The Guardian Art Center, currently under construction, will be equal parts auction house and cultural hub. Ole Scheeren helped create perhaps the most aggressive building on the Beijing skyline — the CCTV tower, which he designed with Rem Koolhaas before opening his own firm, Buro Ole Scheeren, in 2010. Now Scheeren hopes to become known for a less divisive contribution to the Beijing scene — an auction house headquarters that, despite its 600,000 square feet, treads lightly on its site, and which may represent a way forward for foreign architects in China under a culturally conservative regime. Scheeren’s client is the Chinese-owned auction house China Guardian, which wanted
Today, Google unveiled plans for a ground-breaking, 3.4 million-square-foot campus conceived by architecture firms BIG and Heatherwick Studio, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reports. “Tech really hasn’t adopted a particular language for buildings,” said David Radcliffe, Google’s vice-president of real estate development in a video proposal. “I mean, we’ve just found old buildings, and we’ve moved into them, and made do best we could.”Envisioned as both a neighborhood and as a wildlife habitat, the proposed master plan on the fringes of Mountain View, California, features four clusters of buildings draped in a thin, glass membrane. These buildings, rather than being
The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF) hosts its Leadership Awards Gala on Thursday at the Prince George Ballroom in New York City. The Leadership Awards Gala will honor the legacy of Beverly Willis, an architect who fought to give women recognition for their design work, and award firms and individuals who strive to support and advance women in the building professions. HOK will be presented with the Foundation award for its
SmithGroup will adapt and renovate a former 1920s refrigeration warehouse for the 430,000-square-foot Museum of the Bible, scheduled to open in October 2017 in Washington, D.C. If the founders of the incipient Museum of the Bible had asked Frank Gehry to represent the parting of the Red Sea in billows of metal and glass, it might have been the least controversial thing about the project, which broke ground last week two blocks south of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The 430,000-square-foot, $400 million museum was dreamed up by Oklahoma’s Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby craft-store chain, who
The BLUEPRINT exhibition, curated by SO–IL and Sebastiaan Bremer, is currently on view at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. The blueprint, invented in the 1840s, was ubiquitous in architecture offices—to which it lent a slightly acrid smell—for much of the 20th century. Now the medium confers a certain authenticity, a kind of Instragram-ish patina, says architect Florian Idenburg, though, he notes that paradoxically, a blueprint is also a plan for the future. Building on that paradox, Idenburg and Jing Liu (his partner in the architecture firm SO–IL Solid Objectives) and artist Sebastiaan Bremer have created BLUEPRINT, a show
The renovation market is relatively immune to economic ups and downs with fairly stable performance in both good times and bad. For the coming year, the value of renovation construction starts is expected to grow 6%, to $45.3 billion. Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].