Zaha Hadid reduced the size and toned down the expression of her initial design for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Stadium, but it is still garnering criticism. In the latest round of public outcry over Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic Stadium, architect Arata Isozaki has stepped into the ring, joining a coterie of illustrious architects opposed to the project’s development. Though he favored the initial helmet-shaped scheme that landed the London architect Zaha Hadid the commission, the revised design has Isozaki deeply concerned. He convened last week with Hadid associate Satoshi Ohashi at a public forum in Tokyo intended to give both parties
Paul Katz, 57, President of Kohn Pedersen Fox, who led the firm’s growth as a global powerhouse in the design of large, mixed-use complexes, died unexpectedly last week. Katz, known for his extremely quick mind and dry wit, was a passionate advocate for the impact that good architecture and innovative planning could have on the world’s rapidly evolving cities. Gene Kohn, a founding partner, posted this announcement.
Russell Thomsen and Eric Kahn, partners at IDEA, were drawn to the subject of how the concentration camp in southern Poland will be experienced by future generations. The future of Auschwitz is a topic that would scare most architects away. But Russell Thomsen and Eric Kahn, partners in the Los Angeles firm IDEA, were drawn to the subject of how the concentration camp in southern Poland will be experienced by future generations. During visits to Auschwitz and nearby Birkenau, a 400-acre “annex” built expressly for extermination, they realized that, if the camp is to be maintained as a historic site,
Jean-Francois Bodin’s unassuming but arduous renovation of the beloved museum finally reaches completion. Jean-Francois Bodin is probably the most talented architect you have never heard of.He avoids publicity. His website is “in formation” though he opened his firm, Bodin and Associates, in 1983. He is modest to a fault. His spartan offices are located, with no sign, off of a nondescript 17th-century courtyard in the Marais section of Paris. He works around the corner from the neighborhood where he was born, grew up, and just spent the last five years reconfiguring the Musée Picasso, a quiet triumph of a
The Harvard Art Museums, during renovation and expansion, showing the new addition. From Quincy Street, you would never know that the overhauled Harvard University Art Museums, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lurks behind the puritanically aloof facade of the neo-Georgian Fogg Museum. Even the long boxy volume of Renzo Piano’s addition, which hoists itself one-story above Prescott Street, behind the rear of the Fogg, doesn’t fully disclose its size, even with showy glass cubes poking out at either end. The Fogg is now just one of three merged collections that opened November 16. To accommodate a daunting array of competing programmatic agendas
Marmol Radziner has restored and adapted E. Stewart Williams' 1961 Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan building for its use as a museum. If you’re looking for local heroes, there are several in Palm Springs with the name Williams. E. Stewart Williams (1909-2005) was an Ohio-born architect who moved to the desert town in 1946, and within a year had designed a house for Frank Sinatra, converting the singer to modernism. During the next four decades, Williams, practicing with his brother and father as Williams, Williams and Williams or, as the locals called it, Williams Cubed, designed dozens of buildings
If sustainability is a three-legged stool of environmental, economic, and social performance, then LEED is a bit wobbly: historically, the rating system has not taken on community welfare with the same breadth and depth as it has climate change and resource conservation. “It’s not as if social-equity benefit was absent from LEED,” says U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) vice president of LEED Brendan Owens, citing how power-plant emissions disproportionately impact marginalized communities. “But we knew we could do more.” To begin righting the imbalance, USGBC posited social equity as one of seven system goals for LEED v4, and formed a
Perkins+Will maintains a Precautionary List, an index of building materials that can harm the human body. While mercury and lead’s impacts may be well understood, those of one ubiquitous set of chemicals have not been: flame-retardant chemicals. They are common in many architectural materials, from upholstery to insulation, and they slow the spread of fire in otherwise flammable substances. However, they also tend to escape into the environment and become absorbed in the human body, where they don’t break down. What results is a “body burden”: a cache of chemicals that has been linked to cancer, loss of IQ, and
Construction activity in the higher-education sector is beginning to slowly rebound as the stock market improves and college and university endowments, along with gifts from alumni and other benefactors, grow. Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].
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