The finger-pointing has already begun in response to a lawsuit filed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) against Frank Gehry’s firm, Gehry Partners, and general contractor Skanska USA. The suit alleges that flaws exist in the design and construction of the $300 million Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences. Photo: ' Roland Halbe MIT’s suit alleges that the Stata Center has developed “persistent leaks,” and that ice and snow slide from the roof during winter, creating a hazard. The tilting, warped 720,000-square-foot titanium and brick building houses labs, offices, classrooms, and meeting rooms for MIT’s Computer Science
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has selected the French architect Atelier Christian de Portzamparc to design a new complex for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. It will be located next to the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in Hollywood, California. As of yet there are no formal design plans for the site, which will span eight acres and preserve existing 1940s-era structures, but the idea is to create a campus of 165,000 square feet of new construction and open spaces that engage their surroundings. “It is important that this building conforms to the Hollywood location
At a time when quite a few mid-century Modernist structures are threatened with demolition, a new retrospective exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., aims to remind people of the contribution that Modernist architects made through their bold experimentation with forms and materials. Photo: Courtesy Constance L. Breuer (top); Minneapolis Star and Tribune Co., Courtesy Marcel Breuer Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C. (above). Marcel Breuer in the Wassily chair, circa 1926 (top). Breuer standing in front of the Saint John’s Abbey and university complex, Collegeville, Minnesota, during its construction circa 1961 (above). Related Links: Grosse Pointe
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 Frank Gehry has been slapped with a lawsuit by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which all alleges that the super-starchitect’s Stata Center is riddled with leaks, The Boston Globe reported on November 6. The negligence suit names both Gehry Partners and general contractor Skanska, alleging that they violated contracts and are responsible for design and construction failures. The 400,000-square-foot Stata Center was
The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) is planning to revamp its popular Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system in an effort to make it more user-friendly. USGBC hopes to create, with some exceptions, one LEED system instead of having LEED for residential, for example, and LEED for commercial. It expects to roll out the new system next fall. Another likely change is that LEED will address life cycle analysis, something many of the users would welcome. USGBC is “harmonizing and aligning credits” across all LEED rating systems, the group says. This will make the system more “adaptive
Former President Bill Clinton took the stage at the U.S. Green Building Council’s sixth annual Greenbuild conference in Chicago yesterday morning and, before a crowd of 6,000 people who gathered to hear his keynote address, described the green building movement the nation’s largest economic opportunity since the country mobilized for World War II. “It’s not going to be easy, but we have to move away from the carbon economy,” Clinton said, adding that he considers green building to be “perhaps the most important cause we can be involved in today.” In a lightly political speech—we are facing an election year,
Berlin, the capital of Germany, acknowledges the darkest chapters in its history by dispersing Holocaust artifacts amid vestigial Communist buildings and parks. New York City is struggling to remember its own trauma—September 11, 2001—amid new towers and fast-changing neighborhoods downtown. What might these cities say to one another? Photos: Courtesy the Center for Architecture The show 'Berlin-New York Dialogues,' at New York City's Center for Architecture, features images of this bridge in Berlin. Wilk-Salinas Architekten with Thomas Freiwald designed this bridge across the Spree River with a swimming pool in a boat whose planes of sight suggest a river dip;
The Four Seasons Hotel New York has unveiled its new 4,300-square-foot penthouse suite with nine rooms, ceiling heights up to 25 feet, and breathtaking city views.
Correction appended January 1, 2008 The word “sustainable” is not often used to describe the pollution-choked cities of Asia, but the continent is poised to host a new generation of green cities that right the wrongs of industrial-era urban planning. The question “Could we do better?” motivated New York-based SHoP Architects to take on one such project, the high-tech Sector 61 node of Gurgaon, India. Images: Courtesy Balmori Associates Balmori Associates' in-house studio Balmorilab teamed with Haeahn Architecture and H Associates to design the Public Administration Town district of Multi-Functional Administrative City in South Korea. Roughly 9.7 million square feet
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is set to release revisions to its A201 contract documents today. These forms, the most widely used in the construction industry, define the legal relationship between building owners, architects, and contractors; the AIA first prepared them in 1887 and issues updates once a decade. The AIA is also releasing a new owner-architect agreement. Chief among revisions to the A201 documents is the removal of mandatory arbitration, which has been specified since the AIA’s first owner-contractor agreement in 1888. Arbitration must now be selected, with mediation as the first option and litigation as the default
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