There were more construction workers than shoppers in Miami’s Design District on Tuesday. A glass loggia by Sou Fujimoto was finished, as was a storefront by Aranda\Lasch for Tom Ford on a corner lot. But much else awaited completion. Craig Robins’s plan to turn the Design District into a high-end fashion destination, with architecture as a draw, is proceeding fitfully. Related links Design Miami Dispatch: Highlights From the Fair Following a master plan developed by Duany Plater Zyberk (DPZ), Robins has created a north-south pedestrian “street” that ends in what is now called Palm Court, a plaza centered on a
Finalist GH-76091181 comprises a ring of slender, sculptural towers faced with timber shingles gathered around a cathedral-like central space. The Guggenheim Museum has chosen six finalists in the competition to design its planned Helsinki outpost. The museum announced the six names at a press conference in Helsinki this morning. It also released six sets of renderings, but kept the names and the images apart, noting that “under EU procurement rules the concepts must remain anonymous until the competition concludes.” The finalists will now refine their schemes, with a March deadline; the museum expects to announce its selection in June. The
Russell Thomsen and Eric Kahn, partners at IDEA, were drawn to the subject of how the concentration camp in southern Poland will be experienced by future generations. The future of Auschwitz is a topic that would scare most architects away. But Russell Thomsen and Eric Kahn, partners in the Los Angeles firm IDEA, were drawn to the subject of how the concentration camp in southern Poland will be experienced by future generations. During visits to Auschwitz and nearby Birkenau, a 400-acre “annex” built expressly for extermination, they realized that, if the camp is to be maintained as a historic site,
Marmol Radziner has restored and adapted E. Stewart Williams' 1961 Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan building for its use as a museum. If you’re looking for local heroes, there are several in Palm Springs with the name Williams. E. Stewart Williams (1909-2005) was an Ohio-born architect who moved to the desert town in 1946, and within a year had designed a house for Frank Sinatra, converting the singer to modernism. During the next four decades, Williams, practicing with his brother and father as Williams, Williams and Williams or, as the locals called it, Williams Cubed, designed dozens of buildings
During this season of Michael Graves, the architect's work is being celebrated in exhibitions and is the subject of a daylong symposium. Michael Graves Denver Central Library Assessing the legacy of Michael Graves is no small task. During a 50-year career, Graves has completed so many projects that the current retrospective at Grounds for Sculpture (an indoor-outdoor art park near Trenton, New Jersey) requires several buildings. Some parts of the exhibition are organized by decade—starting with the all-white houses of the 1970s and ending with the anything-but-white buildings of recent decades; others are arranged by category (toasters alone could fill
David Mohney has taken a one-year-leave from the University of Kentucky College of Architecture to help create the Michael Graves School at Kean University, which will have two campuses, one in New Jersey and the other in Wenzhou, China.
With help from a California-based architect and engineer, Rafael Viñoly's Walkie-Talkie building in London is getting a system of aluminum fins to diminish its destructive reflectivity. Image via City of London A rendering of 20 Fenchurch shows how it will look with aluminum brise soleils. The 37-story building at 20 Fenchurch Street in London was first nicknamed the Walkie-Talkie, for its shape, and then the Walkie-Scorchie, for its reflectivity. Sun bouncing off its south façade melted part of a car last year, exciting tabloid editors and sending the building’s owners searching for a fix. Image via City of London