The nine projects that won the 2007 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, announced yesterday, range from a sustainable residential tower in Singapore, to a village school hand-built by local craftspeople in Dinajpur, Bangladesh.
In the mid-1940s, long before the phrases “carbon footprint” and “green building” were coined, R. Buckminster Fuller urged people to lessen their environmental impact by taking up residence in aluminum-and-fiberglass geodesic domes. Construction of these shelters avoided the destruction of trees, and the domes required less energy to cool and heat compared to traditional rectangular buildings.
As NASA prepares to retire the space shuttle by the end of the decade, just in time for completion of the International Space Station, the tourism industry is planning to take its own giant leap into the void.
When Public Architecture launched The 1% Solution in 2005, it tapped into the architecture community’s altruism: The San Francisco–based practice and public-service advocacy has since signed up 157 firms to pledge 1 percent of their time to nonprofit organizations that could not otherwise afford design direction. And yet Public Architecture executive director John Cary admits that some of those promises have been “more symbolic than anything.” A three-pronged initiative, to be unveiled September 4 along with a name change to simply “The 1%,” will help architects realize their best intentions. Image: ' MendeDesign A mockup of The %’s new handbook
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 On the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, USA Today summed up New Orleans’ ongoing recovery this way: while some neighborhoods “have rebuilt themselves using private funds, insurance money and sheer will,” publicly funded efforts “have moved much more slowly.” The New York Times, in an August 28 article, had a similar view of the city’s architecture: “No grand designs. No inspired
HOK Sport unveiled conceptual plans on Tuesday for a new $290 million hockey arena in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, at the eastern edge of downtown. When the city’s Sports and Exhibition Authority (SEA) and the Pittsburgh Penguins announced the project earlier this year, it reopened old wounds in the contentious relationship between development authorities and residents of the city’s storied Hill District.
Shelby Farms Park Conservancy, in consultation with Alex Garvin & Associates, will issue an RFQ on September 4 seeking designers for a 4,500-acre park in Shelby County, Tennessee. Located at the northeastern edge of Memphis, the site is more than five-times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park. Organizers are hoping to design a new kind of park for a new age. Images: Courtesy Alex Garvin & Associates Shelby Farms Park, located at the northeast edge of Memphis (top), will encompass 4,500 acres—some five times the size of Central Park in New York City. Organizers of a new RFQ for the
Correction appended August 31, 2007 For all the official secrecy surrounding the process, yesterday’s announcement that Robert A.M. Stern Architects has been selected to design the George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University (SMU), in Dallas, proved to be a no-brainer: a high-profile historicist for an institution that wants only collegiate Georgian architecture. Neo Trad for Neo-Cons. Where’s the surprise? According to a statement from the Bush Library Foundation, Stern got the job following an August 23 meeting with the president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. “I guess he wanted to look me over and I suppose
A row of cement bollards blocking the main entrance to Glasgow’s international airport terminal prevented an explosives-packed vehicle from crashing into the building with disastrous consequences in June. Other airports have erected bollards or reinforced-concrete blast walls for the same reason.
The Airports Authority of India has chosen plans by a team of architects including Frederic Schwartz Architects, Hargreaves Associates, Gensler, and New Delhi-based Creative Group to expand the Chennai International Airport’s domestic and international terminals. When completed in 2010, the $300 million project will transform Chennai, located in the city formerly known as Madras, into India’s greenest airport. Images: Courtesy Frederic Schwartz Architects The revamped Kamraj Domestic Terminal will feature what designers describe as a “green gate”: a parking garage with a green roof and rainwater capture systems. Two one-acre gardens will form a central element within the terminal (top).
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