This article first appeared on ENR. Four months after URS agreed to an activist investor's demand for a reshaped board and new strategic options to boost its share price, the firm is set to be acquired by AECOM. The deal, worth about $6 billion in cash, stock, and assumed debt, would keep URS intact. The firms, which announced the transaction on July 13, said it would create the latest global giant, particularly in oil, gas, power, and government services, with more than $19 billion in revenue and 95,000 employees in 150 countries. The $56.31 per share price is about 19
Two of Paul Rudolph's houses are for sale, and they may be joined by his Orange County Government Center. Via michiganmodern.org Paul Rudolph's Frank and Anne Parcells House (1970) in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, is for sale. Its projecting rooms resemble the architect's Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York. Two buildings by Paul Rudolph—houses in Michigan and Massachusetts—are on the market, and they may soon be joined by a third: the Orange County Government Center, the sprawling structure in Goshen, New York, that has been the cause of hand wringing by preservationists for over a decade, and has been
Designed by Coyula and other colleagues, El Parque de los Mártires Universitarios, completed in 1967, stands at a major intersection down the hill from the University of Havana's steps, where it remains one of the city's most powerful monuments to the revolution. The celebrated Cuban architect and urban planner Mario Coyula Cowley died in Havana on July 7, after a long battle with cancer. He was 79 years old. During his career Coyula was director of the School of Architecture at the Instituto Superior Politécnico José Antonio Echeverria (ISPJAE), head of the Group for the Integral Development of the Capital,
At 57 feet square and 18 feet high, the maze occupies the eastern third of the National Building Museum's Great Hall. The vast Great Hall of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., is as tricky to program as it is impressive to behold. More than 300 feet long and several stories high, the Renaissance Revival hall is often rented out for private events, and its columns and arcades provide a suitably grand backdrop during gala dinners. But the space tends to swallow up lectures and other small-scale public programs. To make better use of it, the museum installed
Protestors gather around the National Stadium on Saturday, hoping to save it from demolition. On Saturday, placard-wearing protestors took to the streets of central Tokyo and peacefully encircled the 50,000-seat Kasumigaoka National Stadium designed by Mitsuo Katayama and erected for the 1964 Olympics. In preparation for hosting the games again in 2020, the vintage structure is being readied for demolition followed by replacement with a futuristic, Zaha Hadid-designed arena several times its size. But a collection of architects and lay people alike are hoping to convince the Japan Sport Council (JSC) to do otherwise. Japan does not have a great
The role of Jews in creating and popularizing post-war modernism has largely escaped attention, but it is now the subject of a new exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco. Eichler model home advertisement, c. 1960. Are Jews particularly likely to embrace new forms of artistic expression? The ongoing coverage of collections looted by the Nazis strongly suggests that, when it came to avant-garde painting, Jewish collectors were essential. So too for architecture: Can it be coincidence that Mies’s greatest clients, the Tugendahts, and le Corbusier’s, the Savoyes, were Jewish? In America, the Kaufmann family commissioned houses
At the Chicago Architecture Foundation's exhibition on big data, a resin model of Chicago has been digitally enhanced to project statistics on everything from demographics to tweets. In the lobby of Daniel Burnham’s Railway Exchange building, the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has made the invisible, visible. For the exhibition Chicago: City of Big Data, CAF turned its centerpiece Chicago Model—a 320-square-foot resin replica of the city’s downtown, updated annually to reflect additions and subtractions—into an interpretive piece through which to “view” the city’s data. Encompassing everything from tweets to demographics to air quality, so-called big data is increasingly employed
Just before the debut of a summer-long installation in New York, architect David Benjamin announced that Autodesk has acquired his research-focused firm. The Living's installation, Hy-Fi, in the courtyard at MoMA/P.S.1 in Queens, New York. The smell is distinctive—not offensive, but definitely farm-like. “I think it smells like hay,” says architect David Benjamin looking up at the three conjoined brick towers rising above the courtyard at MoMA/P.S.1, the Museum of Modern Art-administered contemporary art space in Queens, New York. Benjamin made his olfactory observation last week at an opening event for Hy-Fi, a temporary installation designed by his firm, The
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