RMJM, the international design firm based in Edinburgh, has donated $1.5 million to the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) for the creation of the “RMJM Program for Research and Education in Integrated Design Practice.” This new project aims to heighten the value of architects by incorporating business principles into design education. “Architecture is at risk of losing talent,” explains RMJM CEO Peter Morrison, who has explored the idea for such a program with GSD professors and architects during the past three years while giving guest lectures at the school. “On the surface, things look good: projects are good,
Baseball players are hardly alone in experiencing opening-day jitters. Less than a week before the March 30th opening of the Washington Nationals’ new home, the first LEED-certified Major League Baseball stadium, scores of bricklayers, painters, electricians, and other contractors were still hard at work. Designed by a joint venture between the international firm HOK Sport, and D.C.-based Devrouax + Purnell Architects, the $611 million ballpark was erected in just under two years. Images courtesy HOK Sport Nationals Park, designed by HOK Sport and Devrouax + Purnell Architects, opened on March 30, 2008 (top). The ballpark is located on South Capitol
BusinessWeek and RECORD announce the winners of the second biannual “Good Design is Good Business” China Awards Program, which honors building and planning projects that are reshaping modern China.
Jean Nouvel has talked of creating buildings that he hopes will disappear into their surroundings, defy easy characterization, and that will become dated.
Plans to resurrect the spirit of old Penn Station in a new structure named after the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan “suffered a potentially fatal blow,” The New York Times reported on March 28.
Developer Tishman Speyer won rights to develop Manhattan’s Hudson Rail Yards with a scheme designed by architect Helmut Jahn and landscape architect Peter Walker. Announced yesterday, the deal is expected to be formalized within 14 days.
Nilay Oza, a project architect for the well-known Houses at Sagaponac, in the Hamptons on Long Island, has found that real estate developers want to emulate this Modernist enclave. “I advise people about economies of scale, and finding constants between different designs,” he says of phone calls he’s fielded from throughout the U.S.
Correction appended March 25, 2008 When Tulane University architecture students were first presented last fall with the dimensions of the tiny lot in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward that their URBANbuild prototype house would occupy, they knew the scheme for their design/build project would have to be tight. But the test of their ingenuity was kicked up a notch when it turned out that the lot was five feet smaller than it was supposed to be. Still, the fourth-year students managed to configure a three-bedroom, two-bath house on a lot less than 30-by-57 feet in size. Icing on the cake was
Correction appended March 25, 2008 Construction on Forest City Ratner’s $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn could be “put off for years” and Frank Gehry’s design could be scaled back, according to two articles published by The New York Times on March 21. In one article, the developer’s president and CEO, Bruce Ratner, told the paper that the nation’s slowing economy and credit crisis “may hold up the office building”—which is the 8-million-square-foot project’s signature component and was due to be completed in July 2009—and that “the bond market may slow the pace of the residential buildings,” which were