The Harvard Art Museums, during renovation and expansion, showing the new addition. From Quincy Street, you would never know that the overhauled Harvard University Art Museums, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lurks behind the puritanically aloof facade of the neo-Georgian Fogg Museum. Even the long boxy volume of Renzo Piano’s addition, which hoists itself one-story above Prescott Street, behind the rear of the Fogg, doesn’t fully disclose its size, even with showy glass cubes poking out at either end. The Fogg is now just one of three merged collections that opened November 16. To accommodate a daunting array of competing programmatic agendas
Marmol Radziner has restored and adapted E. Stewart Williams' 1961 Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan building for its use as a museum. If you’re looking for local heroes, there are several in Palm Springs with the name Williams. E. Stewart Williams (1909-2005) was an Ohio-born architect who moved to the desert town in 1946, and within a year had designed a house for Frank Sinatra, converting the singer to modernism. During the next four decades, Williams, practicing with his brother and father as Williams, Williams and Williams or, as the locals called it, Williams Cubed, designed dozens of buildings
If sustainability is a three-legged stool of environmental, economic, and social performance, then LEED is a bit wobbly: historically, the rating system has not taken on community welfare with the same breadth and depth as it has climate change and resource conservation. “It’s not as if social-equity benefit was absent from LEED,” says U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) vice president of LEED Brendan Owens, citing how power-plant emissions disproportionately impact marginalized communities. “But we knew we could do more.” To begin righting the imbalance, USGBC posited social equity as one of seven system goals for LEED v4, and formed a
Perkins+Will maintains a Precautionary List, an index of building materials that can harm the human body. While mercury and lead’s impacts may be well understood, those of one ubiquitous set of chemicals have not been: flame-retardant chemicals. They are common in many architectural materials, from upholstery to insulation, and they slow the spread of fire in otherwise flammable substances. However, they also tend to escape into the environment and become absorbed in the human body, where they don’t break down. What results is a “body burden”: a cache of chemicals that has been linked to cancer, loss of IQ, and
Construction activity in the higher-education sector is beginning to slowly rebound as the stock market improves and college and university endowments, along with gifts from alumni and other benefactors, grow. Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].
During this season of Michael Graves, the architect's work is being celebrated in exhibitions and is the subject of a daylong symposium. Michael Graves Denver Central Library Assessing the legacy of Michael Graves is no small task. During a 50-year career, Graves has completed so many projects that the current retrospective at Grounds for Sculpture (an indoor-outdoor art park near Trenton, New Jersey) requires several buildings. Some parts of the exhibition are organized by decade—starting with the all-white houses of the 1970s and ending with the anything-but-white buildings of recent decades; others are arranged by category (toasters alone could fill
The film crew, including Bassett (center) talks to John Boiler, CEO of 72andSunny, a design and advertising agency. By day the CEO of design and brand strategy firm Bassett & Partners, Tom Bassett moonlights as an occasional filmmaker. His first film, the 18-minute Connecting released in 2012, was co-produced by Microsoft Design and focused on the “Internet of Things.” His latest work is more ambitious. Briefly, a 26-minute film released for free online last month that explores how some uber-creatives work with, bend, manipulate, and subvert the document that kicks it all off—the project brief—to accomplish great end products. “We
Paul Rudolph's Sarasota High School—a boldly conceived 1958-60 addition to an older building, with folded concrete planes that emphasize the play of light and shadow—is being restored. Sarasota’s preservation community is feeling the pressure. With no ironclad protections in place, the Gulf Coast Florida city—which, thanks largely to Paul Rudolph, who maintained a presence there from 1941 until 1962, became an epicenter of architectural ingenuity—is in a race to save what’s left of its repository of significant mid-20th century homes, schools, and churches. Among the fallen: Rudolph’s elegant, skeletal steel Riverview High School, designed in 1958 and demolished, after an
The Fulton Center's metal-clad oculus can be seen emerging from Grimshaw’s steel and glass station. The 125-year-old Corbin building, to the right of the station, was renovated and provides another entrance into the station. For months, commuters have been traveling through the almost complete Fulton Center, the transit hub conceived for Lower Manhattan in the wake of the September 11 attacks. But much of the $1.4 billion complex was off limits, hidden by temporary partitions and construction tarps as final construction and systems testing wrapped up. But the tarps and partitions have come down and nearly a decade after the
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