World Building of the Year (and Office): Media-TIC, Barcelona, Cloud 9, Spain The fourth annual World Architecture Festival (WAF) wrapped up in Barcelona on November 4. More than 1,300 people attended this year’s awards ceremony, which capped the three-day event, and got a peek at the 700-plus international projects entered. Seminars and keynote speakers touched on issues of “disaster” and “difference,” including David van der Leer, assistant curator of Architecture and Urban Studies at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, who also led the museum’s team in executing the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a touring project that wrapped up its New York City
Moshe Safdie was nibbling crab cakes in the recently completed, 150,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete headquarters he designed for the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.
Rendering Denmark’s second-largest city in 52 colors, artist Olafur Eliasson has perched his permanent installation “Your Rainbow Panorama” on delicate columns 12 feet above the roof of the ARoS Art Museum, in Aarhus.
Image courtesy Perkins + Will Shanghai Natural History Museum, Shanghai, China, Perkins + Will When it is completed at the end of 2012, Perkins + Will’s nautilus-shell-shaped Shanghai Natural History Museum will emerge from a proposed sculpture park and provide views of the surrounding city. Perkins + Will won the international competition in 2007 to design the museum, which will replace an existing natural history museum. The architects were inspired by the classical gardens in Suzhou with their water features, rock formations, and screened walls, which they abstracted in their design. “It’s important that the museum is in the old
Evoking the creations of a brilliant, futuristic insect, architect Michael Hansmeyer’s fantastical extrapolation of classical columns leaves no smooth surface untouched.
The organization will open the doors to its renovated facility this fall, marking the end of a long, troubled saga. Image courtesy of Platt Byard Dovell White Architects Click on the slide show button to view more images of New-York Historical Society Renovation. Related Links: NY Historical Society Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture Completed in 1908 by York and Sawyer, the New-York Historical Society’s classical, Roman Eclectic style building, on Central Park West, has long been known as a “bunker”—its elegant yet severe granite façade fails to extend a warm welcome to visitors and passersby.
An office building in the Bronx Zoo seems as natural to the site as the surrounding parkland and accommodates multiple programs with minimal resources. Staring out the window is part of the job description.
When Brooklyn-based design and fabrication shop Situ Studio was installing reOrder at the Brooklyn Museum in late February, it looked as though their team was fashioning enormous Victorian skirts for the classical columns in the McKim, Mead & White'designed Great Hall.