In a move expected for several months, Foster + Partners announced today that is expanding its shareholder base to include more employees as well as its first external investor, the private equity firm 3i. Although the London-based firm is remaining mum on how much the deal with 3i costs, the Financial Times reported earlier this week that it is worth between $800 million and $1 billion. Lord Norman Foster founded his practice 40 years ago. In an interview yesterday with Tom Sawyer, an editor of Engineering News Record, RECORD’s sister magazine, the firm’s current financial director Gary Lawley said that
Editor’s note: You may read the news digest below or listen to it, plus other news headlines from ArchiecturalRecord.com, as a podcast by clicking this link. Click the play button to begin | Click here to download The newly restored Griffith Park Observatory isn't the only architectural gem to dodge the bullet of this week's wildfires in Los Angeles. Just outside the park are Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House as well as residences by Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler, Gregory Ain, Craig Ellwood, and Raphael Soriano'what the Los Angeles Times described on May 11 as 'one of the most important concentrations
If you’re a professional association representing more than 81,800 members, such as the American Institute of Architects (AIA), it helps to plan ahead—way ahead. So while more than 21,000 architects were in San Antonio last week for the AIA’s 2007 National Convention and Design Exposition, delegates held elections for the 2009 president as well as other leadership slots for 2008. The results? Marvin J. Malecha, FAIA, won the presidency; Peter J. Arsenault, AIA, and Clark Manus, FAIA, were elected vice presidents; and Hal P. Munger, FAIA, ran unopposed for the office of treasurer. The vice presidents and treasurer will serve
People are treating the atmosphere like “an open sewer,” former vice president Al Gore contends, and the best way to stop them is with a pollution tax. Gore laid out just such a penalty system, as well as financial incentives for not polluting, during his keynote address at the AIA’s 2007 National Convention and Design Exposition in San Antonio on Saturday. It was a speech tailored to his audience, using little of the same content from “An Inconvenient Truth”—his Academy Award-winning documentary—and with good reason. “Architects have by far the greatest opportunity to affect how our society deals with the
By accident or design, Creative Time has helped catalyze the transformation of New York City’s built environment. This nonprofit group has sponsored and commissioned public art to energize buildings and streetscapes since 1974. Now it is looking outside the Big Apple. It recently sponsored a video installation along four blocks of the Strip in Las Vegas, and this spring will announce plans for an ambitious project in New Orleans—a city in transition that, like New York in the 1970s, could use a big dose of transformative art. Photo: Courtesy Creative Time “Real estate is an important part of the history
In China, the business practice of bootlegging is not just confined to DVDs and Louis Vuitton handbags. Foreign architects have discovered that their designs, even their company names, are also attracting copycats. But some are beginning to fight back. In one of the first cases in which the government is allowing a foreign firm to sue a Chinese business, Woodhead International, Australia’s second-largest design firm, filed a lawsuit in Shanghai earlier this year against its former local partner on the basis of “unfair competition.” Very few of these cases ever made it to a Chinese court in the past because
An estimated 25,000 architects descended on San Antonio, May 3, for the American Institute of Architects’ 2007 National Convention and Design Exposition. In keeping with this year’s theme, “Growing Beyond Green,” president RK Stewart, FAIA, said at Thursday’s opening general session that the AIA is purchasing clean, green power to offset carbon emissions generated during the three-day event at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. (More details about this transaction will follow on the web.) Click the play button to begin | Click here to download “Steady growth forever is the creed of cancer cells and the economists,” said ecologist
Michael A. Fitts, FAIA Photo: Courtesy the State of Tennessee Michael A. Fitts, FAIA, didn’t think he would receive the Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture when he helped launch the prize in 1991. Back then, the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on Public Architecture had a threefold objective: to recognize advocacy and achievement in public architecture; to raise the stature of public architects; and to promote architecture in the mainstream and in the profession. But fittingly, after 36 years pursuing exactly these goals as the state architect of Tennessee, Fitts is being lauded with one of two
Recognizing the role that architects can play in lessening the impact of climate change on the built environment, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has awarded the 2007 Latrobe Prize to a team of architects and engineers who are researching waterfront development and the ramifications of severe urban flooding. Guy Nordenson, founder of Guy Nordenson Associates and a Princeton University structural engineering professor, leads the seven-member group. Also on the team are Stan Allen, AIA, dean of the Princeton University School of Architecture; Catherine Seavitt, AIA, and James Smith, of Princeton University; Michael Tantala, of Tantala Associates; and Adam Yarinsky,
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