Phase one of world’s first commercial spaceport is now 90% completed – in time for first flights in 2013

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

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Source: Mail Online

New building slated for Hudson Square, NYC

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.”

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Article in WSJ

Aspen, CO – Local architectural firms start to rebuild their staffs

Uptick in business has them cautiously optimistic about a rebound

Some of the larger architectural firms in Aspen and Basalt have hired additional employees this spring after cutting up to half of their staffs during the recession.

Poss Architecture and Planning, Harry Teague Architects, Cottle Carr Yaw Architects and Design Workshop’s Aspen branch have each hired three or four workers in recent weeks. Partners in each firm said business is up this spring and they are bringing on additional workers to help with projects on the books.

“This year is just different from last year in a positive way,” said John Cottle, a partner with Cottle Carr Yaw Architects.

However, the owners of each of the firms said they remain very cautious about the business outlook because there is so much uncertainty beyond the next year or so. Bill Poss said 2007 and 2008 were the best years in his firm’s 35-year history. He doesn’t expect business to return to that level in some time. On the other hand, any uptick in business over 2010 is welcomed.

“Last year was pretty bad,” he said.

Architectural firms are somewhat like a canary in the coal mine for the construction industry. Projects they work on translate into work for contractors and subcontractors six months or so later. Poss said he is constantly being quizzed by friends in the construction world who want to know if his business is picking up.

The answer isn’t a simple yes or no. His firm is working on a large hotel in North Carolina that had been temporarily placed on hold when the recession hit. It is an encouraging sign that the owners have felt the economy has recovered enough that they are moving ahead with the design, Poss said. “That’s about a 12-month deal” for his firm, he said.

Poss is getting more calls this year than last year from property owners in the Roaring Fork Valley who are considering building homes. While the interest is encouraging, he noted that “nobody’s pulled the trigger, so to speak.”

Consumers of architectural services, like consumers of all types, are shopping for the best prices. His firm has reduced its prices, which required it to cut costs. That meant laying off employees after the recession struck, and cutting salaries for the remaining staff.

Poss said he and his partners recently hired three more drafting people and interns and are considering hiring a fourth person. Even so, the firm isn’t anywhere close to where it was three years ago in terms of the staff count when it employed 56 people. That fell to about 22 at the lowest point and is now creeping back toward 30 workers, he said.

Poss said business has always been cyclical. He has experienced a downturn every five to seven years. This downturn was different because it was so severe and long. He said laying off so many employees was unpleasant because it had so many consequences.

“I had to lay off 30 families, not just individuals,” he said.

Harry Teague, another longtime veteran architect in Aspen, said it has been common over the years for the staffs of architectural firms to expand and contract, depending on the firm’s number of projects. Employees who were laid off from one firm could usually find work with another.

“The roller coaster is not particularly unique to this time” he said.

What was different in this cycle is that business dropped off for virtually all firms at once, according to Teague. That was tough because people who were laid off had a tough time finding new jobs with different firms.

Teague said his firm’s work is also picking up this year so he has hired four people, boosting the total to 12. He described the positions he hired for as a mix of architects, project managers and designers as well as interns.

Teague’s firm is working on a project at the Aspen Music School campus on Castle Creek Road, including the replacement of a building that can no longer be used. His firm is also designing a school in Crestone, Colo., a home in Telluride and a home in the Roaring Fork Valley. He is also the architect for a river center proposed by the Roaring Fork Conservancy in Basalt. That project is scheduled to be reviewed by the Basalt Town Council and Basalt Planning and Zoning Commission on Tuesday.

Overall, Teague said, it does feel as though the level of activity is increasing.

Cottle said his firm is staying busy with a combination of local, regional and even international projects, a combination of residential and commercial.

“Aspen is stronger than most of the other places where we work,” he said.

The firm is receiving more calls of inquiry so far this year compared to the last couple of years, he said. Cottle is encouraged because potential clients are exploring a variety of projects and seem serious about moving ahead.

The firm recently added four positions, one permanent and three tied to current projects, Cottle said. It’s too soon to tell if business has truly turned around, so he and his partners will remain cautious with their projections and with their hiring. Cottle said they don’t want to get in a position of hiring workers for permanent positions only to lay them off again. That’s rough on everybody, he said.

Cottle Carr Yaw employed 38 workers from 2000 through the end of 2008 and intentionally didn’t expand beyond that point. They laid off roughly half the staff during the lean last couple of years and are back to 20 employees with the recent hires.

Kurt Culbertson, chairman of the board for Design Workshop, said the firm hired two entry-level workers and two mid-level experience workers in its Aspen office within the last six months. The position were for landscape architects. They are looking to fill another two positions.

The firm — which also has offices in Denver, Tahoe, Austin, Salt Lake City, and Asheville, N.C. — works on everything from resort planning to residential gardens. The Aspen office is benefiting from an increase in business overseas as well as domestically and in the Roaring Fork Valley, according to Culbertson. He said some potential clients are even looking into real estate development, which has been on hold for the last couple of years.

Culbertson said the Aspen office of Design Workshop reduced its staff by about half after the recession.

“It hasn’t been fine times,” he said.

He’s been with the firm through five recessions, this one being the worst. The name of the game is living to fight another day.

“You can’t hire people back if you’re not in business,” Culbertson said.

Via The Aspen Times

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.

Miami architect plans new Port-au-Prince

When I attended the University of Miami School of Architecture from 1974-1976 (before transferring to Pratt) my studio director was Andres Duany.  He was a relative unknown and had recently graduated from Columbia.  I have very fond memories of my time in his classes.

Andres Duany

A slide presentation is available at www.PortAuPrinceRP.com.

Famed Miami architect and planner Andres Duany’s government-commissioned blueprint for the reconstruction of Port-au-Prince’s quake-decimated historic city center envisions a new, middle-class residential, commercial and governmental district literally built upon the rubble of the old.