Opponents of a vaiduct connecting Panama City to outlying suburbs say that it will destroy the atmosphere of a neighborhood protected by UNESCO World Heritage status. Courtesy facebook.com/CintaCostera3 A rendering of the Cinta Costera, a planned ring road around Casco Viejo, the oldest section of Panama City and a UNESCO World Heritage site. More than 300 years after it was settled, Casco Viejo, the oldest section of Panama City, is a picturesque, if sometimes slummy, neighborhood protected by UNESCO World Heritage status. But the limits of that protection are unclear. Residents of Casco Viejo, including several American property owners, have

Goldman Sachs shapes the spaces around its NYC headquarters. Photo courtesy Preston Scott Cohen A glass-and-steel canopy by Preston Scott Cohen covers an alley between the Goldman Sachs headquarters by Pei Cobb Freed and the Conrad New York, a collaborative design effort. Anyone looking for a dream career in architecture—without having to practice—could do worse than to emulate Timur Galen, who, after receiving his M.Arch. at the University of Pennsylvania, noticed, he says, “a real deficit in the world of clients.” (Who hasn't?) In his current job as global head of corporate services and real estate for Goldman Sachs, Galen

Herzog & de Meuron’s Parrish Art Museum shown under construction.   Here's a message not all architects will want to hear.Less is more. Even less money.Exhibit A is the Parrish Art Museum, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and scheduled to open on November 10. The museum, which is visible to anyone driving along the Montauk Highway on the South Fork of Long Island, New York, is a single low-slung rectangle, about 100 feet wide and more than 600 feet long, under a standing-seam metal roof.It's not a small building, but it is a simple one. The design replaced an

Two architecturally ambitious developments have stalled following accusations of municipal malfeasance. Photo via Wikipedia Following a corruption investigation, bidding has stalled on a $1-billion project to redevelop the Miami Beach Convention Center site. Architects, no matter how successful, are dependent on clients; even the indomitable Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas can see their best efforts dashed when clients get in trouble. That’s the situation in Florida, where the two starchitects were in the running to design a billion-dollar development on the site of the Miami Beach Convention Center. Now the project has been set back by charges of municipal corruption,

A SHoP-designed weathered steel facade—and the involvement of the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z—will influence the controversial arena's success. The Barclays Center in Brooklyn. New York City felt “baited-and-switched,” says Gregg Pasquarelli, the principal of SHoP Architects, explaining how his firm came to design Barclays Center, the 675,000-square-foot arena in Brooklyn, home to the Brooklyn (formerly New Jersey) Nets. The arena officially opens tonight with a Jay-Z (aka Hova) concert. The bait-and-switch occurred when Bruce Ratner, the developer of the arena, dangled a design by Frank Gehry, helping him win city approval for the project, then dropped Gehry after the financial meltdown

Patrick Kennedy, of Berkeley developer Panoramic Interests, is creating twenty-three 300-square-foot units in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. As wealth disparities in the United States have reached Dickensian proportions, housing disparities have followed. Condo developers are creating increasingly lavish apartments for the super-rich, while those with modest budgets find themselves priced out of city centers. That’s an issue not only for housing advocates, who lament the human toll of housing stratification, but also for mayors who believe their cities’ futures depend on attracting “young creatives.” One solution is to encourage the building of micro-units, apartments of about 300 square feet or

Why is a Washington, D.C., rail revamp moving forward while another in New York can’t seem to pull away from the platform? Image courtesy Amtrak A rendering for an improved West End Concourse extending from New York's Penn Station under the Farley Post Office. Riding Amtrak from Washington’s Union Station to New York’s Penn Station is a trip, architecturally speaking, from heaven to hell. So it came as a surprise this summer when Amtrak announced plans to transform one of those stations into “a world class transportation hub,” at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion. The upgrades will bring

This article originally appeared in the Chinese edition of Architectural Record. Image courtesy Trahan Architects Victor “Trey” Trahan may be the best-known architect in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (130 kilometers northwest of New Orleans), where his firm has built cultural, academic, and religious buildings of unusual clarity and grace. But an architect, he says, “has to go where the work is.” So last year, Trahan sent one of his employees to establish a small office in Shenyang—a "second-tier" city in northeast China, but one that is very large compared to cities in the United States and is 40 times bigger than

Under African Skies: The first phase of an ambitious national university creates a community of buildings and outdoor spaces adapted to a hot, dry climate. When Perkins+Will's Ralph Johnson first visited the site of the new campus of Universidade Agostinho Neto, near Luanda, Angola, in 2001, the five-mile drive from the city center involved military checkpoints, refugees living in squalid camps along the road, and warnings to steer clear of land mines. Back then, the country was still in the throes of a decades-long civil war. But Angola was beginning to use oil revenue to improve its social infrastructure. At