Adaptive Reuse and Renovation

RSS

Hugh Hardy's addition atop Eero Saarinen's Vivian Beaumont Theater provides a sleekly tailored coda to the New York City complex.

Mixing materials and methods from the vernacular and the modern, a Japanese architect creates a timeless retreat for the sculpture of two German artists. 

The Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) is inaptly named. The word “gallery” doesn't convey the institution's size and its almost encyclopedic scope, with holdings that number more than 200,000 objects encompassing an array of eras, cultures, and media.

Like a good poker player, the Baroque Court Apartments in Slovenia's capital city show a public face that reveals almost nothing of what's going on inside.

"Beer," Benjamin Franklin supposedly said, "is constant proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Once you get past the eye-popping turquoise green prepatinated copper of Renzo Piano's new 70,000-square-foot addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, you discover that the new wing echoes the older museum in its proportions, sleek lines, and taut planes.

The following excerpts are from a conversation included in Park Avenue Armory, a limited-edition publication edited by Gerhard Mack for the Park Avenue Armory Conservancy.

A single-story, 30,000-square-foot headquarters for the Livestrong Foundation, with office space, meeting rooms, a courtyard, a gym, and a resource center for cancer patients. Located in East Austin, the facility is an adaptive reuse of a concrete tilt-up paper warehouse built in the 1950s.

In an exhibition he organized at the New Museum in New York City last year, Rem Koolhaas took the preservation movement to task, arguing that it had become an “empire” all too successful at tying the hands of architects and suffocating daring thinking.