After nearly three years of fierce criticism, revisions, budget cuts, and soaring costs, plans for a Zaha Hadid-designed Olympic stadium in Tokyo—an 80,000-seat stingray-like arena set to rise 20 stories in the city’s heart—has been cancelled.
Hotel construction has come back in full force since the recession. Demand for new buildings is expected to continue to grow, thanks to a solid economy and a resurgence in both business and leisure travel. Click on the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].
German architect Werner Düttmann (1921-1983), a prominent postwar modernist, designed the Brutalist St. Agnes Church in 1967 as the centerpiece of a social housing community of the Kreuzberg area of Berlin, which had been leveled in World War II. After years of neglect and threats of demolition, the church has made a comeback, reopening this May as König Galerie following a three-year restoration. Werner Düttmann served as the West Berlin senate building director in the 1960s. He assigned the St. Agnes project to his own firm, which had significant experience with public works projects. Designed with the strength and functionality
As If It Were Already Here, suspended above Fort Point Channel Park, is comprised of 100 miles worth of rope. Janet Echelman’s massive new installation in downtown Boston hovers 365 feet above the ground at its highest point and weighs 2,000 pounds. Titled As If It Were Already Here, the sculpture, suspended above Fort Point Channel Parks, is comprised of 100 miles worth of rope and exerts 100,000 pounds of force on the Intercontinental Hotel, one of the anchor points for the project, when the wind blows. When dealing with forces of that magnitude, it’s no surprise that Echelman—who was
New Yorkers can take the subway to Coney Island and Angelenos can cool off in Venice or Santa Monica, but Washingtonians are out of luck if they want to hit the beach—the shore is a three-hour drive away. Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham, partners of the New York design studio Snarkitecture, thought that Washington, D.C. could use a beach of its own. So they created one inside the National Building Museum, filling a giant pit with almost a million plastic balls that visitors can float on or swim through. The pit, which opened on the Fourth of July, is fronted
Cooper Union today announced that Nader Tehrani will be taking over as the new dean of the college's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, effective this month.
Swiss furnishings manufacturer Vitra has teamed up with Spanish shoe company and design patron Camper for a pop-up project that reimagines the retail experience. Located inside a futuristic tent construction (once a Detroit car showroom in the mid-‘70s) on the Vitra campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, the project opened on June 18. The companies commissioned Berlin-based architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, originally from Burkina Faso, to design a space inside the tent: a modular, donut-shaped pavilion made of blockboard. The zig-zag orientation of panels creates seating, LED-illuminated shelving, and display space on both sides of the freestanding walls. Kére, known
“Has ‘The Lighthouse’ Found Support?” boldly queried the Helsinki daily newspaper’s leading headline the morning after the June 23 announcement of the winning entry of the Guggenheim Museum’s year-long, two-phase, open international design competition to produce “a museum for the 21st century” as an extension of its branded franchise operations in the Finnish capital. The competition and its long-awaited result have been aimed at persuasively reinvigorating the Guggenheim’s dogged five-year saga in “the White City of the North,” following the Helsinki City Council’s 2011 rejection of the proposed museum branch and its financing. The headline’s question neatly condensed several aspects