Several large urban redevelopment projects are getting underway across California. In Los Angeles, the City Council’s Ad Hoc River Committee is seeking funds from federal, state, and local sources for the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan. The document, which was developed over the past two years by a team including the city’s Bureau of Engineering and Tetra Tech, received council approval in May. It calls for lowering, terracing, and greening much of the waterway’s concrete channel barriers as well as redeveloping surrounding areas into parks: a total of 239 projects along 31 miles of the 51-mile-long river. Image: courtesy
Editor’s note: You may read the news digest below or listen to it, plus other news headlines from ArchitecturalRecord.com, as a podcast by clicking this link. Click the play button to begin | Click here to download “Confrontational and controversial” architecture is what Gehry Partners’ Edwin Chan hoped to find among the five designs unveiled this week for the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, Michigan, according to a July 18 article in City Pulse. With an avant-garde roster of finalists, it’s likely that Chan, one of the university’s eight jurors, got
Andres Lepik Photo:Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art Andres Lepik, a German curator and historian, joined the Museum of Modern Art as curator of contemporary architecture on July 1. He becomes the newest member of the Architecture and Design Department, headed by Barry Bergdoll, who was appointed last summer. Lepik most recently served as chief curator of the 20th- and 21st-century architecture collection at the Kunstbibliothek, in Berlin. Working in that capacity since 2004, he staged a series of small exhibitions that explored the designs of Berlin-based architects who have had commissions around the world but not in Berlin.
Columbia University continues to encounter hurdles in its plans to build a new 17-acre campus in Manhattanville, a scheme created by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Roughly 400 people turned out a public hearing last week to support plan 197-A, a modest community-backed alternative to the school’s proposal. Named for a clause in New York City’s charter that authorizes communities to create and submit their own development plans to the City Council, and developed over the past three years with the help of experts at the Pratt Institute, the 197-A plan is intended to integrate
Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), Foster + Partners, and Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) have been retained as architects for a multi-billion-dollar-project to redevelop New York City’s Pennsylvania Station district, parties close to the deal confirmed on Friday. Image ' William Low A view of the original Pennsylvania Station, from author/illustrator William Low's 2007 book Old Penn Station. Click here to read an article about the book Old Penn Station. Bud Perrone, a spokesperson for the project’s developers, a joint venture of the Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust, acknowledged that the three architecture firms are involved. Another source involved in
Anything But Stilted Agence Search, a Paris-based architecture office, has designed a new $16 million headquarters for the Human Sciences Institute: a venture established by the French government and Paris-Nord University to promote research into the arts, culture, health, and society. The 72,000-square-foot building is an exploration of cantilevers and levitation. Images: Agence Search Agence Search designed the new Human Sciences Institute building, in Paris. The 72,000-square-foot building is an exploration of cantilevers and levitation. Overlapping wooden panels and angled windows will visually break up the building’s east and west facades. Located on a remediated brownfield site in Paris’s La
Morphosis's 'Dragon' Takes Flight in Shanghai Santa Monica-based Morphosis is designing in China for the first time: a new headquarters for Giant Group Pharmaceuticals. The 180,000-square-foot building’s narrow, winding form will twist around canals and a man-made lake on eight-acre site that was once farmland in the outskirts of Shanghai. Firm principal Tim Christ says that its shape resembles that of a dragon, which is the nickname that his Chinese clients have given the project. Images: Courtesy Morphosis Morphosis designed a new headquarters for Giant Group Pharmaceuticals in Shanghai. Firm principal Tim Christ says that the building’s shape resembles that
OMA's Beijing Office Designs Residential Tower for Singapore Three years after establishing its Beijing office, the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has announced the first project spearheaded entirely by this branch: Singapore Scotts Tower, a 36-story, 68-unit condominium tower for the Far East Organization, Singapore’s largest private development company. Image: Courtesy OMA OMA’s Beijing office has designed Singapore Scotts Tower, a 36-story, 68-unit condominium building in Singapore. By eliminating most of the lower floors, OMA created a residential tower where essentially only top floors exist. Designed by partner Ole Scheeren and associate Eric Chang—both veterans of OMA’s Prada projects—the
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