The Dallas Morning News has reported that a consultant working for the owners of the Museum Tower, a 42-story residential building designed by Johnson Fain on the edge of the city's Arts District, has used fake social media accounts to try to sway public opinion about the project. Since its completion last year, the tower’s reflective glass facade has bounced sunlight into the skylit galleries of the Nasher Sculpture Center, a 2003 museum and sculpture garden designed by Renzo Piano, and led to the closing of its James Turrell "skyspace." Photo via Flickr / user jczart The Museum Tower by
This Trey Trahan-designed 28,000-square-foot building, set in the oldest settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, aims to resolve a number of conflicting demands—bringing contemporary design to a historic context and finding a common language for a program that involves both a history museum and a sports hall of fame. In deference to its neighbors on Natchitoches’ main public square, the $12.6-million museum maintains the area’s two-story scale and wraps itself in a louvered copper rainscreen that alludes to the shaded porches of Creole architecture. The architects pinched the copper louvers at various locations to create a pleated effect that animates the
Salt & Straw in Portland, Oregon Ice cream won’t solve global warming, but the sweet stuff can offer personal relief from the grips of a fiery summer day. Served in a thoughtfully conceived retail environment, a scoop of ice cream may even offer design inspiration. We went in search of such dessert oases on two continents. The journey revealed several parallel vernaculars within the project type, which range from artisanal to mad-scientist to whimsical. Click the image above to view a slide show.
The Shaheen-Portman energy bill has broad bipartisan backing, but many organizations have warned that they will fight the bill if a certain amendment is adopted. This story originally appeared on BuildingGreen.com. The historic Shaheen-Portman energy bill making its way through the U.S. Senate enjoys rare and broad bipartisan backing, with the likes of Earthjustice and the Vinyl Siding Institute both announcing full-throated support. But the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and more than 350 other organizations have warned that they will fight Shaheen-Portman (a.k.a. the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2013) if a certain amendment is adopted. Thanks
A common Freshkills vista: a former landfill, it is in the process of being capped and planted with native species. Since 1947, it has been one of New York’s most notorious locations: the Freshkills landfill, in Staten Island, the city’s least populated, least renowned borough. To many, it became a sort of running joke about the borough itself. After all, how seriously can you take a place whose best-known landmark is vast mounds of garbage? Now Freshkills is on its way to becoming Staten Island’s claim to fame rather than notoriety. The landfill stopped accepting trash in March 2001; now,
Ennead Architects, New York (with Langan Engineering, LERA, Atelier 10, Hargreaves, and BioHabitats) View larger image (PDF) Four finalists have been selected to advance to the second phase of a design competition called "For a Resilient Rockaway" (FAR ROC). Organized by the the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, L+M Development Partners, The Bluestone Organization, Triangle Equities, the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter, and Enterprise Community Partners, the competition brief asked designers to develop ideas for a new mixed-use, mixed-income, sustainable, and storm-resilient community on an 80-acre site on the Rockaway Peninsula, one of the
Video by Danny Forster Design Studio + dbox Rem Koolhaas has won the chance to redesign a large swath of Miami Beach. In a late Wednesday night vote, city commissioners chose a team led by Koolhaas to enlarge the Miami Beach Convention Center and redevelop its 52-acre site, a project that the Miami Herald called “the most important development deal in the history of Miami Beach.” Koolhaas beat out his onetime employee Bjarke Ingels, who had described their competition for the $1 billion-plus project as “oedipal.”The selection appeared to hinge less on architecture than on cost and other factors. Koolhaas’s