The Cuban-born architect Max Borges Jr. passed away at his home in Falls Church, Virginia, on January 18, after an extended illness. He was 90 years old. Borges was born to a well-to-do family in Havana on July 24, 1918. He received a bachelor’s degree in architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology (1939) and subsequently earned a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard (1940). He maintained a successful Havana practice founded by his father, Max Borges del Junco, until departing for exile in the United States in 1959.
The economic woes affecting architects nationwide are echoing through the ranks of the AIA. The association has announced sweeping plans to cut costs as a means of combating slumping revenues brought on by the recession. “The Institute is feeling the impact of the recession just as we are in our firms and practices,” said Marvin Malecha, FAIA, 2009 president of the AIA, in a March 23 statement. In the first quarter of the year, the AIA saw a shortfall in membership dues, as some architects deferred payments and others ceased membership completely. Malecha also cited a decrease in revenues for
The residents of the Carrollton district of New Orleans must be prescient. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the Carrollton United Neighborhood Organization (CUNO) decided that reopening Alfred C. Priestley Junior High, which had been closed since 1993, would spark local revitalization, and a survey of residents indicated widespread support for an architecture and construction charter school. In spring 2005 CUNO began negotiating with the Orleans Parish School Board to secure the vacant building for its reuse as the Priestley School of Architecture & Construction.
Atlanta has long been an epicenter of the civil rights movement, and the hometown of many of its most influential figures. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded here in 1957; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staged sit-ins at Atlanta department stores in 1960; and the city is the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr.
In January, Minneapolis-based Cuningham Group Architecture submitted a proposal for a public elementary school in Austin, Texas. It expected to be one of ten competing firms, says firm principal Tim Dufault, AIA; instead, it was one of two dozen. Similarly, it expected little competition for an elementary school in suburban Albuquerque—a project that ultimately drew 32 proposals. Traditionally, public schools are not the most sought after commissions, due to low budgets and little room for unique designs. That so many firms are now pursuing these types of commissions reflects a hard reality: the public realm is one of the only
In mid-March the architecture program of Tuskegee University—the historically black university founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881—earned accreditation for the period January 2008 through 2011. The decision comes after the National Architectural Accrediting Board revoked Tuskegee’s accreditation in 2006, the first such occurrence in NAAB’s 69-year history. NAAB executive director Andrea S. Rutledge says that, in general, revocation is contingent upon “a perfect storm of problems in some combination of physical resources, financial resources, human resources, and information resources, from which you often see corresponding problems in students’ ability to achieve the prescribed level in the student performance criterion.”
Architects in Nevada are placing their bets on a campaign aimed at steering much-needed stimulus package money toward design work in the state. The Nevada chapter recently launched an initiative to convince state lawmakers to substitute shovel-ready projects with “pencil-ready” ones. Chapter leaders have so far met twice with state legislators in Carson City, educating them about the long-term effects of focusing on short-term projects, says Sean Coulter, AIA, principal at Las Vegas-basd Pugsley Simpson Coulter Architects. In Las Vegas, where Coulter is chapter president, he says unemployment rates for architects are topping 50 percent as the commercial market slows
When Mark Baker started his small Albuquerque, New Mexico, firm, Baker Architecture + Design, in 2002, he focused on small-scale projects: home additions, kitchen remodels, garages, and the like. In more recent years, Baker’s work has grown to include restaurants, spas, high-end custom homes, and elementary schools for Albuquerque’s public school system. Then the recession hit. “We had three big projects canceled at the same time,” Baker says. “February was horrible. We didn’t have any jobs that month.” Image courtesy RNL Design RNL Design has found a 'safe haven' in government work. One of the firm's current projects is a
The ideas competition, featured in a January 21 story in RECORD, drew 75 entries from around the world. The brief, which asked entrants to “rethink the relationship between transit systems, public space, and urban redevelopment,” was inspired by both the federal stimulus program and Measure R—a half-cent sales tax increase in Los Angeles County that promises to provide $40 billion for transit-related projects in the next 30 years.
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