With its grand roof canopy and sweeping entry plaza, the Ed Roberts Campus welcomes everyone into its fold. The 82,500-square-foot building, which sits atop a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in a scruffy part of Berkeley, sends a powerful message of inclusiveness to the diverse groups of people who work in and use it, as well as the neighborhood around it and, indeed, the world beyond. As the new home of 10 organizations serving people with many different kinds of disabilities, the center caters to the specific needs of people who have been shut out of buildings in the
The showy skyscrapers that established Dubai's identity in this hot, humid, desert site on the Persian Gulf have been overshadowed by the towering Burj Khalifa.
“Humble” seems an unlikely word to associate with an architect who, at 36, has already built three inventive apartment complexes on his home turf of Copenhagen, has a high-profile commission for another in New York City, and is the darling of the design blogosphere.
Your visit starts in an unremarkable city park adjacent to a generic shopping mall. Local kids are playing tag, while a man in short sleeves throws a stick for his dog and a family picnics on the grass. You follow a concrete path, which turns into a gently sloping ramp descending into the ground. On either side of you, concrete walls rise to meet an angled green roof, slowly blocking out the sounds of people enjoying the park. The laughter gets more faint, the excited chatter less distinct. As you enter the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH), you
The evocative title of the exhibition Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978–1988 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal in 1994 turns out to be an oracular description of the architect’s City of Culture of Galicia in northwest Spain. Eisenman’s project of a lifetime, now 12 years in design and construction, has involved serious digging and earthmoving to create topographical man-made structures that blur figure and ground. With two buildings just open, the complex’s raw state presents an artificial landscape of thrashing, gnashing stone creatures restlessly rising up from the earth before subsiding into calm
Since launching their eponymous Paris-based practice in 1992, Dominique Jakob and Brendan MacFarlane have produced a series of exuberant projects that wouldn’t look out of place in a sci-fi film.
The global financial crisis has derailed construction all over the world — even in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. But certain megaprojects continue to march ahead, though with tighter budgets, more pragmatic goals, and less ambitious schedules. One such project is Masdar City, in Abu Dhabi. In 2007, the government-owned Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company chose a consortium led by London-based Foster + Partners to design the master plan for the 2.3-square-mile development it touted as the world’s first zero-carbon city.
Frank Gehry’s New World Center (NWC) in Miami’s South Beach, and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles [RECORD, November 2003, page 134], are at once similar yet quite different.
With its undulating roof profile, the Coliseums, a complex built for the 2010 South American Games in Medellín, Colombia, appears as a mountain — albeit a caricature of one — in the midst of the city.
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