The Kings Theatre under renovation. Shuttered for almost 40 years, the ornamental façade of the Kings Theatre—towering over the storefronts along Brooklyn, New York's busy Flatbush Avenue—stood as a sad reminder of the area’s decline, beginning in the 1970s, from a once glorious past. Now its decorative terracotta panels and sculptural flourishes are a sign of progress as the theater prepares to reopen in January 2015. The façade, however, does not come close to equaling the splendor of the newly restored interiors. Opened in 1929 as one of five Loew’s Wonder Theatres constructed in New York and New Jersey, it
Architect Judith Edelman, 91, died on October 4, in New York City where she left a profound mark, both on the built environment and as a role model for younger women architects.
Toyo Ito at the theater construction site. Displaying architecture in a gallery is always a challenge. This is especially true with a building still under construction. And even more so when that building is Taiwan’s National Taichung Theater—unarguably Tokyo architect Toyo Ito’s most ambitious project to date. Taking Ito’s structural know-how and spatial ingenuity to new limits, this extraordinary complex appears as a rectangular block. But contained within is a spectacular 3D grid of tubular voids hinted at by the hourglass-shaped cutouts that define the elevations. Expanding and contracting, the hollows accommodate the various programmatic pieces, including a 2014-seat theater,
Playful yet menacing, the fangs of a grinning dragon greet you as you enter @Large, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s extensive installation at Alcatraz, the notorious former prison in San Francisco Bay.
The Dutch architecture firm and the Philadelphia landscape architects won the unanimous support of the jury with their X-shaped, densely-programmed design. On October 15, OMA + OLIN was named the winner of the design competition for 11th Street Bridge Park, a planned linear park spanning Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia River that has been widely compared to the High Line and could open in 2018. Selected from four finalist teams, the team comprised of the Dutch architecture firm and the Philadelphia landscape architects won the unanimous support of the jury with their bold, X-shaped design—the most iconic in form, and also the
The multifamily residential sector has expanded more rapidly than the single-family housing market in recent years. The growth has been fueled, in part, by a strong demand for rental units. Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].
Photo courtesy Lawrence Halprin Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin conducting a “Driftwood City Discussion” at Sea Ranch during a July 5, 1966, workshop. Fifty years ago, a breathtaking, 10-mile-long, mile-wide strip of the California coast, 105 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, was declared a privately-owned model community and opened for radically eco-friendly residential development. Owned and managed for 42 years as a sheep ranch, the new town was named The Sea Ranch (the “The” is mandatory). Al Boeke, manager of The Sea Ranch for its new owners (Oceanic Properties, a division of
The Royal Institute of British Architects has awarded this year's Stirling Prize for best building to the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. Haworth Tompkins Architects recently rebuilt and greatly expanded the rundown chapel that has housed the theater since the 1960s (incorporating some of its original material). The metal shades on the project's street-facing facade feature etched images of Liverpool residents.The Haworth Tompkins building beat out Feilden Clegg Bradley's Manchester School of Art, Mecanoo's Library of Birmingham, O’Donnell + Tuomey's student center at the London School of Economics, Renzo Piano's Shard, and Zaha Hadid's London Aquatics Centre to win the
Adam Reed Tucker, a Chicago-based architect, conceived the concept for Lego Architecture, an elegant series of building sets celebrated in Lego Architecture: The Visual Guide, published last month. The relationship between Lego and architecture began in 1962 with the company’s Scale Model Series. It only lasted until 1965, but its impact was massive thanks to the introduction of the Lego plate. One-third the size of a traditional Lego brick, the plate added an element of stability that opened up a world of building possibility for kids and adults alike. But few took to the potential quite like architects. Moshe Safdie,
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