Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), Foster + Partners, and Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) have been retained as architects for a multi-billion-dollar-project to redevelop New York City’s Pennsylvania Station district, parties close to the deal confirmed on Friday. Image ' William Low A view of the original Pennsylvania Station, from author/illustrator William Low's 2007 book Old Penn Station. Click here to read an article about the book Old Penn Station. Bud Perrone, a spokesperson for the project’s developers, a joint venture of the Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust, acknowledged that the three architecture firms are involved. Another source involved in

Anything But Stilted Agence Search, a Paris-based architecture office, has designed a new $16 million headquarters for the Human Sciences Institute: a venture established by the French government and Paris-Nord University to promote research into the arts, culture, health, and society. The 72,000-square-foot building is an exploration of cantilevers and levitation. Images: Agence Search Agence Search designed the new Human Sciences Institute building, in Paris. The 72,000-square-foot building is an exploration of cantilevers and levitation. Overlapping wooden panels and angled windows will visually break up the building’s east and west facades. Located on a remediated brownfield site in Paris’s La

Morphosis's 'Dragon' Takes Flight in Shanghai Santa Monica-based Morphosis is designing in China for the first time: a new headquarters for Giant Group Pharmaceuticals. The 180,000-square-foot building’s narrow, winding form will twist around canals and a man-made lake on eight-acre site that was once farmland in the outskirts of Shanghai. Firm principal Tim Christ says that its shape resembles that of a dragon, which is the nickname that his Chinese clients have given the project. Images: Courtesy Morphosis Morphosis designed a new headquarters for Giant Group Pharmaceuticals in Shanghai. Firm principal Tim Christ says that the building’s shape resembles that

OMA's Beijing Office Designs Residential Tower for Singapore Three years after establishing its Beijing office, the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has announced the first project spearheaded entirely by this branch: Singapore Scotts Tower, a 36-story, 68-unit condominium tower for the Far East Organization, Singapore’s largest private development company. Image: Courtesy OMA OMA’s Beijing office has designed Singapore Scotts Tower, a 36-story, 68-unit condominium building in Singapore. By eliminating most of the lower floors, OMA created a residential tower where essentially only top floors exist. Designed by partner Ole Scheeren and associate Eric Chang—both veterans of OMA’s Prada projects—the

Harlem has seen a flurry of residential and retail developments in recent years. Now the northern Manhattan neighborhood is slated to get its first major office building in three decades'a striking glass tower designed by Swanke Hayden Connell Architects (SHCA). Named the Harlem Park, the 340-foot-tall, 21-story building will be the neighborhood's tallest. Photo: Courtesy Crystal CG Renders Swanke Hayden Connell Architects have designed a 340-foot-tall office tower that will rise at the corner of Park Avenue and 125th Street—the first major new office building in Harlem since 1973 An illuminated volume at the building’s southwest corner acts like a

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 Rafael Viñoly’s “Walkie-Talkie,” a proposed 500-foot-tall skyscraper that the group English Heritage labeled London’s “ugliest and most oppressive” building, received the go ahead from government regulators this week, The Financial Times reported on July 11. A public inquiry was launched last winter in response to concerns that the cell-phone-shaped building might spoil views of the Tower of London and other landmarks. Construction could

In retrospect, the anointing of Renzo Piano to design an addition to the Kimbell Art Museum seems almost preordained. He worked in Louis I. Kahn’s Philadelphia office during the 1960s and already had three critically acclaimed art museums in Texas: the Nasher, Menil Collection, and Cy Twombly Gallery. Photo: Courtesy the Kimbell Art Museum The existing Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, designed by Louis I. Kahn, dates to 1972. The museum has hired Renzo Piano, who worked for Kahn, to design a new building across the street. Piano called the commission, which was announced in April, “an awesome challenge,

The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, also known as Taliesin, regained full accreditation last month from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC). Its future had been in doubt since the HLC placed it on notice in 2005, following falling enrollment and turmoil within the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which runs the school. Maintaining HLC accreditation is a prerequisite for National Architectural Accrediting Board accreditation, which the school currently has for its master's program. Photo: Courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona, is one of two campuses for the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. “The stakes

Although Rome is no longer the head of an empire, plenty of roads still lead to it. Many of its streets are now getting swept up in a radical redesign of the city’s urban fabric. As cars and scooters are slowly exorcised from the city’s center, tire-friendly asphalt is replacing the historic sanpietrini, or cobblestones, on major traffic arteries. The old sanpietrini will be used to resurface streets and piazzas that will be handed over to pedestrians at the project’s end. One of Rome's new pedestrian-only zones. Mayor Walter Veltroni outlined the “restyling” plan at a press event earlier this

It doesn’t take much to envision what Louis I. Kahn’s memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt will look like if it is eventually finished. It occupies a triangular, 2.8-acre site at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River. Construction crews have already shaped the earth into the exact dimensions and contours that Kahn specified in 1973: a raised lawn, to be flanked by two groves of trees and granite steps, that gently slopes down and culminates in an open-air, granite-walled room overlooking the United Nations. These walls will bear quotes from the president’s powerful Four Freedoms