A renovation and expansion of a midcentury academic tower restores a master's legacy. Preservation and Modernism might seem to have contradictory goals, but not for architects Bruner/Cott. The Cambridge, Massachusetts'based firm is renovating and restoring Boston University's Law Tower and has just completed a 93,000-square-foot addition at its base.
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
On October 31st, the Wood Innovation and Design Centre (WIDC)—a 96-foot-tall, 51,000 square foot structure built almost entirely out of engineered wood components—opened in Prince George, British Columbia.
A building that produces all the energy it requires, without sacrifices to its operations or concessions of human comfort, might sound like pie in the sky. But according to the New Buildings Institute (NBI), 160 commercial and institutional buildings in the U.S. are targeting or have achieved net zero energy—meaning that, over the course of a year, they produce at least as much energy from renewable sources as they consume.
The artist toiling in solitude has long been a romantic ideal. But it rarely holds in reality, especially for those who work at the civic scale, making pieces that straddle the blurry boundary between art and architecture. These artists rarely work alone, typically relying on a host of collaborators to realize their visions, including studio assistants, fabricators, and even city officials.
As a building material, wood's appeal has endured at least as long as humans have been constructing shelters. However, since the industrial revolution, the range of potential building materials has expanded, putting wood at a disadvantage—until now, that is.
By Russell Fortmeyer and Charles D. Linn. Images Publishing, April 2014, 224 pages, $78. Smart Skins Despite its title, Kinetic Architecture is not a book about buildings with components that literally move. Instead, its authors, Russell Fortmeyer and Charles D. Linn (both former editors at Architectural Record), investigate projects with envelopes that dynamically respond—in ways both visible and invisible—to their surroundings in order to modulate the interior environment, conserve energy, and enhance the comfort of occupants. Linn, an architect and director of communications for the University of Kansas School of Architecture, and Fortmeyer, an electrical engineer and sustainable-technology specialist at
Architects warm to a project delivery method that makes them more integral to the construction process and reasserts their control over the final product.
Fact or fiction, it is a common perception that the design and construction process is plagued with problems: cost and schedule overruns, under-detailed design drawings, shoddy workmanship, disputes, and litigation.
When asked if his latest project, a vacation home in the Idaho resort town of Sun Valley, is at all based on a local vernacular, Tuscon-based architect Rick Joy bristles.
This interview appears in the March/April 2014 issue of GreenSource. Stephen Selkowitz, photographed by Eric Millette on February 11, 2014, at LBNL's FLEXLab in Berkeley, California. Stephen Selkowitz is leader of the windows and envelope-materials group and senior advisor for building science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California. From 1985 to 2011, he headed LBNL’s building-technologies department, where he was the driving force behind a just-completed plug-and-play testing complex, the Facility for Low Energy Experiments (FLEXLab). Here users can mock up and evaluate the performance of proposed designs with actual building components such as cladding, windows, lighting,