The Shaheen-Portman energy bill has broad bipartisan backing, but many organizations have warned that they will fight the bill if a certain amendment is adopted. This story originally appeared on BuildingGreen.com. The historic Shaheen-Portman energy bill making its way through the U.S. Senate enjoys rare and broad bipartisan backing, with the likes of Earthjustice and the Vinyl Siding Institute both announcing full-throated support. But the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and more than 350 other organizations have warned that they will fight Shaheen-Portman (a.k.a. the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2013) if a certain amendment is adopted. Thanks
A common Freshkills vista: a former landfill, it is in the process of being capped and planted with native species. Since 1947, it has been one of New York’s most notorious locations: the Freshkills landfill, in Staten Island, the city’s least populated, least renowned borough. To many, it became a sort of running joke about the borough itself. After all, how seriously can you take a place whose best-known landmark is vast mounds of garbage? Now Freshkills is on its way to becoming Staten Island’s claim to fame rather than notoriety. The landfill stopped accepting trash in March 2001; now,
Ennead Architects, New York (with Langan Engineering, LERA, Atelier 10, Hargreaves, and BioHabitats) View larger image (PDF) Four finalists have been selected to advance to the second phase of a design competition called "For a Resilient Rockaway" (FAR ROC). Organized by the the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, L+M Development Partners, The Bluestone Organization, Triangle Equities, the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter, and Enterprise Community Partners, the competition brief asked designers to develop ideas for a new mixed-use, mixed-income, sustainable, and storm-resilient community on an 80-acre site on the Rockaway Peninsula, one of the
Video by Danny Forster Design Studio + dbox Rem Koolhaas has won the chance to redesign a large swath of Miami Beach. In a late Wednesday night vote, city commissioners chose a team led by Koolhaas to enlarge the Miami Beach Convention Center and redevelop its 52-acre site, a project that the Miami Herald called “the most important development deal in the history of Miami Beach.” Koolhaas beat out his onetime employee Bjarke Ingels, who had described their competition for the $1 billion-plus project as “oedipal.”The selection appeared to hinge less on architecture than on cost and other factors. Koolhaas’s
After hitting bottom in 2009, the multifamily housing market has shown steady improvement. Since 2010, construction starts in the sector have grown by double digits in each of the four regions of the U.S. Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].
Allied Works Architecture’s tasting room for the Sokol Blosser Winery, nestled in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, is a low-profile building with a complex flavor profile. Architect Brad Cloepfil set the low-slung, 5,000-square-foot structure into a hillside and clad the interior and exterior walls in earthy-hued bands of tight knot cedar, Douglas fir, and hickory. Large windows frame vistas of the landscape, while large, striated skylights cast shadows that evoke the grape trellises of the surrounding vineyards. The Allied Works addition gives the winery, which opened Oregon’s first tasting room in 1978, a new centerpiece. It serves as a point of orientation
Colombia Transformed: Architecture=Politics features work by six designers including Felipe Mesa, Planb Arquitectos. His Orquidorama pavilion in Medellín’s Botanic Garden is shown here. Last Thursday, July 11, the exhibition Colombia Transformed: Architecture=Politics opened at AIA New York’s Center for Architecture. The show examines 11 recent works by six of the Latin American country’s leading architects: Daniel Bonilla, Giancarlo Mazzanti, Felipe Mesa, Juan Manuel Pelaez, Felipe Uribe, and Orlando Garcia. The featured projects—from libraries and community centers, to sports arenas, to schools—reflect the wave of innovative design that has been driving social transformation across the country (most notably in Bogotá and