Rows of Victorian-era workers’ cottages line the streets in Richmond Hill, a residential neighborhood of Melbourne, Australia. While these humble dwellings do not appear intimidating, the surrounding historic district’s covenants make some architects cringe. Jon Clements, of Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, is among them. When given the opportunity to work there in 2001, afforded by his brother’s acquisition of a house, he faced a quandary of expressing originality within preservation’s restrictive prerogatives. Courtesy Jackson Clements Burrows Architects The house in question was a single-story weatherboard cottage in a significant state of decay. Clements’s brother hoped to build a new structure
Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, created a buzz in museum circles earlier this year when he expressed an interest in acquiring canonical, Midcentury Modernist houses for his institution's collection.
Renzo Piano is not bashful about his plan to raze century-old, masonry-clad factories and tenements in West Harlem and replace them with big, crisp buildings of steel and glass—a new campus for Columbia University that resembles Metropolis more than it does the existing neighborhood. “Cities are bound to change,” he says, “You have to accept it.” Images courtesy Renzo Piano Building Workshop / Skidmore Owings & Merrill Created by Renzo Piano and SOM, Columbia University’s new 17-acre campus will replace low-rise warehouses and tenements with glass-walled towers. Pressed for space at its original campus in Morningside Heights, 10 blocks south,
Ashley Scott Kelly and Rikako Wakabayashi, a Brooklyn-based architecture team, took home first prize in the Van Alen Institute's 'Envisioning Gateway' ideas competition this week. Launched last winter, the competition asked designers to re-conceive the National Recreation Area, a 26,607-acre waterfront zone along the New York-New Jersey coast that comprises one of the region's largest open spaces. It yielded 230 entrants from 23 different countries.