Architecture News

RSS

A leading construction industry management consultant and investment banking firm is expanding its architectural focus. FMI, of Raleigh, North Carolina, purchased Advanced Management Institute (AMI), of Napa, California, in February, allowing it to target the architecture clients that AMI has traditionally served.  The 55-year-old FMI has chiefly served contractors, but the growth of design/build has created a larger pool of architects and engineers who could benefit from its services, says Hank Harris, FMI’s president and CEO. “We think it’s going to be a great combination for the industry,” he adds. AMI has offered leadership development, training, and consulting to architecture

Since dissolving the avant-garde Copenhagen architecture firm PLOT in 2006, former partners Julien De Smedt and Bjarke Ingels have launched individual practices with grandiose, statement-making visions. Considering how to add new housing in the middle of already-crowded Copenhagen, for example, Ingels’s firm Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, decided that a local sports field could be surrounded by a giant wall containing 5,000 apartments—an unsolicited idea that the municipality now intends to realize. De Smedt, too, has thrilled potential clients. His studio, JDS, recently won a competition to redesign the Holmenkollen ski jump in Oslo. Images courtesy JDS Julien De Smedt

Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum, set to open in 2010, will be a “a series of spaces that provide moments for introspection and repose,” according to Brad Cloepfil, principal of Allied Works Architecture, who unveiled his design at a press conference yesterday. The 31,500-square-foot building will sit in the shadow—literally—of the Denver Art Museum’s 2006 addition, designed by Daniel Libeskind. Images courtesy Clyfford Still Museum Brad Cloepfil, principal of Allied Works Architecture, has unveiled his design for the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver (top).  The main lobby (middle).  Typical galleries (above). In contrast to the Libeskind building, with its jutting angles

When SWA Group was brought in as the landscape architect for the California Academy of Sciences, located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the challenge was to create one of the most efficient and sustainable buildings in the Bay Area. Renzo Piano’s design called for a green roof that would essentially lift a piece of the park and place it atop the building: seven earth mounds that would serve as a research facility. Images courtesy SWA Group (top); BAR Architects (middle);  Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (above). The California Academy of Sciences Building, in San Francisco, by Renzo Piano and SWA

The Foster + Partner-designed Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport opened Friday, reported the Associated Press. Six airlines have started flying into the 14 million-square-foot terminal, with other airlines to follow in March. The glass-and-steel structure, touted as the world’s largest airport building, is the centerpiece of a massive development project for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which begin Aug. 8. The terminal was designed and constructed in four years and cost a reported $3.65 billion. “This new terminal is the largest and most advanced airport building in the world – a celebration of the thrill and poetry of flight,”

  Photo David M. Heald, © SRGF, New York   Thomas Krens The Guggenheim Foundation revealed on Wednesday that its director, Thomas Krens, would be stepping down, bringing to an end an almost two-decade-long tenure as one of the most celebrated and criticized museum directors in the world. Few museum heads are known outside the hallowed walls of their respective institutions, but perhaps it was the famously curved walls of Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim Museum building that inspired Krens to think outside the museum box. Part art historian, part businessman, Krens, 61, became director of the Guggenheim Foundation

It’s only natural for America’s ski community to embrace the environmental movement: a rise in average global temperatures could dwindle vital snowpack. Last year at least 61 ski resorts purchased wind and solar energy credits. Similarly, Jiminy Peak, in Massachusetts, became the first ski resort in the country to produce its own alternative energy, installing a 1.5-megawatt wind turbine that supplies one-third of its electricity. Images ' dbox An overview of the new Base Village in Snowmass Village, Colorado (top). The Little Nell Residences at the Base Village (above). Eco momentum has continued to build during the 2007–2008 ski season.

Esquire magazine hailed Edward A. Feiner, FAIA, as the “most powerful architect in America” when he was chief architect of the General Services Administration’s multibillion-dollar building program, and now he’s on the move—again.   Feiner left the GSA in January 2005 to manage the Washington, D.C., office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Now the cowboy-booted architect is in Las Vegas to work for one of SOM’s clients. On February 27th, Feiner begins his new job as senior vice president and chief architect for the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, an international casino and resort developer perhaps best known for its Italian-inspired casino,

Some three years after hurricanes Katrina and Rita swept through the Gulf of Mexico, temporary housing provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) remains in the news. Earlier this month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported dangerously high levels of formaldehyde in some of the thousands of FEMA trailers sent to the Gulf, adding urgency to the agency’s efforts to resettle victims. As the fallout continues, federal and state agencies are weighing new approaches to emergency shelter. FEMA’s Alternative Housing Pilot Program (AHPP), authorized by Congress in 2006, provides $400 million to Gulf states for the development

New Orleans’ 20th century architectural heritage is at risk due to the public’s desire to see the storm-damaged city rebuilt quickly and a general disregard for structures of the Modern era. That warning came earlier this month from a panel of architects, architecture critics, preservationists, and planners who gathered for a public forum titled “At Risk: 20th Century New Orleans Urban Design and Architecture.” Photo © Neil Alexander Held at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the forum drew an audience of roughly 150 people largely sympathetic to the premise that many 20th century structures—including storm-damaged schools, government offices, and