In counterpoint to last February’s three-venue series of Robert Moses retrospectives, New York City’s design mavens are now revisiting Jane Jacobs, whose writings about urban life came to symbolize the opposite of Moses’ own approach to planning cities. Manhattan’s Municipal Art Society (MAS) is using the late community organizer and theorist as the touchstone for an inquiry into New York City’s current character. Jacobs made her name in the early 1960s by helping organize a grassroots campaign to protect historic buildings and neighborhoods from destruction—most notably Greenwich Village, which lay in the path of an expressway Moses sought to build.
The Battle of Gettysburg lasted three days. The battle over the fate of Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander’s Cyclorama Center at the Gettysburg National Military Park has dragged on for 10 years—and now, with the park poised to raze the building, it has shifted to the federal courts. Image Courtesy National Park Service Richard Neutra’s Cyclorama Center at Gettysburg could be gone by 2009. Opened as a visitor center in 1961, the Cyclorama Center was built as part of the Park Service’s Mission 66 program, which erected roughly 100 Modernist visitor centers and hundreds of other tourist buildings between 1956
Athletes are no doubt excited about the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics, but before the games begin at least one architect is crying foul. Whitefield McQueen Architects, of Melbourne, Australia, claims that the Chinese government’s design for the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park, a “floating boathouse” with an undulating roof, resembles a scheme that it submitted for a design competition in 2005. Tim Whitefield has no proof that his design was intentionally stolen, but he finds the similarities suspicious—and disappointing. “We are a young firm, so it would have been a substantial opportunity for us. I am saddened by the experience.” Images:
Barry LePatner, a Manhattan-based attorney who counts Frank Gehry and other big-name architects among his clients, sees a problem with the construction industry in the United States—clearly indicated by the title of his book Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, published today by the University of Chicago Press. “This is the industry that time has forgotten,” he says. “Mom-and-pop shops, composed of 20 people or less, make up 92 percent of the industry. They are hugely inefficient, and they have no money to spend on improving performance and technology.” The result, LePatner continues, is tremendous waste in a $1.2-trillion-a-year business—nearly half of
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 Cesar Pelli and his firm will design what could become the tallest tower in San Francisco. As RECORD reported this week, Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, teamed with developer Hines, were awarded exclusive negotiating rights for a prime downtown site owned by the Transbay Joint Powers Authority. The authority seeks to rebuild the aging Transbay Terminal facility next door. Pelli’s design is for a
After three years of contentious negotiations, the Czech Republic city of Brno has agreed to restore the Tugendhat Villa, a landmark of early Modernism designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1930. The house, which currently operates as a museum, will close October 31.
Frank Lloyd Wright pushed the limitations of technology with his buildings, sometimes pushing past them and bequeathing problems to future stewards. Fallingwater, the Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. residence completed in 1939, required a major restoration in 2002. The house’s dramatic cantilevers had deflected dangerously with the main cantilever sagging an alarming seven inches. The restoration team, including structural engineer Robert Silman Associates (RSA) and architect WASA/Studio A were able to halt, but not correct, the deflection with post-tensioning cables—a solution as innovative as Wright’s design. Photo by Robert Johnson, Architectural Business Development, Quantapoint ' The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (top);
Summertime turmoil in credit markets finally caught up with billings at architecture firms. The American Institute of Architects’ Architectural Billings Index (ABI) fell 6.1 points from its near-record high in July for a score of 53.9 in August; the volume of inquiries also tumbled by a similar amount for a score of 60.5. Although these numbers marked the biggest drop since September 2006, when the ABI lost 7.3 points, billings remain healthy since any score over 50 points represents growth. Kermit Baker, the AIA’s chief economist, explained in a press release that while the ABI is compiled using data mainly
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