Transbay won’t rise as high as his Petronas Towers in Malaysia, but Cesar Pelli and his firm have won the rights to design what could become the tallest tower in San Francisco. Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, teamed with developer Hines, were awarded exclusive negotiating rights yesterday to a choice site in downtown San Francisco owned by the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA), which seeks to rebuild the aging Transbay Terminal facility next door. Image: Courtesy Transbay Joint Powers Authority, Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, WRNS Studio, Hines Pelli Clarke Pelli and developer Hines’ scheme for the new Transbay Terminal and skyscraper
Manhattan’s Storefront for Art and Architecture celebrates its 25th birthday this month and the gallery is breaking out hula hoops to celebrate. Over the coming weeks, the non-profit gallery will host a series of public events in “Ring Dome,” a temporary pavilion, designed by Korean architect Minsuk Cho of Seoul-based Mass Studies, made of 1,000 off-the-shelf plastic hoops stuffed with electroluminescent wire. Image: Courtesy Storefront for Art and Architecture The Storefront for Art and Architecture celebrates its 25th birthday this month with “Ring Dome,” a temporary pavilion designed by Korean architect Minsuk Cho of Seoul-based Mass Studies. The sculpture is
Correction appended September 20, 2007 In May 2006, Joshua Prince-Ramus, then the partner-in-charge of Rem Koolhaas’s OMA office in New York, announced that he would leave the firm to begin his own practice. With business partner and fellow OMA alumnus Erez Ella he founded REX: an acronym, with some rhetorical license, for Ramus Ella Architects. The new firm would take with it all of OMA’s projects—excluding only Paul Milstein Hall at Cornell University—along with the entire OMA staff.
Chong Partners Architecture, a San Francisco-based firm with 2006 revenue of $42.4 million and nearly 200 employees, is the latest North American acquisition by Stantec, the publicly-traded Edmonton, Alberta–based engineer-architect. Terms of the transaction, completed yesterday, were not disclosed. “The addition of Chong Partners is a significant step towards building a national architecture presence in the United States similar to what we have been able to achieve in Canada,” Tony Franceschini, Stantec president and CEO, said in a statement. He added that Chong offers significant hospital and health care facility design to Stantec’s capabilities. It also expands the size of
Following his successful sale of Case Study House #21, Chicago’s Modernist-design auctioneer Richard Wright is putting another mid-century residence on the block. But instead of a Pierre Koenig icon, the lot up for grabs on October 7 is an arguably kitschy work by Marcel Breuer. Photos Courtesy Wright and Brian Franczyk Photography) A porch spans the south elevation of the Wolfson house; its design features Marcel Breuer’s trademark cable material. At the request of his client, Breuer incorporated a Spartan Trailer into the house. The trailer’s interior includes a kitchen. The idiosyncratic house, located in Dutchess County, New York, is
Polshek Partnership Architects is spreading the news—literally. The Manhattan-based firm has designed three journalism-related projects featuring design elements that explicitly express the building’s program. Photos: ' Jeff Goldberg/Esto (top); Courtesy Polshek Partnership (above) Designed by Polshek Partnership, the new headquarters for public broadcaster WGBH opens today in Brighton, Massachusetts. An oversized LED screen displays images from the station’s programs; slivers of LED screens punctuate the glazed facade of a long, rectangular volume that connects two other buildings in the three-building complex (top). Newhouse III, a new building for the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, will be
Editor’s note: You may read the news digest below or listen to it, plus other news headlines from ArchitecturalRecord.com, as a podcast by clicking this link. Click the play button to begin | Click here to download “From pariah state to Côte d’Azur,” is how The Times of London, in a September 11 article, described Libya’s newly unveiled $3 billion plan to develop 180 miles of its northeast coastline into an ecologically sensitive tourist hotspot. The Guardian, preferring on September 12 to employ the correct color rather than metaphor, noted that “green is big in Libya.” The massive scheme will
The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) marks a milestone today with the opening of its first new structure in 80 years. Designed by Gluckman Mayner Architects, the new 184,000-square-foot Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building allows the encyclopedic institution to display 130,000 objects—more than half its total collection of paintings, sculpture, and photography—that had previously sat in storage. Photos: Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art Gluckman Mayner Architects transformed the 80-year-old Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company Building into the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, which opens today (top). The designers added a rectangular volume composed
With summer break finished, high school students in Los Angeles began classes again last week. But at least one facility wasn’t ready to accommodate them: the new High School #9 building, also known as the School for the Visual and Performing Arts, designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au. The eagerly anticipated project was originally scheduled to open this month but its completion has been delayed by nearly a year. Image: Courtesy Coop Himmelb(l)au (top); Photo Courtesy Los Angeles Unified School District (above) Los Angeles’s High School #9, also known as the School for the Visual and Performing Arts, was designed by Coop
Stephen Kanner, a principal of Kanner Architects in Los Angeles, and his friend Joe Gaddo, an architect based in Ghana, are helping to develop a cement additive that could decrease construction costs there by a one third—no small accomplishment in a country where concrete is the preferred building material and yet few people are able to afford it. Image: Courtesy Kanner Architects Kanner Architects, based in Los Angeles, designed Augustino Neto Condominiums, a residential complex in Accra, Ghana. The building will be constructed using PozzoGhana, a new form of low-cost cement. The new additive is called PozzoGhana, a wordplay on