A show at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture asks the architecture world to petition its political leaders. Dear Mayors (and All Other Inhabitants of Cities),Last week, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City opened an exhibition called Letters to the Mayor. It consists of 50 letters to mayors of various cities by an invited group of architects, critics and curators. It’s not much to look at—just some notes typed on white paper and pinned to the wall—but it aggregates and articulates important points about contemporary architecture and urban development. The letters hang opposite wallpaper designed
Photo by Sean Hemmerle, via Graham Foundation Paul Rudolph's three-story Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York, completed in 1970, has 87 roofs. The long-running saga over Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center—which officials have been threatening to demolish for more than a decade—took perhaps its strangest turn last week: Gene Kaufman, an architect best known for designing colorful towers for national hotel chains on the West Side of Manhattan, offered to buy the building. At a meeting of the County Legislature on May 1, Kaufman offered to purchase the Rudolph building, which has been closed since 2011, and
Designed to be the greenest commercial building in the world, the six-story structure is outperforming its energy goals with an integrated design and motivated tenants. The Bullitt Center used 75 percent less energy than a new building that meets Seattle’s rigorous energy code. The designers of Seattle’s Bullitt Center have overachieved. The Miller Hull Partnership, co-founded by the late Robert Hull, set out to demonstrate that a six-story office building could generate all of the energy it needs, but after one year of operation, it is sending a sizable energy surplus to the local power grid, according to data released
Theaster Gates will present the 10th annual Lewis Mumford Lecture at The City College of New York on May 1. Theaster Gates is a performance artist, potter, object maker, educator, urban planner, and innovator, and he has become a catalyst for renewal on Chicago’s South Side by putting his background to use in a unique way. His Dorchester Projects transformed abandoned houses into small cultural centers. He partnered with the University of Chicago, where he is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts, to create the Arts Incubator for artists-in-residence in a neglected building. And he’s now working on
Fred Schwartz, visiting his 9/11 memorial in New Jersey in June 2011. Frederic Schwartz, who died on April 28 after struggling with cancer, wasn’t so much an architect as a public citizen who used architecture as a tool to improve lives. Other tools included empathy and patience. His best-known project in New York was the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a project he inherited from his former employers, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, after public officials tinkered with their design so many times they felt unable to continue. Schwartz picked up where they left off, focusing not so much on
It's still early in 2014, but already several important modernist buildings have fallen. Perhaps the most notable is Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Women's Hospital (1975), a cloverleaf-shaped tower that, with other Goldberg variations (including the twin-corncob Marina City complex of 1959-1964), helped define Chicago in a period when the city, under the influence of Mies, was going from gritty to griddy. A beloved oddity, Prentice was as important to Chicago as Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim is to New York, and now it's almost gone. (These photos were taken on a Sunday, April 20.) Northwestern University, which owns the property, has announced
This article first appeared on GreenSource. While most 19th century manufacturing hubs were known for their poor working conditions, the Pullman District on Chicago’s South Side was the country’s first model industrial town designed to provide a safer and healthier environment for the Pullman sleeping company’s workers. Over a century later, Method, the green cleaning products brand, is now carrying on the District’s progressive legacy with the construction of its new 150,000-square-foot sustainable factory. The company asked William McDonough + Partners to design its sprawling building, spanning roughly five acres on a brownfield site where the original Pullman lumberyard once stood.
For the first time since it was completed in 1950, Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin, opens for tours next month. Visitors will see firsthand its functional shortcomings along with its spectacular innovations. Both the Research Tower (1950) and the company’s Wright-designed Administration Building (1939) are now on the National Register of Historic Places. Any list of the greatest buildings of the 20th century would have to include Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower, the 15-story companion to his equally spectacular administration building in Racine, Wisconsin. On May 2, the company will begin offering tours
Well-known U.S.-based architects have taken issue with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Britain’s leading architectural association, for its political stand against its Israeli counterpart. According to the Architects’ Journal, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Meier, and Rick Bell, the executive director of AIA New York, have spoken out against the RIBA’s decision to seek the suspension of the Israeli association from the International Union of Architects (UIA) “until it acts to resist projects on illegally-occupied land and observes international law and accords.” The motion was presented to the RIBA council on March 19 by the association’s past president, Angela Brady.
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