After four years of preparation by more than 400 representatives from the construction industry, the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) has unveiled a comprehensive redesign of its 49-year-old building code. It adapts to national and international standards for the first time, encourages greater safety, and simplifies processing for contractors. It will also introduce time saving benefits such as digital filing online. The new code will be flexible and revised every three years. To start, it adopts five out of the eight code standards prescribed by the International Code Council: fuel and gas, mechanical, plumbing, electrical, and building. It

Barkow Leibinger Architects, a Berlin-based firm headed by the husband and wife team of Frank Barkow and Regine Leibinger, has been selected as the winner of the second annual Marcus Corporation Foundation Prize. Awarded by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the prize recognizes “emerging talent in architecture.” Courtesy Barkow Leibinger Architects In making their selection, the jury noted that firm’s architecture can be defined as the constant interplay between practice, research, and teaching. Barkow Leibinger is known for its use of industrial materials and innovative glass technologies. Its Trutec office building in Korea, for instance,

Remaking the mouth of a river while carving a new neighborhood and parkland out of a post-industrial landscape is challenging enough. But the winners of the Lower Don Lands design competition in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, are also taking on a job with real symbolic weight: rejuvenating a 2,400-acre swath of polluted lakefront land that was thought to be beyond repair. Courtesy The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation announced last week that a team led by Michael van Valkenburgh Associates won the competition. The team also includes Behnisch Architects, Greenberg Consultants, and Great Eastern Ecology. They

The Cincinnati Art Museum announced today the four architecture firms short-listed to redesign and reconfigure its existing campus. On the list are: Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Neutelings Riedijk; Smith-Miller & Hawkinson; and UNStudio. Over its 126-year history, the museum has grown into an assemblage of seven, variously interconnected individual structures. It lacks planned spatial logic as well as a consistent style. The latest addition, completed in 2003, was by KZF. The museum’s next architect—to be selected from the four finalists later this summer—will work with it to develop a new design that will integrate the individual structures into a cohesive

The Cranbrook Art Academy has appointed Reed Kroloff, the current dean of Tulane University’s architecture school, as its director. Kroloff will assume his new post at the school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, on July 1. He was selected after a seven-month-long search and review of 150 candidates nationwide. Kroloff’s time at Tulane, which began in the fall of 2004, was marked by tumult. After shepherding the school through its dislocation and resettlement during the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he played an integral role in helping it to retain nearly all students and faculty after the storm. In addition, the school’s

In a move expected for several months, Foster + Partners announced today that is expanding its shareholder base to include more employees as well as its first external investor, the private equity firm 3i. Although the London-based firm is remaining mum on how much the deal with 3i costs, the Financial Times reported earlier this week that it is worth between $800 million and $1 billion. Lord Norman Foster founded his practice 40 years ago. In an interview yesterday with Tom Sawyer, an editor of Engineering News Record, RECORD’s sister magazine, the firm’s current financial director Gary Lawley said that

Editor’s note: You may read the news digest below or listen to it, plus other news headlines from ArchiecturalRecord.com, as a podcast by clicking this link. Click the play button to begin | Click here to download The newly restored Griffith Park Observatory isn't the only architectural gem to dodge the bullet of this week's wildfires in Los Angeles. Just outside the park are Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House as well as residences by Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler, Gregory Ain, Craig Ellwood, and Raphael Soriano'what the Los Angeles Times described on May 11 as 'one of the most important concentrations

If you’re a professional association representing more than 81,800 members, such as the American Institute of Architects (AIA), it helps to plan ahead—way ahead. So while more than 21,000 architects were in San Antonio last week for the AIA’s 2007 National Convention and Design Exposition, delegates held elections for the 2009 president as well as other leadership slots for 2008. The results? Marvin J. Malecha, FAIA, won the presidency; Peter J. Arsenault, AIA, and Clark Manus, FAIA, were elected vice presidents; and Hal P. Munger, FAIA, ran unopposed for the office of treasurer. The vice presidents and treasurer will serve

There’s something about open space in Seattle that prize juries seem to love. Weiss/Manfredi’s Olympic Sculpture Park, for instance, won the prestigious Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design in March—and, just last month, it received an American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) general design honor award. ASLA also gave an honor award to Open Space Seattle 2100, a plan for building green spaces throughout the city during the next 100 years. Photo: © Benjamin Benschneider The Seattle Art Museum Olympic Sculpture Park. With the Olympic Sculpture Park, Weiss/Manfredi worked with landscape architect Charles Anderson to transform a nine-acre industrial

People are treating the atmosphere like “an open sewer,” former vice president Al Gore contends, and the best way to stop them is with a pollution tax. Gore laid out just such a penalty system, as well as financial incentives for not polluting, during his keynote address at the AIA’s 2007 National Convention and Design Exposition in San Antonio on Saturday. It was a speech tailored to his audience, using little of the same content from “An Inconvenient Truth”—his Academy Award-winning documentary—and with good reason. “Architects have by far the greatest opportunity to affect how our society deals with the