This article originally appeared in the Chinese edition of Architectural Record. A pair of museums designed by Steven Holl Architects will anchor a new cultural district in the Eco-City area of Tianjin. Holl envisions the two museums—one dedicated to ecology and the other to city planning—as complementary buildings, both in terms of their missions and their architectural forms. A collaboration between the governments of China and Singapore, Tianjin Eco-City is being built on a site in the Binhai New Area that had been a polluted salt pan 25 miles from the center of Tianjin. The 11.5-square-mile-project, which aims to be
This article originally appeared in the Chinese edition of Architectural Record. Yuelai Eco-City, one of 17 transit-oriented developments (TODs) that Peter Calthorpe has designed for the northern Chongqing area, is scheduled to break ground on its 2,500-acre site this summer and will eventually accommodate 100,000 to 250,000 residents. Record-breaking pollution levels in Beijing this winter are one visible symptom of the bind China has gotten itself into with its rapid urbanization and infatuation with the automobile. As China accelerates its urban development to accommodate an estimated 300 million people moving from the countryside to cities by 2020, it is turning
Oslo- and New York City-based firm Snøhetta recently completed the James B. Hunt Jr. Library on North Carolina State University's Raleigh campus. The long rectangular volume provides 221,000 square feet of space for up to 1,700 students in traditional and informal study rooms, technology labs, and lounges. An envelope of fritted glass crossed by a zig-zag of aluminum sun shades lets in daylight and permits views to a nearby lake. An automated book delivery system (see slide 4) reduces the space needed for stacks and can accommodate a 2 million volume collection. In addition to library functions, the facility also
Photo courtesy Princeton University Sigrid Adriaenssens, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, shows C. Susan Grimmond, King's College London, one of the exhibits in the "Resilient City" display. Are cities collections of problems that need to be solved or sites of innovation that offer opportunities? Are they best managed by top-down planning and policies or bottom-up entrepreneurialism? These themes and many more were the focus of the inaugural Princeton-Fung Global Forum, “The Future of the City,” held January 30–February 1 in Shanghai. The papers presented during the event were as diverse as its 48 speakers, a collection
Photo courtesy Braden Toan Danforth Toan and his wife Jane Toan. Danforth W. Toan died on January 16 at the age of 94. He was an architect and founding partner of Warner Burns Toan & Lunde Architects & Planners in New York, now known as WBTL Architects. Many of Dan’s significant buildings in New York and around the world were college libraries and educational facilities, including Columbia University’s Hammer Health Sciences Center and New York University’s Warren Weaver Hall. His buildings transformed other campuses, including Brown University, where he designed the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library and the Science Tower,
The unofficial theme of geography and mapping firm Esri’s fourth-annual Geodesign Summit might as well have been “the cloud.” Nearly every presenter at the event, held on January 24th and 25th in Redlands, California, referred to the decentralized, virtual network of software and data storage as the key factor in the growing importance of geographic information systems systems (GIS). The summit brought together architects, engineers, geographers, and software programmers for presentations focused on software like Esri’s ubiquitous ArcGIS and for discussions about how such tools will eventually, if not quite yet, underpin landscape, urban, and planning design projects. Image courtesy
Holl’s proposed addition to the Center in Washington, D.C., will be largely underground, with three pavilions rising to the surface in a newly created park. The scheme resembles his hugely successful addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, though here the pavilions will be made of carved Carrara marble rather than glass.
Gas Works Park in Seattle. Two modernist parks joined the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) this month, boosting the often uphill battle to preserve America’s important post-war landscapes. Gas Works Park in Seattle, designed by Richard Haag, and Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis, designed by M. Paul Friedberg, have won official recognition. “These two landscapes are now part of an august group of seminal works of landscape architecture,” says Charles Birnbaum, President of the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness and understanding of America’s landscape heritage. Each park represents “the work of a master in
The Maspalomas Oasis Hotel on the island of Gran Canaria, in 1968-1971. The hotel, designed by José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún, may be demolished. On the island of Gran Canaria, a last-minute battle wages to save the Maspalomas Oasis Hotel, designed by the Madrid architects José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún and completed in 1971. Weaving together pavilions, gardens, and courtyards, and preserving a virgin grove of palms, the project is a model for harmonious intervention in the unique volcanic landscape of the Canary Islands. The owners, the hotel chain RIU, plan to close the hotel and
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