Articles by Fred A. Bernstein

Encompassing 23 acres, Seaport Square will include office, hotel, and residential space expected to total some 3.5 million square feet. In January, the Boston Redevelopment Authority gave the developer—a partnership of Boston Global Investors and Morgan Stanley—permission to begin construction. If every journey begins with a single step, Seaport Square, a 23-acre mixed-use development along the Boston waterfront, is starting with a single-story building. Related links Another Grand Plan for South Boston Waterfront Boston Society of Architects Headquarters Record Reveals: Boston In early May, Mayor Thomas Menino held a groundbreaking ceremony for the Boston Innovation Center, an angular, 12,000-square-foot structure

Photo courtesy London 2012 Firms that designed venues for the 2012 London Olympics, but didn’t pay “sponsorship” fees, weren’t allowed to promote their involvement. Related Links: Special Report: London Now! For Deborah Saunt, principal of the London-based DSDHA, designing a building for the 2012 Games—the tallest tower in the athletes’ village—was the kind of break most young architects can only dream of. But it wasn’t clear how Saunt would parlay the commission into more business. Like all the architects involved in the Olympics, Saunt signed a contract ceding publication rights to the city’s Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA). That meant she

Photo courtesy Wikipedia In Los Angeles, the historic May Company Building (1939) will be turned into a museum for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Photo © A.M.P.A.S. The Academy announced today that architects Renzo Piano and Zoltan Pali will design the museum. Related Links: Resnick Pavilion at LACMA The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has owned the Art Deco building at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue—home of the May Company department store from 1939 to 1993—for almost 20 years, but has never quite known what to do with it. And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and

Funding shortfalls could hinder ambitious waterfront schemes planned for several U.S. cities. Image courtesy Michael Maltzan The Lens, St. Petersburg, Florida. Click to view more images. Related Links: Brooklyn Bridge Park Toronto Waterfront Vision Focuses on Tourist Dollars A Stunning Revival for Hamburg’s Old Port Waterfronts get architects—and politicians—thinking big, and sometimes too big. Even Daniel Burnham (he of “make no little plans”) proposed festooning Chicago’s lakefront with five massive piers, of which only one was ever built. Now that structure, the 3,300-foot-long Navy Pier, is about to get a face-lift that residents hope isn’t too large a financial burden

Despite declining attendance and revenue, many cities are expanding convention centers or building new ones. Photo courtesy Events DC The Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C.  Click to view more images. Related Links: See Us at the 2012 AIA Convention Record Reveals: Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. Convention Center by TVSA After decades of being dissed, New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is finally getting some respect: A $463 million renovation, designed by the Manhattan firm FXFOWLE, will play to the building’s strengths (preserving its once-revolutionary space frame) while bringing massive aesthetic, organizational, and environmental improvements. And with a

Photo courtesy Generator Studio Generator Studio’s Sun Pavilion at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. The curators of Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs 1851-1939 spent years tracking down the 200 objects now on view at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. But as the April opening approached, one key piece of the world’s fair story was missing—pavilion design. Though the objects would be housed in Steven Holl’s 2007 addition to the museum, curator Catherine Futter wanted to capture the feeling of world’s fair architecture with a temporary structure on the museum’s lawn. In January,

Despite the death of Steve Jobs, the new Apple headquarters project is moving ahead. Recent plans show fruit trees dotting the 175-acre site.

Photo courtesy SHoP The noted urban planner Vishaan Chakrabarti (second from right) recently became a partner at SHoP Architects. No one has a résumé like Vishaan Chakrabarti, a planner who has darted between the public and private sectors: as a top executive at Related Companies; a director at the New York City Planning Commission; an associate partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; a transportation planner for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; and, most recently, as the director of Columbia University’s Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE). In March, Chakrabarti became a partner at SHoP Architects. He

The March 27 event drew roughly 200 attendees, many of them Greenwich Village residents opposed to the plan. Image courtesy MAS NYU wants to add 2.5 million square feet to its Greenwich Village campus. The plan will likely reach the city council this summer. New York University has proposed reshaping its Greenwich Village neighborhood with 2.5 million square feet of new construction, dramatically increasing density on two “superblocks” devoted mainly to faculty housing. The plan, initially generated by a competition-winning team composed of SMWM (now part of Perkins+Will), Toshiko Mori, Grimshaw Architects, and Olin Partnership, would entail the demolition of