The Barnes Foundation’s long and fitful quest to build a new art gallery for itself in Philadelphia marked a new chapter today with the announcement that its trustees, in a unanimous vote, selected architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.
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 The city of St. Petersburg, Russia, which UNESCO has listed as a world heritage site since 1990 thanks to its well-preserved baroque and neo-classical skyline, is at risk of having this designation revoked if current plans for the proposed Gazprom skyscraper move forward. Designed by RMJM, the glass and steel tower for a Russian petroleum company would rise 984 feet—far taller than the
The Tempe Center for the Arts, dubbed “our little Sydney Opera House,” opens this weekend. Like its distant Down Under cousin, the $65.7 million performance hall overlooks a body of water: in this case the Tempe Town Lake, a recreational lake created when the long-dry Salt River was reclaimed during the 1990s. Photos: Courtesy City of Tempe Barton Myers Associates and Architekton collaborated on the design of the Tempe Center for the Arts, which opens this weekend. The city’s former mayor Neil Giuliano, who helped get the project going during his term as mayor between 1994 and 2004, dubbed the
Larry Silverstein announced at a press conference yesterday that his development firm will put out to bid 70 construction packages for three office skyscrapers at the World Trade Center site by November, with foundation and steel work set to begin in January. Representatives from Foster & Partners, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, and Maki and Associates were also on hand to present the latest schematic designs for these buildings—the most detailed views yet of what people visiting the site might see when construction finishes in 2012. Image: Courtesy RSHP, Team Macarie, SPI Detailed designs were released yesterday for three office
The new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which is scheduled to open this month, will only be accessible to visitors who undergo extensive security checks. The State Department has tried to deflect attention from the compound, but Internet users got an unexpected peak at it when images were posted online this spring. After a blogger discovered this rendering of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Berger Devine Yaeger's Web site, The Associated Press, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and other news agencies published it. Berger Devine Yaeger (BDY), of Kansas City, Missouri, and Sorg Associates, based in Washington, D.C., designed the embassy
The nine projects that won the 2007 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, announced yesterday, range from a sustainable residential tower in Singapore, to a village school hand-built by local craftspeople in Dinajpur, Bangladesh.
In the mid-1940s, long before the phrases “carbon footprint” and “green building” were coined, R. Buckminster Fuller urged people to lessen their environmental impact by taking up residence in aluminum-and-fiberglass geodesic domes. Construction of these shelters avoided the destruction of trees, and the domes required less energy to cool and heat compared to traditional rectangular buildings.
As NASA prepares to retire the space shuttle by the end of the decade, just in time for completion of the International Space Station, the tourism industry is planning to take its own giant leap into the void.
When Public Architecture launched The 1% Solution in 2005, it tapped into the architecture community’s altruism: The San Francisco–based practice and public-service advocacy has since signed up 157 firms to pledge 1 percent of their time to nonprofit organizations that could not otherwise afford design direction. And yet Public Architecture executive director John Cary admits that some of those promises have been “more symbolic than anything.” A three-pronged initiative, to be unveiled September 4 along with a name change to simply “The 1%,” will help architects realize their best intentions. Image: ' MendeDesign A mockup of The %’s new handbook
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 On the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, USA Today summed up New Orleans’ ongoing recovery this way: while some neighborhoods “have rebuilt themselves using private funds, insurance money and sheer will,” publicly funded efforts “have moved much more slowly.” The New York Times, in an August 28 article, had a similar view of the city’s architecture: “No grand designs. No inspired
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