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Banyan Tree Inspires Shape of Taiwan's Largest Arts Hall The Dutch firm Mecanoo is designing the largest performing arts facility in Taiwan: the 1-million-square-foot National Performing Arts Center. It will be located inside Wei-Wu-Ying Metropolitan Park, a former military base, in the city of Kaohsiung. Mecanoo won the commission in 2007 after competing against Zaha Hadid of London, Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama Amorphe of Tokyo, Artech Architects of Taiwan, and Weber + Hofer Architects of Switzerland. Images courtesy Mecanoo Mecanoo has designed an undulating topographical roof structure for Taiwan’s National Performing Arts Center (top).  The design was inspired by the banyan

Construction on two towers at the World Trade Center, designed by Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, will begin this week—or by the end of the month, depending on whom you believe, and whether or not you consider test blasts to represent the start of foundation work. A March 13 article in the New York Post says “this week,” whereas The New York Sun wrote that it would be “later this month” when workers begin “foundation work” following this week’s test blasts. Both papers were reporting on remarks made by developer Larry Silverstein during a speech at the New York Building

  In a project that fuses fashion, art, and architecture, Zaha Hadid has created a moveable art space for the fashion house Chanel. Taking his cues from Mademoiselle Chanel herself—who supported Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Lipchitz, and other artists during her lifetime—Karl Lagerfeld, the company’s director of collections and ready-to-wear, gathered 20 international artists to collaborate with Chanel on unique art installations for the gallery. Officially opened yesterday in Hong Kong, the Mobile Art Pavilion, which resembles a space capsule, will touch down for one to two months at a time over the next two years in Tokyo, London, Moscow,

Known for its outlandish architecture and oversized projects, Dubai is about to get its biggest development yet with a new 34,435-acre urban district slated to house as many as 1.5 million people. Rem Koolhaas’s Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is creating the master plan for Waterfront City, a site on the western edge of Dubai that could become as big and as dense as Manhattan. Images © Office for Metropolitan Architecture A rendering of Waterfront City in Dubai showing OMA’s own signature, spherical building (top).  An artificial, square-shaped island will be created by flooding parts of a coastal area;

The first public review period, held last summer, generated more than 900 comments. Now a coalition of groups developing the Standard for the Design of High-Performance Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings, better known as Standard 189, is for a second time seeking input on a proposed code-enforceable language for sustainable buildings. Related Links: Groups Advance High-Performance StandardsSeeking Public Comment on Standard 189 The coalition developing Standard 189 includes the American Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA). Speaking with RECORD in January, ASHRAE

When housing prices seemed like they’d never stop climbing, developers were using architects’ names as selling points—but now they’re finding that Hollywood, and royalty, lend a dependable air of glamour even in a down market. So when Brett Buehrer and Jeremiah O’Connor recently completed a litigation-strewn, rental-to-condominium conversion of Manhattan House, a Modernist apartment block on New York City’s chichi Upper East Side, they settled on marketing the building not as a masterpiece designed by Gordon Bunshaft but as the onetime home of Grace Kelly. Photo © James Murdock (top); courtesy Rubenstein Public Relations (above); courtesy Rubenstein Public Relations (right).

In a ruling that could help bolster the enforcement of zoning ordinances that cap house size, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently upheld the authority of local communities to restrict overbuilding. Although the case is one of a handful around the nation to take up the issue so far, interest in smart growth and sustainability is increasingly focusing regulators’ attention on house size—and this could ultimately accrue to the benefit of architects. “It’s a very telling sign that the court is addressing the significance of mansionization,” says Lora Lucero, a staff attorney with the American Planning Association. “The justices focused on the

Czech-born architect Jan Kaplický, whose British office Future Systems won the design competition for a new National Library in Prague, is threatening to pull out of the project, according to a March 4 article in the Prague Daily Monitor. Chosen in March 2007, Kaplicky’s scheme for the $183.5 million project has earned the evocative monikers “the blob” and “the octopus.” It calls for a bulbous, gold-tinted volume with round windows to rise in a neighborhood of more traditional, older buildings—a funky look that some observers think is too funky. Prague’s mayor, who initially appeared to endorse the project, feels that

A leading construction industry management consultant and investment banking firm is expanding its architectural focus. FMI, of Raleigh, North Carolina, purchased Advanced Management Institute (AMI), of Napa, California, in February, allowing it to target the architecture clients that AMI has traditionally served.  The 55-year-old FMI has chiefly served contractors, but the growth of design/build has created a larger pool of architects and engineers who could benefit from its services, says Hank Harris, FMI’s president and CEO. “We think it’s going to be a great combination for the industry,” he adds. AMI has offered leadership development, training, and consulting to architecture

Since dissolving the avant-garde Copenhagen architecture firm PLOT in 2006, former partners Julien De Smedt and Bjarke Ingels have launched individual practices with grandiose, statement-making visions. Considering how to add new housing in the middle of already-crowded Copenhagen, for example, Ingels’s firm Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, decided that a local sports field could be surrounded by a giant wall containing 5,000 apartments—an unsolicited idea that the municipality now intends to realize. De Smedt, too, has thrilled potential clients. His studio, JDS, recently won a competition to redesign the Holmenkollen ski jump in Oslo. Images courtesy JDS Julien De Smedt