Denver International Airport’s main terminal, with its distinctive white peaked fabric roof, is getting some company: a 500-room Westin Hotel, a commuter train station, and a rail bridge, all designed by Santiago Calatrava.
Shovels, hammers or hard hats were nowhere in sight. Instead, hair curlers, buttons and paper clips were used to construct future train stations for California’s new proposed high-speed rail. Held in Downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, July 17, the “groundbreaking” was part of an interactive community design forum to engage the public on high-speed rail. The event was hosted by railLA, an organization comprised of the Los Angeles Chapters of the American Institute of Architects (AIA/LA) and the American Planning Association (APA-LA), created to raise public awareness about the future of high-speed rail. “We are doing these workshops to get
A former business partner of acclaimed architect Philip Johnson recently unveiled an archive of nearly 25,000 sketches, tracings, and renderings from between 1968 and 1992, a sparsely documented period of Johnson’s prolific career.
Photo courtesy ELS Barry Elbasani Barry Elbasani, FAIA, an architect whose master plans and buildings were frameworks for revitalizing downtowns throughout the country, died on June 29, 2010, at his home in Berkeley, California. He was 69.The cause of death was brain cancer. Elbasani, one of the founding principals of ELS Architecture and Urban Design in Berkeley, was responsible for major buildings and plans in Milwaukee, Portland, Oregon, Phoenix, Summerlin, Nevada, Los Angeles, Austin, and Coral Gables. Grounded in a belief that architecture and urban design were interdependent, his designs drew on the principles of thriving urban streets. Elbasani and
Photo courtesy Kanner Architects Stephen Kanner In automobile-dominated Los Angeles, it seems entirely fitting that two of the city’s most celebrated buildings of recent years are a gas station and a drive-through hamburger restaurant. The United Oil Gasoline Station (2009) at the corner of Slauson and La Brea features a swooping steel canopy and a curved concrete ramp meant to resemble a freeway entrance. The red-and-yellow In-N-Out Burger (1998) in Westwood takes its design cues from the company’s boomerang logo and pays homage to Southern California Googie architecture. Both projects were designed by Stephen Kanner, a third-generation Los Angeles architect
Photo courtesy RNL John B. Rogers John B. Rogers, FAIA, co-founder of Denver-based architecture firm RNL, died on July 12 at the age of 85. Rogers first arrived in Denver in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering from Kansas State University and three years overseas with the army in Lentz, Austria. It was during a postwar ski trip to Winter Park that he decided to move to Denver, where he found employment with Mark Musick and Temple Buell. Though he left again to earn a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Texas, he returned upon graduation
July 12, 2010 As campuses prep for the fall semester, some top architecture schools are experiencing turnovers among their high-level staff. Deans and other administrators have stepped down, or announced plans to, at the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Maryland, the Cooper Union, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley. Ever year brings a changing of the guard at one school or another, so these recent departures don’t indicate the sky is falling. But, they do highlight a trend: Tenures, in general, are shortening, which may be the result
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