Photo courtesy SHoP Architects “We’re basically focusing on digital integration services, but we could go as far as construction management advisory services,” says Jonathan Mallie of SHoP Construction, a newly founded spin-off of SHoP Architects. New York-based SHoP Architects made what might seem like a counterintuitive move early this month. The 12-year-old firm—best known for the meditative Hangil Book Hall (2004) in Seoul, South Korea, several high-profile New York residential projects, and still-shaking-out plans for Manhattan’s East River Waterfront and South Street Seaport—has decided to put itself at the forefront of the profession-wide push for greater design-build project integration, not
Foster + Partners has been commissioned to design an ambitious, $177 million masterplan for the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the largest museum of European art in Moscow.
UFO Museum Has Close Encounter of the CAD Kind Have intelligent beings from other planets visited Earth? The International UFO Museum and Research Center, in Roswell, New Mexico, lacks a definitive answer, such as an alien spacecraft—but it does have plenty of intriguing photographs and affidavits from people who say they have seen one. “If visitors walk out of here with more questions than they had when they came in, that’s all we ask,” says executive director Julie Shuster. Images courtesy Ahearn-Schopfer Associates Ahearn-Schopfer Associates, a Boston-based firm, is designing a new home for the International UFO Museum and Research
Since 1985, the Whitney Museum of American Art has presented three separate expansion plans for its 42-year-old home in Upper Manhattan—all of which have fizzled. Once again, the institution is trying to increase its square footage, with hopes that an entirely new strategy will make the fourth time a charm.
Studio Pei-Zhu Designs Museum for Iconic Chinese Artist While the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May left a large portion of Western China in ruins, signs are emerging that some notable building projects in the area are pushing forward. One of these projects is the Art Museum of Yue Minjun, designed by Beijing-based Studio Pei-Zhu, a 2007 Design Vanguard winner. Image courtesy Studio Pei-Zhu Located near the Qingcheng Mountains, and adjacent to the Shimeng River in Sichuan Province, the 10,700-square-foot museum will house the work of Yue Minjun, a Chinese contemporary artist known for his repetitive images of large, smiling figures.
The owner of an abandoned—and reportedly haunted—sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky, wants to turn the five-story building into a boutique hotel. Charlie Mattingly and architect Kevin Milburn, of a firm called Urban Designz, hope to raise $18 million to transform the Waverly Hills Sanatorium into a 78-room hotel with a spa, fitness center, and meeting area, according to the Courier-Journal. “My intent is for this to be first class all the way,” Mattingly told the newspaper. A “mecca for ghost hunters,” the old tuberculosis hospital regularly appears on lists of America’s most haunted places. Last fall, it was featured in a
The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Palmer House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, acclaimed by historians as one of the architect’s best residential projects, has been put up for sale by the family of the original owners.
For architects Winfried Brenne and Franz Jaschke, restoring the 80-year-old ADGB Trade Union School, in Germany, was a case of subtraction. “The building was not in worse condition than others we had worked with,” Brenne says, “but it was more hidden under changes made over time.”
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