On the morning of September 11, 2001, two hijacked commercial jetliners struck the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan, a third plane struck the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania. A total of 2.977 people were killed in the terrorist attacks. In the face of this unprecedented loss, the city of New York promised to rebuild Lower Manhattan as a lively neighborhood while honoring and maintaining the memory of this day. Thus began one of the largest reconstruction projects in New York City, a process that is still ongoing now, 23 years after the tragedy.
After over two decades in the making, the Perelman Performing Arts Center opened to the public on September 19, 2023. The luminous cube-shaped building was designed by the architecture firm REX, led by Joshua Ramus, to become one of New York City’s cultural keystones and the final piece in the 2023 Master Plan for the rebuilding of the 16-acre World Trade Center site. The inaugural season will feature commissions, world premieres, co-productions, and collaborative work across theater, dance, music, opera, film, and more. While only eight stories high, the venue stands out due to its monolithic façade composed of translucent veined Portuguese marble.
Metropolitans take pride in their storied cultural venues, the chroniclers of intellectual acumen and architectural achievement. While these icons revel in their ornate design, immersive grandiosity, and dramatic acoustics, the pandemic has introduced numerous challenges to the rules of assembly.
Recognizing changes in the rituals of attending a show—from procession and gathering to engagement—architects and cultural leaders are designing the next generation of performance venues while asking the question: How does architecture solve issues raised by a building’s inherent purpose? Is it possible to maintain the essence of a venue through gentle yet effective changes in people’s habits? The answers seem to rely on updating the auditorium culture (which dates as far back as the Colosseum) with contemporary design solutions rooted in new technologies.
https://www.archdaily.com/976581/what-will-post-pandemic-performance-venues-look-likeOsman Can Yerebakan
Washington D.C. has earned a reputation for iconic architecture. Emerging from the L'Enfant and McMillan Plans, Washington’s cityscape includes wide streets and low-rise buildings that sprawl out from circles and rectangular plazas. From the White House to Lincoln Memorial, Washington’s architecture was built to symbolize the nation’s values. Today, new projects are designed to rethink the city’s morphology while respecting its identity.
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. / Adjaye Associates, The Freelon Group, Davis Brody Bond, SmithGroupJJR for the Smithsonian Institution. Image Courtesy of The Design Museum in London
Presented by the Design Museum in London, the award is given to the project that best meets the criteria of design that “promotes or delivers change, enables access, extends design practice or captures the spirit of the year.”
See more from the overall winner and each of the category winners, below.
Fifteen years ago, when I worked on the design of a high-performance museum, the concept was considered so unusual that the media questioned the very idea. The US Green Building Council (USGBC) had only very recently introduced its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, so much of the public wasn’t familiar with the concept. Over the following decade, it became more and more popular in every building type, including museums. A watershed year was 2008. The Water + Life Museums in Hemet, CA, became the first LEED Platinum museum, quickly followed by the California Academy of Science, which has been called “the world’s greenest museum.” The same year, the Grand Rapids Art Museum became the first LEED-certified art museum. By 2016, International Museum Day could highlight ten LEED-certified museums in the US alone.
This article, originally titled "The Space of Resistance," was originally published on Lance Hosey's Huffington Post blog. It is part of a four-part series about the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The city can be a powerful form of political myth, and Washington, DC, is the premier example.
Political myths dramatize historical events for ideological purposes, in order to strengthen the authority of the status quo. For example, America’s Founding Fathers often are portrayed as motivated only by a virtuous desire for universal freedom and equality, a simplistic depiction that ignores the complex socioeconomic forces behind the Revolution. The National Mall, its buildings, and its monuments, are America’s foundation myth writ large in stone and space. Manfredo Tafuri called the image of the District of Columbia “a timeless, indisputable, completely ‘positive’ Olympus” whose creation “presupposed great optimism and was thoroughly opposed to any polemical doubt.”
In this sense, the city as political myth is ripe for protest, and the National Mall has been the site of many of the most important protests in American history. Most often, these events consist only of people gathering for demonstration. Sometimes, however, they involve building.
The architectural team comprised of Davis Brody Bond and Kieran Timberlake has unveiled its newest updates on the design for 181 Mercer, a 735,000-square-foot complex for New York University that will replace a 35-year-old gym facility and become NYU’s largest classroom building, as well as a space for performing arts, athletics, and students and faculty housing.
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.
Gateway Arch / Eero Saarinen. Image Courtesy of Flickr CC Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, NPS https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffnps/
While Eliel and Eero Saarinen may be the most well known father-son architect duo, they are certainly not the only pair to have left their mark in the field. As far back as the 1700s, the Gabriel father and son dynasty (Jacques V and Ange-Jacques) constructed much of Versailles, and more recently both I.M. Pei and Lewis Davis have passed their legacy onto their sons. In honor of Father's Day, we look at four father-son architecture dynasties and their lasting influence on the profession, after the break.
https://www.archdaily.com/644466/like-father-like-son-4-famous-architecture-dynastiesAD Editorial Team
US Embassy in London / KieranTimberlake Architects
As the culmination of a five-month selection process, New York University (NYU) has announced that Davis Brody Bond and KieranTimberlake will be designing its major new facility along Mercer Street between Houston and Bleecker in New York. The facility's many uses will include classrooms, teaching spaces for performing arts, a state-of-the-art sports facility, and student and faculty housing.
Set to open to the public on Wednesday after a highly controversial and contested journey from idea to reality, the September 11 Memorial Museum has inevitably been a talking point among critics this week. The museum by Davis Brody Bond occupies the space between the Memorial Plaza at ground level and the bedrock below, with an angular glass pavilion by Snøhetta providing an entrance from above. A long ramp, designed to recall the access ramp with which tons of twisted metal was excavated from the site, descends to the exhibits which sit within the perimeter boundaries of the twin towers' foundations, underneath the suspended volumes of Michael Arad's memorial fountains.
The content of the museum is obviously fraught with painful memories, and the entrance pavilion occupies a privileged position as the only surface level structure ground zero, in opposition to the great voids of the memorial itself. The discussion at the opening of the museum was therefore always going to center on whether the design of the museum - both its built form and the exhibitions contained - were sensitive and appropriate enough for this challenging brief. Read the critics' takes on the results after the break.
In August, we reported a Request for Qualifications for the renovation of Mies van der Rohe's Martin Luther King (MLK) Jr. Memorial Library in Washington D.C. - Mies' only library and the only building in D.C. A few days ago, the District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL) narrowed down the list of potential firms from 26 to 10 and revealed that it was looking for community input on the library's future spaces and services.
