John Belle, who died this week at 84, helped restore several of New York City’s most important buildings, including Grand Central Terminal and the soaring Enid Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden.
To make way for the University of Chicago Campus North Residential Commons, the school demolished Harry Weese’s 1960 Pierce Tower, who’s stacked bays and neo-mansard crown showcased some of the University of Chicago’s least confident mid-century architecture on the famously Collegiate Gothic campus.
“People thought New York was finished,” says Architectural Record editor in chief Cathleen McGuigan, thinking back on the days after September 11, 2001. “People didn't understand how a city could go on.” But in the decade that followed, the city and country did carry on, spurred by tragedy into new conversations about politics, security, and architecture.
By the time Joshua Prince-Ramus was hired to design what is now called the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center, Charcoalblue, a theater design firm with studios in New York and London, had already come up with a layout for the building's three performance venues.
The annual showcase, now in its eighth edition, will feature a lineup of more than 30 feature-length and short films, all focused on architecture and design.
Brooklyn-based conceptual artist Jill Magid spent years plotting the perfect proposal—the location, the rock, the words—but what she had in mind was a bit different from most.