media giant Condé Nast signed a lease to occupy part of the building earlier this year.
Agency officials point out that the original towers were not initially profitable-it took almost three decades before they made money. And the Twin Towers, designed by Minoru Yamasaki and completed in 1970 and 1971, were at first called ugly, boxy, featureless.
“Just glass-and-metal filing cabinets,” architecture critic Lewis Mumford called them.
With time, they would become beloved icons marking the country’s financial epicenter. The memorial that takes their place will be surrounded for years by construction. Plans for the site include a total of four office towers, a vehicle security center, a transportation hub and an underground 9/11 museum.
Arad said he does not expect the construction surrounding the memorial to detract from its solemnity. The cascading water will soften the harsh sounds of the city – the hammering, the honking, the drilling – as visitors take in the massive voids and reflect on all that was lost on Sept. 11, 2001.
“What we’re doing is building a moment of silence,” he said.
Flight of fancy? Spaceport America is billed as the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport
Phase one of the world’s first commercial spaceport, which will be the hub for Virgin’s consumer spaceflights, is now 90 per cent complete.
The 1,800-acre Spaceport America site, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, is the home base for Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s most ambitious business venture yet.
It already boasts a runway stretching to nearly two miles long, a futuristic styled terminal hanger, and a dome-shaped Space Operations Centre.
The work is now just months away from completion, according to a spaceport spokesman, and is set to be done by the end of the year, well in time for the first expected Virgin Galactic spaceflights in 2013.
Christine Anderson, the newly appointed executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, told SPACE.com she was ‘jazzed’ about the progress made so far.
Pioneering: Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is shown on its maiden flight from the Mojave Air and Spaceport in Mojave, California in this March 22, 2010 file photo
Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo launch system is still in testing and she says it is up to them when they decide it is safe to fly tourists to the edge of space.
At a best guess, she told SPACE.com, flights could begin in the first quarter of 2013.
Construction of phase two has already begun and is set for completion in time for Virgin Galactic’s pioneering flights.
It will include the completion of the Vertical Launch Complex facility, two visitor centres in nearby towns and a further visitor centre on the main spaceport site
See Video
Source: Mail Online
Ocean Financial Centre, rated LEED Platinum, opens on prime waterfront site
Ocean Financial Centre, Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects’ newest completed office tower, opened Wednesday with a dramatic light show while crowds watched near Marina Bay.
As 120,000 LEDs built into its curving glass-and-metal exterior wall sparkled, the 43-story tower lit up the sky. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance and Manpower; officials fromKeppelLand, the building’s developer; and guests from the business world and government attended a ceremony preceding the show.
Ocean Financial Centre, which contains 82,200 square meters of grade-A office space, is one of the largest office developments in the historic financialdistrict of Raffles Place. The building is also adjacent to the newer financial district atMarinaBay. Occupying a premier waterfront site, the tower can be seen unobstructed from the bay.
Recalling the maritime heritage ofSingapore, the tower is reminiscent of a ship’s sail, its bowed form curving along the street. A 25-meter-tall sky garden sits atop the building. Planted with trees, vines and flowering plants, this space will be an amenity for office workers and a green urban landmark.
Ocean Financial Centre is the first office building in Southeast Asia to achieve a LEED Platinum rating for its core and shell as well as the first to receive the Platinum Green Mark Award from the Building and Construction Authority of Singapore.The building has 400 square meters of photovoltaic panels, the largest installation of any office tower in Singapore, to help light common areas.
A 5.9 magnitude earthquake that was centered in Richmond, Virginia and felt as far as New York City and New England.
Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly reported at 2:30 pm that their bureau received information from a producer saying that a Captiol Hill Police officer was saying the Washington Monument may actually be tilting as a result of the earthquake.
Seismologist John Rundle joined Kelly on her show and confirmed that the Washington Monument could very well be tilting as a result of the earthquake and the structure should be checked out.
Two nuclear reactors have reportedly been taken off line near the epicenter of the earthquake.
According to the AP:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A 5.9 magnitude earthquake centered northwest of Richmond, Va., shook much of Washington, D.C., and was felt as far north as Rhode Island, New York City and Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where President Barack Obama is vacationing.The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake was half a mile deep.
Shaking was felt at the White House and all over the East Coast, as far south as Chapel Hill, N.C. Parts of the Pentagon, White House and Capitol were evacuated. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
It was centered near Louisa, Va., which is northwest of Richmond and south of Washington.
Obama and many of the nation’s leaders were out of town on August vacation when the quake struck at 1:51 p.m. EDT. The shaking was felt on the Martha’s Vineyard golf course as Obama was just starting a round.
The East Coast gets earthquakes, but usually smaller ones and is less prepared than California or Alaska for shaking.At Reagan National Airport outside Washington, ceiling tiles fell during a few seconds of shaking.
Authorities announced it was an earthquake and all flights were put on hold.
At the Pentagon in northern Virginia, a low rumbling built and built to the point that the building was shaking. People ran into the corridors of the government’s biggest building and as the shaking continued there were shouts of “Evacuate! Evacuate!”
