Laura Raskin, a former RECORD editor, writes about architecture. She recently moved with her family from Brooklyn, New York, to the Green Mountains of Vermont.
U.S. firm Moore Ruble Yudell is master planning a huge development for China's largest agriculture company. Click on the slide show button to view additional images. China's largest agriculture company has hired California-based Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners (MRY) to master plan a 1,215-hectare agricultural and residential development 30 miles southwest of Beijing. The project, called the Agricultural Eco Valley, will be carbon-neutral. With all of the recent tainted food scares in China, the client, COFCO, has a high stake in ensuring its brand is equated with food safety, says James Mary O'Connor, a MRY principal. "[COFCO sees] themselves
Corporate branding gets an illuminating twist in two projects where light is as essential as environmental graphics to convey company philosophy in satellite offices—one urban, the other suburban.
Smithgroup had completed four Microsoft Technology Centers (MTC) for the software giant by the time the multidisciplinary firm was asked to design a fifth, in Southfield, Michigan.
World Building of the Year (and Office): Media-TIC, Barcelona, Cloud 9, Spain The fourth annual World Architecture Festival (WAF) wrapped up in Barcelona on November 4. More than 1,300 people attended this year’s awards ceremony, which capped the three-day event, and got a peek at the 700-plus international projects entered. Seminars and keynote speakers touched on issues of “disaster” and “difference,” including David van der Leer, assistant curator of Architecture and Urban Studies at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, who also led the museum’s team in executing the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a touring project that wrapped up its New York City
Moshe Safdie was nibbling crab cakes in the recently completed, 150,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete headquarters he designed for the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.
Rendering Denmark’s second-largest city in 52 colors, artist Olafur Eliasson has perched his permanent installation “Your Rainbow Panorama” on delicate columns 12 feet above the roof of the ARoS Art Museum, in Aarhus.
Image courtesy Perkins + Will Shanghai Natural History Museum, Shanghai, China, Perkins + Will When it is completed at the end of 2012, Perkins + Will’s nautilus-shell-shaped Shanghai Natural History Museum will emerge from a proposed sculpture park and provide views of the surrounding city. Perkins + Will won the international competition in 2007 to design the museum, which will replace an existing natural history museum. The architects were inspired by the classical gardens in Suzhou with their water features, rock formations, and screened walls, which they abstracted in their design. “It’s important that the museum is in the old
Evoking the creations of a brilliant, futuristic insect, architect Michael Hansmeyer’s fantastical extrapolation of classical columns leaves no smooth surface untouched.