Gas Works Park in Seattle. Two modernist parks joined the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) this month, boosting the often uphill battle to preserve America’s important post-war landscapes. Gas Works Park in Seattle, designed by Richard Haag, and Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis, designed by M. Paul Friedberg, have won official recognition. “These two landscapes are now part of an august group of seminal works of landscape architecture,” says Charles Birnbaum, President of the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness and understanding of America’s landscape heritage. Each park represents “the work of a master in
The Maspalomas Oasis Hotel on the island of Gran Canaria, in 1968-1971. The hotel, designed by José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún, may be demolished. On the island of Gran Canaria, a last-minute battle wages to save the Maspalomas Oasis Hotel, designed by the Madrid architects José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún and completed in 1971. Weaving together pavilions, gardens, and courtyards, and preserving a virgin grove of palms, the project is a model for harmonious intervention in the unique volcanic landscape of the Canary Islands. The owners, the hotel chain RIU, plan to close the hotel and
Cruz y Ortiz and Jean-Michel Wilmotte complete a 10-year overhaul of the stern neo-Gothic structure. The Rijksmuseum shares a prime public square with its neighbor, the Stedelijk, also recently reopened following a renovation and expansion. In recent months the museum hogging the cultural spotlight in Amsterdam has been the Stedelijk, which opened in December after a nine-year renovation and expansion. (Read Justin Davidson's review.) Many critics have panned its extension, designed by Benthem Crouwel and dubbed the “bathtub.” But this spring, attention will turn to the $500 million expansion of the Rijksmuseum, which shares a public square with the Stedelijk.
nARCHITECTS's winning design for a micro-unit apartment building in Manhattan's Kips Bay neighborhood. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that a team that includes local firm nARCHITECTS has won a competition to design a micro-unit apartment building for a publicly owned lot in Manhattan. The city launched the competition in July to spur the development of small residential spaces tailored to the financial needs of young professionals. "Three quarters of Manhattan is one- or two-person households," said the Mayor at a press conference this morning. "But we just don't have enough apartments that are the appropriate size for
With musicians in mind, Mark Cavagnero designs the first concert hall in the United States purpose-built for jazz performances. With musicians in mind, Mark Cavagnero designs the first concert hall in the United States purpose-built for jazz performances. When Chick Corea, Esperanza Spalding, and other greats take the stage at SFJAZZ Center’s opening concert on Wednesday—in a night of performances emceed by Bill Cosby—they will not only inaugurate San Francisco’s newest concert venue, but they will also break in the first standalone jazz hall in the United States. The building, which opens officially today, joins the city’s opera, ballet, and
The BMW Guggenheim Lab hosted a competition to redesign one of the city's most viscid intersections. Sweta Parab and Hrishikesh More (winner in the professional category): View the full proposal “The traffic in Mumbai is immensely congested and chaotic,” says the Guggenheim Museum’s David van der Leer. “Many people commute for four hours every day, and I have had my fair share of endless travel times.” The curator heads up the museum’s BMW Guggenheim Lab, a traveling pop-up event and exhibition space that has been docked in the city of 18 million people for the last six weeks. Van der
Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers will open at the Museum of the City of New York on January 23. RECORD spoke with the show's co-curator. Image courtesy The Durst Organization and Dattner Architects Dattner Architects' proposal for New York City's adAPT competition is a micro-unit-only building with 60 apartments. The units are typically 300 square feet. The building would be an "80/20" project, where at least 20 percent of the units are set aside for households with incomes at 50 percent or less of the local median income. Micro-apartments are having a moment, and not just as
Image Courtesy Dorothy Alexander Ada Louise Huxtable at her New York apartment on March 7, 1974. Everyone has a favorite quote from the architecture critic par excellence, Ada Louise Huxtable. A pithy one dates to 1973: “The let-them-eat-travertine perfectionism of SOM superstar Gordon Bunshaft is seldom less belligerently antihuman these days,” she wrote in the New York Times about an office building in New York. Huxtable, who died of cancer on January 7 at 91, brought architecture criticism visibility and influence at a crucial time. In the boom years after World War II, the banality of commercial Modernism, the demolition
CODA's "Party Wall" wins MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program competition. CODA's winning proposal calls for a large wall clad in scrap wood from the skateboard-making process. Ithaca, New York-based firm CODA has won this year's competition to design a temporary installation for P.S.1, the Museum of Modern Art-affiliated contemporary art space in New York City. In the proposal, the firm (helmed by Caroline O'Donnell) calls for erecting a large wall clad in panels made from scrap wood cast-off during the skateboard-making process. Woven together, they will hang on an armature that straddles the former school building's courtyard. A series of archways
At a time when the notion of omniscient master architects is seen by many critics as passé, a day-long design conference in San Francisco suggested that the concept remains in vogue with the wider public.
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