For 242 State Street, Kundig conceived a 16-by-10-foot guillotine window that can open the 2,500-square-foot interior entirely to the outdoors. Just as the Internet boom has produced winners and losers, so the spoils of Silicon Valley’s growth have been distributed unevenly. Palo Alto, for example, today is home to a Burberry store and SoulCycle fitness studio. Meanwhile, the small commercial core of Los Altos looks ostensibly unchanged from analog days, and struggles to find its footing against larger commercial developments nearby. In 2009, a progressive local business called Passerelle Investment Company was founded to turn the tide in Los Altos’
Worlds of Cityvision will be on view at the WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles through March 23, 2014. The exhibition features urban proposals submitted to international ideas competitions launched by independent architecture lab Cityvision, as well as the lab's own projects. Cityvision team members, left to right: Sebastian Di Guardo, Vanessa Todaro, Joshua Mackley, Boris Prosperini, Ilja Burchard, and Francesco Lipari. The timelessness of Rome—the Eternal City—can be problematic for young architects attempting to break free of its design conservatism. Cityvision, an independent architecture lab based in Rome, offers an outlet by sponsoring competitions, publishing a magazine, and hosting lectures
Two young collaborators organize an art fair like a puzzle. Andrew Feuerstein and Bret Quagliara designed a configuration of temporary exhibition spaces for the Independent Art Fair, which runs March 7-9 in New York City. Art and design fairs often provide a platform for emerging designers—Design Miami has long commissioned installations for its entrance, and Frieze New York’s serpentine tent gave a serious boost to the career of SO-IL, to name a few. But this year, the Independent Art Fair took a risk, hiring a couple of untested young collaborators to design the exhibition spaces at its New York fair,
Richard Meier's new model museum is located at Mana Contemporary, a cultural center and fine arts storage and handling facility that occupies a hulking former manufacturing complex in Jersey City, New Jersey. On the evening of March 5, Richard Meier celebrated the opening of his new model museum in Jersey City, New Jersey. Guests from Manhattan arrived by coach buses, which whisked them below the Hudson River and across the state’s gritty edges to Mana Contemporary, a cultural center and fine arts storage and handling facility that occupies a hulking former manufacturing complex. The collection, which was relocated to its
With a small staff based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, David Benjamin is taking his young, research-based firm, The Living, to the next level. Living Light, 2009The LivingSeoulThis permanent pavilion in a public park uses LEDs and data from government-monitored sensors to map air quality throughout the city. David Benjamin, the principal of Brooklyn-based firm The Living, is not one for convention. His research interests—mussels, slime mold, bone growth, to name a few—are not exactly mainstream. But his unusual design approach—the application of biological systems to architecture, coupled with a geeky software and programming sensibility—has led to collaborations with a
The newly completed tower along the Danube is the tallest in Austria. The tower, overlooking Vienna, has a facade of folded glass planes that appear to weave in and out. The heart of Vienna lies within its famous Ringstrasse—a circular road completed nearly 150 years ago punctuated with Neo-Renaissance, Neo-Baroque, and Neo-Gothic monuments, and later, icons of Viennese Secession architecture. Like most modern capitals however, Vienna has expanded well beyond its historic center. In recent decades, the city has embraced a part of its geography it had long shied away from—the fabled Danube River. Donau City, or Danube City, began
Two recent deals point to a growing number of mergers and acquisitions among design firms. The Anacostia Library in Washington, D.C. by The Freelon Group and R. McGhee & Associates. At the start of this month, two significant deals combining design firms were announced within days of each other. On March 4, Perkins+Will (P+W) and The Freelon Group—the Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina, firm headed by Phil Freelon—said they would merge. The day before, Shanghai Xian Dai Architectural Design Group unveiled its acquisition of Wilson Associates, a 400-person interior design firm with headquarters in Dallas and offices around the
The New York Restoration Project Selects Architecture Firm Bade Stageberg Cox to Design a Flood-resistant Boathouse along the Harlem River. This article first appeared on GreenSource. Bade Stageberg Cox's winning design for an education center and boathouse along the Harlem River. Scarcely two decades ago, Sherman Creek, a tributary of the Harlem River in northern Manhattan, was choked by weeds and the wreckage of century-old boathouses. Now, the New York Restoration Project (NYRP) and Brooklyn-based firm Bade Stageberg Cox are on track to restore the area to the vibrant community hub it once was. On February 6, NYRP announced that
The project gives the Boston-based communications and arts school a permanent home on the west coast. Renowned for its communications, TV, and film programs, Emerson College has long been a presence in iconic Boston neighborhoods, first in residential Back Bay and more recently in the historic Theater District. Its newest building stakes out similar territory, but this time in Los Angeles on the famed Sunset Boulevard. Designed by architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis, the dynamic, aluminum-clad structure—really a self-contained campus—stands poised to become a symbol of its rapidly changing neighborhood. The college purchased the lot in 2008 and later tapped