Although SHoP Architects partner Gregg Pasquarelli jokes that he’s designed something to last “as long as the pyramids,” he admits realistically that his ambitious proposal for redeveloping the South Street Seaport—which begins the municipal approvals process next week—would unlikely be the area’s final makeover. This lower Manhattan district has been revamped seemingly every few decades since it was built on a landfill during the 1700's.
Brilliant inventions usually result when someone asks the right question at the right time. Taja Sevelle, the founder and executive director of Urban Farming, a Detroit-based nonprofit dedicated to eradicating hunger, had just such a query for architect Robin Osler when the two met last year for the first time: If sedum and other non-edible plants thrive on green roofs and walls, why not tomatoes, peppers, and onions? If so, she reckoned, these gardens could supply free, healthy food for economically distressed neighborhoods. Images courtesy Urban Farming Food Chain In Los Angeles, walls covered in food plants are being installed
UFO Museum Has Close Encounter of the CAD Kind Have intelligent beings from other planets visited Earth? The International UFO Museum and Research Center, in Roswell, New Mexico, lacks a definitive answer, such as an alien spacecraft—but it does have plenty of intriguing photographs and affidavits from people who say they have seen one. “If visitors walk out of here with more questions than they had when they came in, that’s all we ask,” says executive director Julie Shuster. Images courtesy Ahearn-Schopfer Associates Ahearn-Schopfer Associates, a Boston-based firm, is designing a new home for the International UFO Museum and Research
Following the resignation of architect Patricia Lancaster as New York City’s Department of Buildings commissioner, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is mulling whether or not to drop the requirement that the commissioner be a registered architect or engineer, The New York Times reported on April 23. Lancaster stepped down this week in the wake of several recent construction accidents, including a deadly crane collapse in March at a high-rise whose construction Lancaster later admitted should never have been approved. Until this string of disasters, which has left 13 people dead this year (already more than all of 2007), Lancaster had been viewed
Reports that the operators of Paris’s Eiffel Tower were planning a dramatic, temporary addition to the structure proved to be tall tales. The UK’s Guardian newspaper, Architect magazine, The New York Times, and others wrote in March that a design by the French firm Serero Architects had won a competition to redesign the 905-foot-tall structure’s uppermost public viewing platform in time for its 120th anniversary in 2009. Serero unveiled renderings of a clover-shaped cantilevered platform that could be “bolted onto the tower using a web of Kevlar” temporarily, the Guardian wrote. But according to an April 15 New York Times
Daniel Libeskind is accused of “hypocrisy of the first order” after it was learned that he is working in Hong Kong—despite having recently called for architects to boycott jobs in what he called the “totalitarian regime” of China. The UK’s Building Design magazine reported on April 4 that construction has begun on the 269,000-square-foot Creative Media Center at the City University of Hong Kong. But back in February, as RECORD reported, Libeskind urged architects to “take a more ethical stance” by avoiding work in China and other countries that have a poor record on human rights. His apparent about face
“There has been nothing to signal a transformation in the sea of blight and abandonment that still defines much of” New Orleans, The New York Times reported on April 1, one year after municipal officials unveiled the city’s rebuilding plan. Created by Edward Blakely, who led the successful recovery of Oakland, California, after that city suffered both an earthquake and fires during the 1990s, the New Orleans plan targeted 17 recovery zones. “On their one-year anniversary, the designated ‘zones’ have hardly budged,” the Times wrote. As residents seek explanations, they are blaming Blakely—who they criticize for spending too much time