On Tuesday, a school board in Sarasota, Florida, voted to raze the Paul Rudolph-designed Riverview High School to make way for a parking lot. The narrow 3-2 vote ended a two-year long battle to save the structure, which opened in 1958, reported the Herald-Tribune newspaper. Preservationists were trying to raise money to convert the building into a community music center, a project anticipated to cost $15 to $20 million. As of this week, pledges totaled a mere $100,000, according to an article in The Architect’s Newspaper. "The time to show me the money was today,” said board member Shirley Brown
On May 27, less than two months after winning the 2008 Pritzker Prize, French architect Jean Nouvel defeated top firms such as Foster + Partners and Studio Daniel Libeskind in a competition to design a new iconic tower for La Défense, an aging business district on the outskirts of Paris.
If architecture is frozen music, as 19th-century poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, then this weekend it will sound like electro punk and rock-and-roll. London’s annual Exhibition Road Music Day, on June 21, will coincide with opening festivities for the third biennial London Festival of Architecture (LFA), which officially kicks off June 20. The month-long architecture event—devoted to London’s unique built landscape and avant-garde design community—will move across the city, stopping at five key hubs and featuring more than 600 installations and events.
Construction plans for the site of Le Corbusier¹s chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (1954) in Ronchamp, France, have ignited a vigorous debate, pitting leading architects against each other, and sparking disagreement between organizations seeking to preserve Le Corbusier¹s legacy.
An elephant house designed by Foster + Partners for the Copenhagen Zoo, in Denmark, opened this week, marking the firm’s first zoological building. “I don’t know how I can go back to designing office blocks for grumpy humans after this,” John Jennings, a lead architect on the project, told The Guardian newspaper. According to Foster’s office, the design was guided by research on the behavioral patterns of elephants. Because bull elephants tend to wander away from their herd, the designers created two sunken enclosures, both made of terra-cotta colored concrete and topped by glass domes. The fritted glass is meant
Images courtesy Rafael Viñoly Architects For the University of California, San Francisco, Rafael Viñoly Architects has designed a stem cell research facility that features terraced volumes with green roofs. The project is partly funded by taxpayers in California, where $271 million is earmarked for construction of stem cell labs throughout the state. It’s “one of the largest building programs ever dedicated to a new field of medical science,” says Robert Klein, chairman of California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. In August 2001, the Bush administration announced it was cutting off federal funding for most stem cell research. Three years later, in
Appended: June 13, 2008 Adding another mega-terminal to China’s aviation landscape, the Shenzhen Airport Authority announced it has selected Rome-based Fuksas Architects, run by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas, to design the new Terminal 3 at Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport.
One name that will be absent from RECORD’s 2008 list of the top 150 design firms is New Jersey-based CUH2A. The 400-member firm, which specializes in science and technology (S&T) projects such as hospitals and research facilities, is merging into HDR Architecture, in Omaha, Nebraska, to form what both companies say will be the world’s most comprehensive S & T design program. HDR has 1,300 employees and is the tenth highest grossing architecture and engineering firm in the world, with reported revenues of $260 million in 2007. The merger spawned from the company’s desire to expand its portfolio without slowing
Le Corbusier’s famous Ronchamp chapel (1954) in France is the center of a fierce online debate, reports Building Design. Cesar Pelli, Richard Meier, and Rafael Moneo are among the 1,500 people who have signed an online petition to block Renzo Piano’s scheme for new visitor facilities and accommodations for nuns at the landmark site. The Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris initiated the petition. In response, Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW), and its client, L’Association Oeuvre Notre-Dame du Haut, have launched a counter-petition—and have collected nearly 250 signatures, including those of Peter Cook, David Adjaye, and Massimiliano Fuksas, according to the
RSS