Architect Returns to Drawing Board

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

Frank Gehry Turns to Asia for Architecture Projects as U.S. Growth Slows

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.”

Staying Near Home

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.

New York Apartments

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]

Building 7 at World Trade Center now fully leased

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

The Greatest Buildings Never Built

Monumental victims of dwindling finances, public backlash and political roadblocks, many designs from the world’s most celebrated architects never broke ground. Promising much in their form and magnitude, the stunning structures exist only as colorfully rendered visions on a lost landscape. Here, man’s best unmade plans.

Zaha Hadid's proposed Dubai Performing Arts Center was a 2009 victim of the global economic slowdown.

In his classic novel “Invisible Cities,” Italo Calvino envisioned a building, in a city called Fedora, containing a series of small globes. The visitor peering into each would see a small city, a model of a different Fedora. “These are the forms the city could have taken,” wrote Calvino, “if for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today.” In the real world, one can stand on a street in Manhattan and look into one’s iPhone, where the app “Museum of the Phantom City: Other Futures” reveals the New York that might have been: from the fantastic (Buckminster Fuller’s projected Midtown-covering dome) to the nearly realized (Diller and Scofidio’s Eyebeam Museum).

Architectural history is told by the victors, city skylines their monuments. But there are also missing monuments, those projects which, by dint of political folly, the capricious tides of public taste or simple financial overreach, never break ground. The credit crisis, for example, has turned a presumptive architectural fantasyland in Dubai, that emirate of excess—where submerged hotels or $3 billion cities in the form of chessboards were the order of the day—into a graveyard of gauzy renderings.

The financial collapse claimed so many schemes that the architectural and design provocateurs Constantin Boym and Laurene Leon Boym, known for their small metal replicas of such buildings as the Chernobyl plant (as part of the “Buildings of Disaster” series), began in 2009 to produce a series of so-called “Recession Souvenirs,” projects like Norman Foster’s Russia Tower. “But the series was short-lived,” says Constantin Boym, speaking from Doha, Qatar. “There was not much enthusiasm in this black humor any more.” (The few that were made, however, are highly collectible.)

As is suggested by their difficulty in getting built, unbuilt projects are often superlative in some sense, as much a statement as an edifice. Boris Iofan’s neoclassical Palace of the Soviets, for example, on which construction began in 1937, gradually morphed (with input from Stalin) into what would have been the world’s largest skyscraper. War intervened, however, and its steel frame was repurposed into bridges in 1941.

Norman Foster's Russia Tower. Photos: Renderings to Remember - These brilliant designs from some of the world's greatest architects never saw the light of day.

Even when absent, unbuilt projects can exert a curiously powerful hold on the cultural imagination: Étienne-Louis Boullée’s massively spherical 18th-century cenotaph for Isaac Newton still looms, like the Montgolfier balloon that was said to have inspired it, over the architectural landscape. The 1960s British proposal by Cedric Price for his Fun Palace, with its visual echoes in the Centre Pompidou, now looks prophetic.

Perhaps the most common, and salient, feature of unbuilt projects is that every architect, at some point in his career, will design one—or several. Will Jones, author of “Unbuilt Masterworks of the 21st Century,” says these are not necessarily negatives in an architect’s career. “If an architect can look back upon it without too much bitterness, it’s the perfect area to test out ideas,” he says. “It’s a proving ground, that they take on and can use in future buildings.” Jones notes that Richard Rogers’s Welsh Assembly building, for example, contains ideas from his unbuilt Rome Congress Center design, which itself, the firm notes, advanced themes from a competition for the Tokyo International Forum project.

The building itself hardly sailed to completion; Rogers was briefly fired from the project. But he ultimately avoided the fate of Zaha Hadid, whose Cardiff Bay Opera House, one of the most lamented unbuilt projects of the past few decades, crashed amid the rocky shoals of politics—nationalist, classist (The Sun denounced using Lottery funds for a project for “Welsh toffs”) and aesthetic. “It devastated us,” Hadid says. But this, and a subsequent slew of unbuilt competition entries, “tested our ideas on landscape topography, and you can see the results of this now in all of our work.” Hadid may be the only architect with two unbuilt opera houses (a project in Dubai was terminated), not to mention a celebrated—and built—opera house in Guangzhou, China.

Sometimes unbuilt projects turn out to have a rather unexpected second life. The young Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, whose firm designed the Danish Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, entered a competition in 2008 for a resort project in the north of Sweden. The firm lost the competition. But when they showed the work to a Chinese developer, he was struck by the fact that the building’s shape resembled the Chinese character for “people.” The firm hired a feng shui master, scaled the building up to “Chinese proportions,” and the “People’s Building” is now slated for Shanghai’s Bund.

With China’s expanding economic might, its low-cost labor, and relative lack of restrictions in blank-slate cities like Guangzhou, unbuilt projects have been a rarity. This is common in places where economic booms and cultural dreams conspire. As Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne argues, “Los Angeles was known for much of the 20th century as the city where anything—and everything—could and did get built, from massive subdivisions, to avant-garde houses clinging to hillsides, to hot dog stands shaped like hot dogs.”

On the flip side, however, sits another kind of “unbuilt” architecture—that which is torn down. And Los Angeles, Hawthorne says, rarely paused to reflect as it knocked down iconic architecture. Today, he says, with open land more scarce, seismic and other building codes constricted, it’s much harder to get things built. So now, as it is elsewhere, the destroyed and the unbuilt jostle in the collective imagination, and, as Hawthorne describes it, “the black-and-white photograph of the long-ago destroyed landmark is now joined in the collective imagination by the sleek digital rendering of the high-design project that couldn’t get financing.”

View Building’s slideshow

Article in WSJ

Winners of the 2011 Skyscraper Competition

eVolo magazine has run a tidy little competition for the last five years, inviting architects to innovative new skyscraper typologies. Today, the winners of the 2011 Skyscraper Competition were announced and we’ve got a recycling wind turbine, an energy- and water-harvesting horizontal tower, and a re-imagining of the Hoover Dam.

Jury members included SOFTlab principals Jose Gonzalez and Michael Svizos, architecture critic John Hill, Mitchell Joachim of Terreform One, CarloMaria Ciampoli of Live Architecture Network, and a host of other working and teaching architects (see the full list here).

FIRST PLACE: ‘LO2P Recycling Skyscraper’ by Atelier CMJN (Julien Combes, Gaël Brulé)

“The idea behind this skyscraper is to recycle the old cars and use them as building material for the new structure. The building is designed as a giant lung that would clean New Delhi’s air through a series of large-scale greenhouses that serve as filters. Another set of rotating filters capture the suspended particles in the air while the waste heat and carbon dioxide from the recycling center are used to grow plants that in turn produce bio-fuels.”

“The idea behind this skyscraper is to recycle the old cars and use them as building material for the new structure. The building is designed as a giant lung that would clean New Delhi’s air through a series of large-scale greenhouses that serve as filters. Another set of rotating filters capture the suspended particles in the air while the waste heat and carbon dioxide from the recycling center are used to grow plants that in turn produce bio-fuels.”

SECOND PLACE: ‘Flat Tower’ by Yoann Mescam, Paul-Eric Schirr-Bonnans, and Xavier Schirr-Bonnans

Imagined for medium-size cities where vertical skyscrapers do not fit the skyline, the flat tower is a “new high-density typology that deviates from the traditional skyscraper. The medium-height dome structure is perforated with cell-like skylights that provide direct sunlight to the agricultural fields and to the interior spaces. The dome’s large surface area is perfect to harvest solar energy and rainwater collection.”

THIRD PLACE: ‘Reimagining the Hoover Dam’ by Yheu-Shen Chua, United Kingdom

This project merges the programs at the current Hoover Dam — viewing platform, a bridge, and a gallery – into a “single vertical super structure.”

There a long list of honorable mentions, and we’ve highlighted below some especial favorites (clockwise from top left):

‘Sports Tower’ by Sergiy Prokofyev and Olga Prokofyeva, Ukraine

‘RE:pH Coastscraper’ by Gary Kellett, United Kingdom

‘White Cloud Skyscraper‘ by Adrian Vincent Kumar and Yun Kong Sung, New Zealand

‘Seeds of Life Skyscraper’ by Mekano (Osama Mohamed Elghannam, Karim Mohamed Elnabawy, Mohamed Ahmed Khamis, Nesma Mohamed Abobakr), Egypt

‘Waste Collector Skyscraper’ by Agata Sander and Tomek Kujawski, Poland

‘Hopetel: Transitional High-Rise Housing’ by Asaf Dali, United States

Via Architizer.com

SOM commissioned for FTP City in Danang

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP (SOM) has been awarded the masterplan commission for FTP City in Danang, Vietnam. SOM’s preliminary plan for a sustainable new high-tech community at the edge of the city has been applauded by local authorities, including the Head of Planning and the People’s Committee of the City of Danang. SOM is now working closely with these authorities to finalise the project’s design and ensure its delivery.

The plan has been commissioned by FPT, an up-and-coming national IT and telecommunications company with over 10,000 employees. Covering an area of over 180 hectares, the plan incorporates a wide range of uses organised into a series of distinct districts, including a Town Centre, a Business District, and a series of residential neighbourhoods. The plan also incorporates a new University Campus for FPT University – specialising in information technology, software development and e-services. The campus will also contain a research institute and training centre for FPT employees, allowing new technology to be developed further and put directly into practice.

SOM’s concept is formed on key principles to reduce energy needs and carbon emissions by promoting best practices in mixed-use development in an emerging local context of luxury resorts and single-use residential communities. Instead, FPT City will promote a diverse living community with integrated local services accessed via sheltered and shaded walkable streets. In addition to a web of natural greenways, the plan also incorporates a wide network of smart infrastructure. As a major national IT provider, FPT will ensure the delivery of state-of-the-art communications and information technology to every business and household in the community.

The design also brings to life part of a strategic regional river corridor initiative to be implemented between Danang and Hoi An, a national tourist destination, by establishing a new riverfront eco-park. The waterfront park engages a large existing lake at the river’s edge and will be designed to restore, protect and enhance the wildlife habitat along its entire length and around the lake’s perimeter.

Via World News Architecture

New Architecture From Broadway to Xinjiang Province

Broadway Malyan continues global expansion with first theatre design in China

International architecture, urbanism and design practice Broadway Malyan has completed the design of its first theatre in China, the Kanas Lake Performance Theatre.

The new theatre, set in an area of outstanding natural beauty in the Xinjiang province of North West China, is a multi-purpose theatre for the Provincial Government. It will house a 1,200-seat auditorium for performance arts including theatre, opera, musicals and dance.

The design draws on powerful yet simple forms, with the theatre auditorium enclosed within two protective wings wrapping the shell as if protected within clasped hands. The smooth shape and flowing forms sit harmoniously within the natural contours of the site and dramatic background of the Kanas mountains. The sweeping forms rise around the theatre shell to evoke the dynamic movement of traditional Chinese ribbon dance.

Broadway Malyan has now delivered the design package to the local design institute and will monitor the detail design and site build. Enabling works are already underway and work on the main structure is due to start this summer.

Director Peter Vaughan said: “We have a broad project portfolio in the cultural and leisure sector. However, this is our first theatre project in China and it reflects our ever-increasing portfolio of high-profile, international projects, across all sectors.

“This portfolio is growing as the result of our strategic global push and focus on growing our business in the Far East and China, with the practice having recently announced that it earns just over half its fees outside of the UK and Europe.”

Via World News Architecture

Architectural Landmark Near Completion as Cesar Pelli Tops Out Red Building at Pacific Design Center

LOS ANGELES, March 1, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Cesar Pelli celebrated a milestone for the Red Building on Monday, as the long-awaited final building of the Pacific Design Center nears completion. The Red Building is the third building of the landmark West Hollywood showroom-and-office complex whose design and construction span nearly 40 years.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110301/NE56547 )

At a topping-out ceremony, the architect joined developer and owner Charles S. Cohen to put in place a piece of red glass that completes the Red Building’s narrow triangular facade on San Vicente Boulevard. The 400,000-square-foot office building is slated for occupancy by year’s end.

“I am delighted to see the Red Building so close to fruition,” said Pelli, Senior Principal of Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects. “To know that the Pacific Design Center will soon be how I envisioned it is very exciting.”

Pelli conceived the 14-acre site to contain three buildings arranged around a plaza. The first, nicknamed the Blue Whale, was designed when Pelli was with Gruen Associates and completed in 1975. The Green Building, designed with his own firm, now Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, followed in 1988.

The most dynamic of the three, the Red Building is composed of two curved, sloping towers atop seven levels of parking. Between the towers will be a courtyard planted with palm trees. The six-story West Tower slopes inward against the Hollywood Hills. The eight-story East Tower curves upward.

The ceremony also paid tribute to the “Los Angeles 12,” a group of Southern California architects featured in a 1976 exhibition at the Blue Building. Pelli, Roland Coate, Raymond Kappe, Daniel Dworsky, Craig Ellwood, Frank Gehry, John Lautner, Jerrold Lomax, Anthony Lumsden, Leroy Miller, James Pulliam and Bernard Zimmerman were in the original show. Eric Owen Moss and Michael Maltzan we also recognized at the ceremony.

About Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects

Founded in 1977 and led by Cesar Pelli, Fred Clarke, and Rafael Pelli, Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects has designed some of the world’s most recognizable buildings, including the World Financial Center in New York, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, and the International Finance Centre in Hong Kong. The firm has been honored with critical acclaim and hundreds of design awards, including the American Institute of Architects’ Firm Award and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

SOURCE Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects

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Today’s project highlight

The Cairns Institute, Cairns, Australia
By Woods Bagot Architecture

Proposing a concept that will celebrate the rainforest setting, and enrich the place experience was a winning formula for Woods Bagot and RPA Architects who have been awarded the design of The Cairns Institute, headquartered on the James Cook University (JCU) Cairns campus. A $25 million project, the Institute will be a research hub, housing specialists in the social sciences, humanities, law and business sectors to examine the issues of importance to people in the tropics. Putting the Cairns Institute and JCU on the international stage to attract post-graduate students from around the globe; and to enable the university to draw a high caliber of researchers was key to the winning design.

Today’s Photo

Airport Building in Mestia, Georgia
A project by: J. MAYER H. Architects

About

The new built airport is part of Georgia’s ambitious plans to develop tourism in Mestia. The beautiful medieval town with its stone defensive towers is part of UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites and also famous as ski-resort. With the unveiling of the airport on December 24th the building was designed and constructed within 3 months.

Hat Tip to Architizer.com