Entrepreneur Ivan Pun and New York-based architecture firm Leong Leong have transformed a transit shed into a light-filled space showcasing rotating art exhibitions, design-oriented retail, a restaurant, and other programming. The gritty, textured exterior of the shed contrasts with the light, minimal interior. To visit Yangon, Myanmar, now is to experience a city in flux. The downtown riverfront, once a bustling cosmopolitan dream, is home to streets lined with stately old colonial buildings, full of lost history and oozing with potential. Amidst the recent handover of power from the military to a civilian government, rustlings of revitalization projects
Museum curators tend to stay behind the scenes, especially when high-profile artists are involved. But the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, which runs through October 19, has been so lavishly praised that its curator, Scott Rothkopf, couldn’t stay out of the spotlight if he tried.
The recovery of the office-building construction market began slowly at first, lagging behind other commercial property types. But the sector's rebound is beginning to pick up energy as U.S. job growth improves. Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].
Architects seeking safe, sustainable materials for their buildings have often had to operate in either an information vacuum or wade through an array of rating systems that can be burdensome and baffling. The complexity of supply chains sometimes means that no one is certain what substances a product contains; in other cases, a known material passes muster with one program while raising red flags with another. Manufacturers, too, struggle with the discrepancies and redundancies of different programs' reporting requirements. Now, with support from the U.S. Green Building Council, four major green-manufacturing organizations are striving to simplify the process of assessing
This article first appeared on ENR. Four months after URS agreed to an activist investor's demand for a reshaped board and new strategic options to boost its share price, the firm is set to be acquired by AECOM. The deal, worth about $6 billion in cash, stock, and assumed debt, would keep URS intact. The firms, which announced the transaction on July 13, said it would create the latest global giant, particularly in oil, gas, power, and government services, with more than $19 billion in revenue and 95,000 employees in 150 countries. The $56.31 per share price is about 19
Two of Paul Rudolph's houses are for sale, and they may be joined by his Orange County Government Center. Via michiganmodern.org Paul Rudolph's Frank and Anne Parcells House (1970) in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, is for sale. Its projecting rooms resemble the architect's Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York. Two buildings by Paul Rudolph—houses in Michigan and Massachusetts—are on the market, and they may soon be joined by a third: the Orange County Government Center, the sprawling structure in Goshen, New York, that has been the cause of hand wringing by preservationists for over a decade, and has been
Designed by Coyula and other colleagues, El Parque de los Mártires Universitarios, completed in 1967, stands at a major intersection down the hill from the University of Havana's steps, where it remains one of the city's most powerful monuments to the revolution. The celebrated Cuban architect and urban planner Mario Coyula Cowley died in Havana on July 7, after a long battle with cancer. He was 79 years old. During his career Coyula was director of the School of Architecture at the Instituto Superior Politécnico José Antonio Echeverria (ISPJAE), head of the Group for the Integral Development of the Capital,
At 57 feet square and 18 feet high, the maze occupies the eastern third of the National Building Museum's Great Hall. The vast Great Hall of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., is as tricky to program as it is impressive to behold. More than 300 feet long and several stories high, the Renaissance Revival hall is often rented out for private events, and its columns and arcades provide a suitably grand backdrop during gala dinners. But the space tends to swallow up lectures and other small-scale public programs. To make better use of it, the museum installed
Protestors gather around the National Stadium on Saturday, hoping to save it from demolition. On Saturday, placard-wearing protestors took to the streets of central Tokyo and peacefully encircled the 50,000-seat Kasumigaoka National Stadium designed by Mitsuo Katayama and erected for the 1964 Olympics. In preparation for hosting the games again in 2020, the vintage structure is being readied for demolition followed by replacement with a futuristic, Zaha Hadid-designed arena several times its size. But a collection of architects and lay people alike are hoping to convince the Japan Sport Council (JSC) to do otherwise. Japan does not have a great
The role of Jews in creating and popularizing post-war modernism has largely escaped attention, but it is now the subject of a new exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco. Eichler model home advertisement, c. 1960. Are Jews particularly likely to embrace new forms of artistic expression? The ongoing coverage of collections looted by the Nazis strongly suggests that, when it came to avant-garde painting, Jewish collectors were essential. So too for architecture: Can it be coincidence that Mies’s greatest clients, the Tugendahts, and le Corbusier’s, the Savoyes, were Jewish? In America, the Kaufmann family commissioned houses
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