Photo courtesy Princeton University Sigrid Adriaenssens, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, shows C. Susan Grimmond, King's College London, one of the exhibits in the "Resilient City" display. Are cities collections of problems that need to be solved or sites of innovation that offer opportunities? Are they best managed by top-down planning and policies or bottom-up entrepreneurialism? These themes and many more were the focus of the inaugural Princeton-Fung Global Forum, “The Future of the City,” held January 30–February 1 in Shanghai. The papers presented during the event were as diverse as its 48 speakers, a collection
Photo courtesy Braden Toan Danforth Toan and his wife Jane Toan. Danforth W. Toan died on January 16 at the age of 94. He was an architect and founding partner of Warner Burns Toan & Lunde Architects & Planners in New York, now known as WBTL Architects. Many of Dan’s significant buildings in New York and around the world were college libraries and educational facilities, including Columbia University’s Hammer Health Sciences Center and New York University’s Warren Weaver Hall. His buildings transformed other campuses, including Brown University, where he designed the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library and the Science Tower,
The unofficial theme of geography and mapping firm Esri’s fourth-annual Geodesign Summit might as well have been “the cloud.” Nearly every presenter at the event, held on January 24th and 25th in Redlands, California, referred to the decentralized, virtual network of software and data storage as the key factor in the growing importance of geographic information systems systems (GIS). The summit brought together architects, engineers, geographers, and software programmers for presentations focused on software like Esri’s ubiquitous ArcGIS and for discussions about how such tools will eventually, if not quite yet, underpin landscape, urban, and planning design projects. Image courtesy
Holl’s proposed addition to the Center in Washington, D.C., will be largely underground, with three pavilions rising to the surface in a newly created park. The scheme resembles his hugely successful addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, though here the pavilions will be made of carved Carrara marble rather than glass.
Gas Works Park in Seattle. Two modernist parks joined the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) this month, boosting the often uphill battle to preserve America’s important post-war landscapes. Gas Works Park in Seattle, designed by Richard Haag, and Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis, designed by M. Paul Friedberg, have won official recognition. “These two landscapes are now part of an august group of seminal works of landscape architecture,” says Charles Birnbaum, President of the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness and understanding of America’s landscape heritage. Each park represents “the work of a master in
The Maspalomas Oasis Hotel on the island of Gran Canaria, in 1968-1971. The hotel, designed by José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún, may be demolished. On the island of Gran Canaria, a last-minute battle wages to save the Maspalomas Oasis Hotel, designed by the Madrid architects José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún and completed in 1971. Weaving together pavilions, gardens, and courtyards, and preserving a virgin grove of palms, the project is a model for harmonious intervention in the unique volcanic landscape of the Canary Islands. The owners, the hotel chain RIU, plan to close the hotel and
Cruz y Ortiz and Jean-Michel Wilmotte complete a 10-year overhaul of the stern neo-Gothic structure. The Rijksmuseum shares a prime public square with its neighbor, the Stedelijk, also recently reopened following a renovation and expansion. In recent months the museum hogging the cultural spotlight in Amsterdam has been the Stedelijk, which opened in December after a nine-year renovation and expansion. (Read Justin Davidson's review.) Many critics have panned its extension, designed by Benthem Crouwel and dubbed the “bathtub.” But this spring, attention will turn to the $500 million expansion of the Rijksmuseum, which shares a public square with the Stedelijk.
nARCHITECTS's winning design for a micro-unit apartment building in Manhattan's Kips Bay neighborhood. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that a team that includes local firm nARCHITECTS has won a competition to design a micro-unit apartment building for a publicly owned lot in Manhattan. The city launched the competition in July to spur the development of small residential spaces tailored to the financial needs of young professionals. "Three quarters of Manhattan is one- or two-person households," said the Mayor at a press conference this morning. "But we just don't have enough apartments that are the appropriate size for
With musicians in mind, Mark Cavagnero designs the first concert hall in the United States purpose-built for jazz performances. With musicians in mind, Mark Cavagnero designs the first concert hall in the United States purpose-built for jazz performances. When Chick Corea, Esperanza Spalding, and other greats take the stage at SFJAZZ Center’s opening concert on Wednesday—in a night of performances emceed by Bill Cosby—they will not only inaugurate San Francisco’s newest concert venue, but they will also break in the first standalone jazz hall in the United States. The building, which opens officially today, joins the city’s opera, ballet, and
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