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Image © HOK Among the nine rejected locations was one in Bronzeville, a historically black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, where HOK had developed a proposal (above). When the Barack Obama Foundation announced its choice of four possible homes for the Obama Presidential Library, eliminating nine other contenders, it didn’t say a word about who might design the building. But there may be reason for several well-known​ architects to celebrate. They include Renzo Piano, the master planner for Columbia University’s Manhattanville Campus, and Thom Mayne, a consultant to the University of Illinois at Chicago. Those schools, along with

The Art Institute looks to Chicago’s ambitious architectural and urban past to find new inspiration for the present. Installation view of Chicagoisms. If the story of 19th century America was industrialization and the birth of the modern metropolis, then the story of Chicago’s explosive growth resounds in almost every American city. In the 1830s Chicago was a meagre outpost of some 300 residents, yet by the 1870s it boomed with a population of 300,000. This city on the prairie exemplified the urban density, manufacturing power, and rail infrastructure that reworked the U.S. into an industrial power. The Chicagoisms exhibition at

Although retail construction has experienced moderate growth over the past two years, the sector's health varies by region. In 2013, for example, the South was the only area of the country to see a gain in the value of construction starts. Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].

Perkins Eastman restored Albert Ledner’s 1964 National Maritime Union headquarters in Manhattan’s West Village, and inserted a stand-alone emergency department inside. When New York’s St. Vincent’s Hospital closed in 2010 after years of financial strife, Greenwich Village lost a beloved 150-year-old institution that had served the poor and working class and was “ground zero” when the AIDS epidemic erupted in the 1980s. While most of the St. Vincent’s campus was demolished, a quirky precast-concrete building on Seventh Avenue between West 12th and 13th streets, designed by Albert Ledner and completed in 1964, remained. St. Vincent’s purchased it in 1973, but

Balmori Associates' and Cooper, Robertson & Partners' proposal. Last week, the 11th Street Bridge Park unveiled four finalist design concepts for a proposed linear park to be built on the piers of an old highway bridge spanning the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. The finalist teams in the design competition, which attracted more than 40 entrants, are: Balmori Associates / Cooper, Robertson & Partners; OLIN / OMA; Stoss Landscape Urbanism / Höweler + Yoon Architecture; and Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT) / NEXT Architects / Magnusson Klemencic Associates.Competition organizers urged the designers to create an active, multi-use public space, and

While working on a monumental fish sculpture for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Frank Gehry’s office developed its own software to manage the complexities of the project and gain greater control of the design and construction process. During the design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in the late 1990s, they refined this software into what became Digital Project. By 2002, Gehry Technologies (GT) was born. A spin-off from the design office, GT offered architects the software and expertise that came from realizing Gehry Partners’ complex buildings. On Tuesday, GT revealed it has spun off Digital Project into an

Rendering of Zaha Hadid's Crest pavilion at the Victoria & Albert Museum.  The annual London Design Festival (September 13-21) is an epic platform for designers and manufacturers to showcase their new products at concurrent mini-trade fairs around town. This year’s lineup includes 100% Design, Designjunction, and Decorex International, among many others. Throughout the city, however, there will also be discussions, exhibitions, architectural installations—from a digitally-manufactured house to an enormous new Zaha Hadid sculpture—and many more diversions for the design fan. We’ve rounded up a handful of highlights below. WikiHouse 4.0, September 13–21 Pushing forward into the digital future of

A documentary attempts to respond to the question raised by Michael Heizer's 340-ton granite boulder installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: "It's just a rock—how can it be art?" The boulder passes through La Mirada Park, California, on its way to LACMA. When artist Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass—a 340-ton granite boulder perched above a cavern of “negative space”—was installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2012, the reaction of more than a few people was, “It’s just a rock. How can it be art?” Two years later, director Doug Pray presents a kind

According to the presentation given at the National Planning Commission Meeting on Thursday, Gehry's new design does not include the east and west tapestries. At its monthly meeting on September 4, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) heard an update on Frank Gehry’s embattled design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. Craig Webb of Gehry Partners presented a revised design with significant differences from the one the commission rejected, by a vote of 7 to 3, back in April. Two of the three metal tapestries that formed Gehry’s most distinctive architectural move are gone. There are now