Image courtesy FCRC The Barclays Center in Brooklyn is getting a green roof, to be completed this fall. 5,000 Tons of Steel for an UmbrellaIn Queens, Arthur Ashe Stadium, the 23,000-seat centerpiece of the National Tennis Center, has been plagued by rain delays during important matches. The solution, a retractable roof, has been on the table practically since the venue was completed in 1997. But because interior supports, which would block views of the court, were never a viable option, columns had to be separated by the width of the stadium — more than 500 feet. Over the years,
Photo by Sean Hemmerle, via Graham Foundation As preparations to demolish part of Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center continued, lawyer Michael Sussman awaited his day in court. Last week, Sussman filed suit in against Orange County and two officials—county executive Steven Neuhaus and county legislator Leigh Benton—to stop the county from proceeding with a plan to tear down part of Rudolph's building and significantly alter the rest, as proposed by the engineering and architecture firm Clark Patterson Lee (CPL). Sussman described architect Gene Kaufman’s competing plan—to convert the building into artist studios, and build a new government center—as “the
It was a good news/bad news day in Sarasota, Florida. A couple of dozen protesters stood outside the former Sarasota High School, where part of a concrete canopy designed by Paul Rudolph in 1960 was scheduled to be demolished. But just a few blocks away, officials had gathered to christen the new Center for Architecture Sarasota, one of a growing number of such institutions around the country, and one of the most propitious. Sarasota has a rich architectural history; in the '50s and '60s it was one of the hotbeds (along with Palm Springs, California, and New Canaan, Connecticut) of
Makkah Royal Clock Tower, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, SL Rasch. Twentieth-century New York showed the world that skyscrapers can be more than just tall buildings. Now Manhattan’s dazzling crowns are inspiring a "worldwide surge of signature tops,” says Carol Willis, the director of Manhattan’s Skyscraper Museum and an expert on buildings of 100 stories or more. Indeed, with more than a dozen such “supertalls” rising in Asia and the Middle East, the sky is getting quite a few new baubles. Will any of them be as exciting as the pinnacles of the Chrysler and Empire State Building? The intriguing exhibition
The Driehaus Prize founder talks bad architecture, foiling Frank Gehry's Eisenhower Memorial, and the "Hershey's Kiss" Lucas Museum. Richard Driehaus is best known in architecture circles as the founder of the Driehaus Prize, a $200,000 award given each year “to a living architect whose work embodies the highest ideals of traditional and classical architecture.”
Photo by Sean Hemmerle, via Graham Foundation Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center, the embattled, hive-like structure in Goshen, New York, moved closer to being partially demolished. On March 5, County legislators failed to take action to invalidate a contract with Clark Patterson Lee, an upstate New York architecture and engineering firm, that calls for tearing down a large part of the building, renovating the remainder, and adding an 86,000-square-foot wing that bears little relationship to —and will obscure much of—Rudolph’s design. “That means they can go ahead and begin demolition at any time,” said attorney Michael Sussman, a partner
The Guardian Art Center, currently under construction, will be equal parts auction house and cultural hub. Ole Scheeren helped create perhaps the most aggressive building on the Beijing skyline — the CCTV tower, which he designed with Rem Koolhaas before opening his own firm, Buro Ole Scheeren, in 2010. Now Scheeren hopes to become known for a less divisive contribution to the Beijing scene — an auction house headquarters that, despite its 600,000 square feet, treads lightly on its site, and which may represent a way forward for foreign architects in China under a culturally conservative regime. Scheeren’s client is the Chinese-owned auction house China Guardian, which wanted
The BLUEPRINT exhibition, curated by SO–IL and Sebastiaan Bremer, is currently on view at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. The blueprint, invented in the 1840s, was ubiquitous in architecture offices—to which it lent a slightly acrid smell—for much of the 20th century. Now the medium confers a certain authenticity, a kind of Instragram-ish patina, says architect Florian Idenburg, though, he notes that paradoxically, a blueprint is also a plan for the future. Building on that paradox, Idenburg and Jing Liu (his partner in the architecture firm SO–IL Solid Objectives) and artist Sebastiaan Bremer have created BLUEPRINT, a show
