Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has revealed plans to design and redevelop more than 22,000 square meters of brownfield land in Prague, in a 90,000 square meter development adjacent to the city’s Masaryk Railway Station. ZHA was selected by project partner Penta, an investment company active in ten markets across Europe, as the winner of a 2014 competition for the site. Devising a new central business district, the ZHA plan seeks to integrate with existing means of transit, including suburban and domestic rail services, a bus terminal, Line B of the city’s metro, and a future airport rail link to Vaclav Havel International Airport. Approximately one kilometer from Prague’s central square, the design seeks to create a balance between the horizontality of the railway lines and the verticality and publicness of the Old Town.
Moshe Safdie will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2016 National Design Awards of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. The museum states, “The Lifetime Achievement Award is given in recognition of a distinguished individual who has made a profound and long-term contribution to the contemporary practice of design.” Safdie and his fellow recipients will be honored at the 17th annual National Design Awards gala in New York in October.
Courtesy of Marks Barfield Architects and Davis Brody Bond
Marks Barfield Architects and Davis Brody Bond have revealed plans for the “Chicago Skyline” an aerial cable car attraction spanning from the Chicago Riverfront to Navy Pier and through Downtown along the Riverwalk. The project, still seeking permission, is meant to enable visitors to experience the fabled Chicago skyline in a new way, viewing the city and lakefront from custom-designed pods or “gondolas”. The design shares many similarities with the pill-like capsules surrounding the London Eye, which was also designed by Marks Barfield Architects. The Skyline is being marketed as a practical solution to link Navy Pier to the transit network within the Chicago Loop.
Atelier d’Architecture Michel Remon has been announced as the winner of the Open International Competition for the Tel Aviv University Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Centre. The French company has a history of designing buildings for technological purposes, including the National Research Centre for Scientific Research (Meudon, suburb of Paris), the Physics and Biology Laboratories for Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, suburb of Paris), the National Solar Energy Institute (Savoy), and the Paris-Saclay Research Сentre of Air Liquide. In Tel Aviv, a matrix of vertical lines creates a “skin” over a three story, 6,000 square meter structure that will house 12 research labs – including those for physical, biophysical, and neural engineering, as well as molecular electronics, and others – in addition to offices and public areas. Once complete, the building will house 120 scientists and engineers as collaborators with one of the most significant universities in Israel.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has announced two gifts totaling $75 million dollars, bringing the museum’s Peter Zumthor designed campus overhaul one step closer to reality, reports the Los Angeles Times. Elaine Wynn, one of the world’s top art collectors, has pledged $50 million dollars, and former Univision chairman A. Jerrold Perenchio has promised $25 million, bringing the total funds raised and approved to $275 million, just shy of halfway to the $600 million required for the project.
With the conclusion of this year’s Met Gala, on Thursday the public will have their first look at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new spring show, "Manus x Machina". According to the museum, “[the exhibition] will explore [an] ongoing dichotomy, in which hand and machine are presented as discordant tools in the creative process, and question the relationship and distinction between haute couture and ready-to-wear.” Occurring in the museum’s Robert Lehman Wing, a 1975 expansion by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, the exhibition design has been developed by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA New York. Organized by Andrew Bolton, the Curator of The Costume Institute, the exhibition will feature over 100 samples of “haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear, dating from an 1880s Worth gown to a 2015 Chanel suit.” Read on for a small preview of the exhibition, fashion, and spectacle of Manus x Machina, on view from May 5 - August 14.
Santiago Calatrava has won the competition to design the United Arab Emirates Pavilion for the Expo 2020 Dubai in 2020. Nine finalists submitted 11 concepts that were evaluated on three criteria: their expression of Expo’s theme, “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future,” whether the design was evocative of the UAE, and if a balance was struck between the country’s past and future. Calatrava’s design proposes a 15,000 square meter pavilion with exhibition areas, an auditorium, food and beverage outlets, and VIP lounges. The design is meant to evoke the wings of a falcon in flight, linking itself to the country’s history of falconry to emphasize the country’s present-day goals of global connectedness.
The Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava, a New York landmark built in 1851 by Richard Upjohn, burned Sunday night in a fire after more than 700 parishioners celebrated Easter, reports NBC New York. Originally known as Trinity Chapel, the cathedral was created as satellite location for Trinity Church at Wall Street and Broadway in Lower Manhattan, also designed by Upjohn, after parishioners began to settle farther from the original location. The church was later joined by a Clergy House and the Trinity Chapel School in an ecclesiastical complex, but in 1943 the chapel and neighbors were sold to the Serbian Orthodox Church. The cathedral, stretching between 25th and 26th Street, was nearly 180 feet long, and had one of the largest hammerbeam roofs in the city. The New York Landmarks Conservancy partnered with the church for a 2002-03 restoration of the building's facade and roof. The four-alarm fire that was contained by Monday morning is under investigation as suspicious.
In this video, ArchDaily interviews MASS Design Group co-founder Alan Ricks, who describes the firm’s working process and how the practice, with offices in Boston and Kigali, Rwanda, is intent on improving people's lives through architecture. The firm has established a fundamental process for creating structures, that according to Ricks "Have an obligation to catalyze and amplify the outcomes that are the core services delivered in our buildings.” Whether serving the fields of health, education, or housing, the firm’s modus operandi is public benefit. "[It’s] how we leverage the building process to expand the impact," says Ricks. "We’ve taken to the calling that lo-fab, or locally fabricated, it doesn’t mean lo-tech and it doesn’t mean not pre-fab. It just means we’ve uncovered the available resources where we work and are leveraging them to deliver value.” With clinics in Haiti, primary schools in Rwanda, and proposals for library and hospital projects in the United States, MASS Design has proven its ability to act in the realm of public good. The firm has previously been lauded by New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman, was named one of the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices in 2013, and was the winner of both the Zumtobel Group Award and Curry Stone Design Prize in 2012. Watch the video for more about this entrepreneurial design practice that is redefining what it means to be local, sustainable, and most importantly, for the community.
Architects are famously cynical about the long hours and over-education required for what can be a thankless career. But in a recent study conducted by WalletHub, “2016’s Best & Worst Entry-Level Jobs”, recent grads and seasoned professionals alike may be surprised to find that “architect” is ranked 10th out of 109 evaluated professions. Read on to find out how they calculated their result.
"What is the most expensive object on Earth?" posits an article by Ed Davey published by the BBC. A new nuclear power station being built in the south west of the United Kingdom may well end up holding the title. At £24 billion ($35 billion) Davey estimates, "you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas - the world's tallest building, in Dubai, cost a piffling £1bn ($1.5bn)." The article later compares the construction to other projects like bridges and particle accelerators, as well as historic precedents like the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Great Wall of China, Hong Kong International Airport, or the International Space Station – the last of which cost a whopping $110 billion. But comparing monumental building and engineering projects comes with some caveats, such as: “what is strictly an individual object?” “Is cost measured by today’s values or those at the time of construction?” “Are we talking about modern methods or those used historically?” Read the full article here.
MARC FORNES/THEVERYMANY has unveiled “Spineway”, a permanent public artwork commissioned by the City of San Antonio in Woodlawn Lake Park. Calling to mind the midcentury marvels of Alexander Calder or Mark di Suvero, Spineway has been digitally fabricated with custom computational protocols of structural form-finding and descriptive geometry. As with past projects by MARC FORNES/THEVERYMANY the studio posits, “Spineway is consistent with the studio's approach of exploring structural performance while catalyzing public places through dynamic and unique spatial experiences.”
SHoP has unveiled the design for a new 900 foot tall skyscraper in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The 77 story, 500,000 square foot, mixed-income tower will have 600 units, 150 of which will be permanently affordable and distributed evenly throughout the building. The project has been developed as a collaboration between SHoP and JDS who are co-owners of the development, with the partnership of two not-for-profit groups: Two Bridges Neighborhood Council (TBNC) and Settlement Housing Fund (SHF).
Iwan Baan has unveiled a new series of images depicting a snow-covered Harbin Opera House by MAD Architects and its surrounding landscapes. The northern Chinese city of Harbin is known for its brutal winters where temperatures can reach -22°F (-30°C). In the photographs, the Opera House's sinuous white aluminum cladding echoes the ice formed in the adjacent river. “Harbin is very cold for the most of the year,” says MAD principal and founder Ma Yansong. “I envisioned a building that would blend into the winter landscape as a white snow dune arising from the wetlands.”
Kengo Kuma & Associates, in a team with Cornelius+Vöge and landscape architects MASU planning, have revealed plans for the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense, Denmark. Channeling the otherworldliness of Andersen’s fairy tales, the 5,600 square meter building is two-thirds below grade, leaving ground level space for “enchanted” gardens of large trees, lawns, box hedges, and tall shrubs. The museum building is an ambling collection of cylindrical volumes, with glass and lattice timber facades beneath scooped green roofs, all surrounding a sunken courtyard space. The project will replace an existing museum that is largely focused on the author’s personal life with one that is more centered on his stories.
Kengo Kuma and Associates has revealed plans for the office’s first North American skyscraper, a mixed-use luxury tower on a site adjacent to Stanley Park in Vancouver. Known as ‘Alberni by Kuma,’ the 43-story tower combines 181 residences with retail space and a restaurant in a rectilinear volume accented by "scoops" on two sides. These curvatures are the building’s most important formal attribute, while a moss garden at the tower's base is its most important spatial feature. The project is being organized by Westbank and Peterson, and is part of a group of architecturally significant projects being developed by the pair in the west coast city.
On May 3, Lisson Gallery New York will open beneath the High Line between 23rd and 24th Street. Designed by studioMDA and Studio Christian Wassmann, the 8,500 square foot space is split between a gallery, offices, viewing rooms, and storage. Although the main gallery is directly under the High Line – the steel columns in the photos are actually supports for the elevated railway – it will receive ample sun from dramatically angled skylights along the space’s edge, which also aid to extend the walls vertically. The gallery's polished concrete floors, white walls, and natural light are typical of today's contemporary art spaces, but also maintain the aesthetic of Lisson's other galleries. The public will access the space via 24th Street, while the 23rd Street entrance will be reserved for staff purposes and private functions.
“Libraries,” says Chiote, “Are houses of books. And newspapers. And magazines. And music. And movies. The entire world connected, where we are with ourselves and with others. They are our memories and our legacy. The reference of knowledge and leisure but also urbanity. Libraries are the house where we must always return.”
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