OMA's Beijing Office Designs Residential Tower for Singapore Three years after establishing its Beijing office, the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has announced the first project spearheaded entirely by this branch: Singapore Scotts Tower, a 36-story, 68-unit condominium tower for the Far East Organization, Singapore’s largest private development company. Image: Courtesy OMA OMA’s Beijing office has designed Singapore Scotts Tower, a 36-story, 68-unit condominium building in Singapore. By eliminating most of the lower floors, OMA created a residential tower where essentially only top floors exist. Designed by partner Ole Scheeren and associate Eric Chang—both veterans of OMA’s Prada projects—the

Harlem has seen a flurry of residential and retail developments in recent years. Now the northern Manhattan neighborhood is slated to get its first major office building in three decades'a striking glass tower designed by Swanke Hayden Connell Architects (SHCA). Named the Harlem Park, the 340-foot-tall, 21-story building will be the neighborhood's tallest. Photo: Courtesy Crystal CG Renders Swanke Hayden Connell Architects have designed a 340-foot-tall office tower that will rise at the corner of Park Avenue and 125th Street—the first major new office building in Harlem since 1973 An illuminated volume at the building’s southwest corner acts like a

Editor’s note: You may read the news digest below or listen to it, plus other news headlines from ArchitecturalRecord.com, as a podcast by clicking this link. Click the play button to begin | Click here to download Rafael Viñoly’s “Walkie-Talkie,” a proposed 500-foot-tall skyscraper that the group English Heritage labeled London’s “ugliest and most oppressive” building, received the go ahead from government regulators this week, The Financial Times reported on July 11. A public inquiry was launched last winter in response to concerns that the cell-phone-shaped building might spoil views of the Tower of London and other landmarks. Construction could

In retrospect, the anointing of Renzo Piano to design an addition to the Kimbell Art Museum seems almost preordained. He worked in Louis I. Kahn’s Philadelphia office during the 1960s and already had three critically acclaimed art museums in Texas: the Nasher, Menil Collection, and Cy Twombly Gallery. Photo: Courtesy the Kimbell Art Museum The existing Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, designed by Louis I. Kahn, dates to 1972. The museum has hired Renzo Piano, who worked for Kahn, to design a new building across the street. Piano called the commission, which was announced in April, “an awesome challenge,

The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, also known as Taliesin, regained full accreditation last month from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC). Its future had been in doubt since the HLC placed it on notice in 2005, following falling enrollment and turmoil within the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which runs the school. Maintaining HLC accreditation is a prerequisite for National Architectural Accrediting Board accreditation, which the school currently has for its master's program. Photo: Courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona, is one of two campuses for the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. “The stakes

Although Rome is no longer the head of an empire, plenty of roads still lead to it. Many of its streets are now getting swept up in a radical redesign of the city’s urban fabric. As cars and scooters are slowly exorcised from the city’s center, tire-friendly asphalt is replacing the historic sanpietrini, or cobblestones, on major traffic arteries. The old sanpietrini will be used to resurface streets and piazzas that will be handed over to pedestrians at the project’s end. One of Rome's new pedestrian-only zones. Mayor Walter Veltroni outlined the “restyling” plan at a press event earlier this

It doesn’t take much to envision what Louis I. Kahn’s memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt will look like if it is eventually finished. It occupies a triangular, 2.8-acre site at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River. Construction crews have already shaped the earth into the exact dimensions and contours that Kahn specified in 1973: a raised lawn, to be flanked by two groves of trees and granite steps, that gently slopes down and culminates in an open-air, granite-walled room overlooking the United Nations. These walls will bear quotes from the president’s powerful Four Freedoms

Editor’s note: You may read the news digest below or listen to it, plus other news headlines from ArchitecturalRecord.com, as a podcast by clicking this link. Click the play button to begin | Click here to download The British Museum has tapped Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, the practice that was until this spring known as the Richard Rogers Partnership, to design a new $200 million building, The Guardian reported on July 5. The venerable institution apparently has Tutankhamun envy—its lack of sufficient space prompted the organizers of a blockbuster Egyptology and mummy exhibition, expected to be “the most popular

Arcadis, the Dutch-based environmental and infrastructure engineering giant, announced July 6 that it has acquired RTKL Associates, the architect-engineer. Based in Baltimore, RTKL ranks 61st on Engineering News-Record’s list of Top 500 Design Firms, with more than $203 million in 2006 revenue. Arcadis will not integrate RTKL, which has 1,050 employees, into its operations but will operate RTKL as a wholly owned subsidiary. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. RTKL’s 100 or so shareholders consisted of senior management, vice presidents and principals of the company, and all of them voted in favor of the sale, says Arcadis CEO Harrie