Architectural Record

Happy New Year

2010-01-01T15:45:00.000-08:00

All the best.

V-Ray® 1.50 Service Pack 4a for 3ds Max

2010-01-01T15:42:00.000-08:00

As of December 16th 2009, the newest build, V-Ray® 1.50 Service Pack 4a for 3ds Max®, is available from the download section of the Chaos Group site.

The upgrade is free of charge for all current V-Ray for 3ds Max customers of Chaos Group.

The V-Ray® 1.50 Service Pack 4a is compatible with Autodesk® 3ds Max® 8, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 9, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2008, 3ds Max® 2009, Autodesk® 3ds Max Design 2009, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2010, Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2010.

The new V-Ray build supports both 32-bit and 64-bit OS.

It includes the following modified features:

• Added support for projection mapping when doing texture baking;
• Added new option to link the V-Ray VFB to PDPlayer;

And several bug fixes:

• Turning off "Affect specular" for a dome light made it invisible to reflections as well;
• Fixed a crash when importing a particular .vrmesh file;
• Fixed crash with VRayFastSSS2 material with VRayDirt map and a standard light with VRayShadowMap;
• The "prepass samples" option in the motion blur rollout did not work;
• Fixed stuck buckets with VRayEnvironmentFog and mesh gizmos;
• Fixed issues with VRayEnvironmentFog and mesh gizmos with modifiers;
• User could not remove gizmos/lights from VRayEnvironmentFog;
• ParticleFlow instancing did not render all mapping channels of original mesh;
• Fixed crash with VFB region render when region is outside of image;
• Turned off by default the option to save the DR servers to the scene (caused slowdown on scene save if servers are offline);
• Fixed some licensing issues.

Note, if you have downloaded V-Ray SP4 for 3ds Max we strongly recommend to upgrade it with V-Ray SP4a for 3ds Max because of the licensing issues.
You can receive additional information about this from our Support Team at: vray@chaosgroup.com

The winners of this year’s Heinz Awards

2009-10-27T23:19:00.000-07:00

The Heinz Foundation announced the winners of this year’s Heinz Awards with a special focus on environmental advocacy. For the fifteenth anniversary of the awards, given in memory of the late Senator John Heinz, the foundation is honoring the senator’s long-standing commitment to the environment. Winners include Robert Berkebile, FAIA, sustainable designer and planner, and Ashok Gadgil, Ph.D., a professor and leader in climate science.
Please check http://archrecord.construction.com for more information.

Vancouver Convention Centre

2009-09-26T00:37:00.000-07:00

(photo by Bobak Ha'Eri)
(photo by Buchanan-Hermit)

The Vancouver Convention Centre is the largest convention centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is also one of Canada's largest convention centres. With the the new West Building opened in 2009, it now has 473,523 ft² (43,991 m²) of meeting space.

Just a wield Paris

2009-09-26T00:28:00.000-07:00

We comes from and go to some where in Paris.

MVRDV Designs Super-Sized Project - TEDA - For Tianjin

2009-08-03T23:09:00.000-07:00

By Sebastian Howard
A version of this story appeared in Architectural Record’s Chinese edition.

Dutch architectural firm MVRDV and real estate developer TEDA Vantone have teamed up to build a large residential development in the center of Tianjin, a city of 11.7 million people in China.

Called TEDA, the 240,000-square-meter development (approximately 2.5 million square feet) will comprise 10 towers, with nearly 6,000 residences. Located on the banks of the Haihe River, it will sit adjacent to the new Yongle Bridge and the Tianjin Eye, a 110-meter-high Ferris wheel. The entire project is slated for completion later this year; as of February, four concrete high-rises were already built.

The development is expected to house more than 18,000 people in a neighborhood that was, until recently, filled with dilapidated, low-rise social housing blocks. According to MVRDV spokesman Jan Knikker, none of the buildings were “worth saving—and we are admirers of Modernist socialist housing.” MVRDV increased the area’s density by building up rather than out: the towers’ modest footprints make room for more public and retail spaces than were possible with the previous configuration.

TEDA is unusual in that the project’s lead designer Wenchian Shi (working under MVRDV principals Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries) incorporated some of the neighborhood’s extant geography into the development. Typically with new construction projects, “you have a tabula rasa in China—you just remove everything,” says Knikker. With TEDA, however, MVRDV kept the existing street pattern and trees and essentially “built a new city around them,” explains Knikker. Although the developer was initially skeptical about the costs associated with this approach, MVRDV was able to convince the firm of their value.

While MVRDV was heavily involved in the design and planning process, local firm Tianjin Architects & Consulting Engineers took the reins as ground broke on the project. At this advanced stage of construction, the Dutch firm is mostly involved in quality control, while the Chinese firm is doing the lion’s share of the work. “It’s very important to have a local partner architect,” Knikker says. “The local architect is very good at communicating with the crew, and they know the regulations.”

David Woodhouse Architects Wins Burnham Memorial Design Competition

2009-08-03T23:07:00.001-07:00

By John Scappini

David Woodhouse Architects has won first place in a design competition for a permanent memorial in Chicago to Daniel Burnham. The program—formally known as the Burnham Memorial Design Competition—was sponsored by the AIA Chicago Foundation and funded by the Richard H. Driehaus Charitable Lead Trust.

The winning design for the memorial site, which is located at the southeast corner of Grant Park, includes a corner formed of two walls that depict elements of Burnham's plans for the city on the exterior and reflect the skyline on the other side, as well as a lawn sloping down to the lakefront and an overlook.

Fundraising for the $5 million project has already begun, and it could be built as early as 2011, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

NCARB Five medalists of service

2009-08-03T23:03:00.000-07:00

By John Scappini
Five people received the President's Medal for Distinguished Service from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) at the organization's 90th annual meeting, held in Chicago last month. The medals were awarded by Gordon E. Mills, the 2008–2009 president of NCARB.

The medalists are:

* Erica Brown, director of the Architect Registration Examination (ARE)
* James Cramer, chairman and CEO of the Greenway Group and founding president of the Design Futures Council
* William Dikis, a member of the Iowa Architectural Examining Board from 1983 to 1992 and president of the Iowa board for three of those years
* Glenda Loving, executive secretary of the Iowa Architectural Examining Board
* Edward F. Tredo V, one of the longest-serving nonarchitect members of the ARE subcommittee

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design

2009-02-11T22:37:00.000-08:00

Six projects were selected for the 2009 Institute Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design. SOM is a big winner.

1. Foshan Donghuali Master Plan, Guangdong, China
by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP

2. The Central Park of the New Radiant City
by Lee + Mundwiler Architects

3. Orange County Great Park, Irvine, California
by TEN Arquitectos

4. Between Neighborhood Watershed & Home, Fayetteville, Arkansas
by University of Arkansas Community Design Center

5. Southworks Lakeside Chicago Development, Chicago
by Sasaki Associates, Inc. and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP

6.Treasure Island Master Plan, San Francisco
by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP

TVCC by OMA on fire

2009-02-11T22:07:00.000-08:00

TVCC (Television culture center) was on fire on Chinese traditional Yuanxiao festival. As a part of CCTV complex, TVCC was designed by OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture).
The 159-meter (522-foot) TVCC has played a key role in “transforming a part of Beijing that had been an industrial area”. Along with CCTV, TVCC has become major landmark and are central to the creation of a new business district of Beijing.

The follwoing is an rendering for CCTV and TVCC towers.

2009 AIA Young Architects Award

2009-02-01T01:26:00.000-08:00

2009 AIA Young Architects Award recognizes individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership and made significant contributions to the profession early in their careers. Architects who have been licensed 10 years or fewer, regardless of their age, are eligible.

Following is the list of the winners.

Matthew Bremer, AIA

Nominated by the AIA New York Chapter, Matthew Bremer is a recipient of that chapter’s New Practices Award. In addition, he founded and co-chairs the chapter’s New Practices Committee and sits on the chapter’s Oculus Committee. “Matthew Bremer is a young architect who combines recognized and celebrated talent with a willingness to support the profession and provide mentorship for others,” writes Mark E. Strauss, FAIA, a senior partner at FXFOWLE. Letters of support from Bremer also called out his attention to detail and design talent.

Angela Brooks, AIA

A principal with Pugh + Scarpa and cofounder of the nonprofit Livable Places, Angela Brooks is devoted to creating “long-lasting, enduring, and beautiful spaces for both our residents and the neighborhoods in which we work,” writes Joan Ling, executive director of the Community Corporation of Santa Monica. Brooks has been involved with projects that have received seven national AIA awards and more than 25 other AIA design awards. Those projects include the Colorado Court affordable apartments and the Solar Umbrella home. “I believe Angela has the ability to lead the profession in the direction of a new paradigm: combining design, sustainability, and social concern,” writes David Baker, FAIA.

Matthew Kreilich, AIA

From his studio days at the University of Minnesota, Matthew Kreilich has been recognized as an outstanding, holistic designer. He is also noted for his pro bono work for the Tony Award-winning Theatre de la Jeune Lune, renovating its lobby beautifully on a shoestring budget. Theater Director Steve Richardson writes that working “with an artist both terrifically talented and fiscally responsible” was a great experience for the client. Julie Snow, FAIA—principal at Julie Snow Architects, where Kreilich works—adds that Kreilich has demonstrated his “design voice,” along with his knowledge of construction and how architecture operates in the world.

Haril Pandya, AIA

A superior project manager/designer at CBT, Haril Pandya is also very active in the AIA, being a driving force behind the creation of the Boston Society of Architect’ first Young Professionals Advisory Council. He also has been active in community outreach: Pandya has worked with Habitat for Humanity in Boston, designing an affordable, sustainable prototype and managing its construction, in addition to doing other pro bono work that extends overseas. Working with the Blackstone Group, a large developer, Pandya has overseen more than $100 million in design and construction projects. “He masterfully brings people together, both young and experienced, to form a team to tackle each of our assignments,” writes Richard Bertman, FAIA, and Charles Tseckares, FAIA. Pandya also has used his talents in music and filmmaking to market for CBT and its clients.

Jinhee Park, AIA

Jinhee Park and the firm she co-founded—Single Speed Design—are widely published, including being awarded the first Metropolis Next Generation Prize. “Park is among those few uncommon young architects whose contributions and skills will shape our profession for decades to come,” writes Diane Georgopulos, FAIA, on behalf of the Boston Society of Architects nomination. The firm’s Big Dig House (2006), in Massachusetts, drew particular acclaim from Susan S. Szenasy, Metropolis editor in chief. “Their project, recycling the remnants of Boston’s Big Dig into beautiful housing, so impressed the judges that the proposal, happily, came to represent the high standards we have since then put on our awards program,” Szenasy writes.

Camilo Parra, AIA

Recognized widely in Houston as a designer and builder of upscale and affordable townhouse developments, Camilo Parra also conducts a studio at a design school and volunteers in his community. “One of the unique things about Camilo is that he not only has his own practice, but develops his own projects; last year alone Parra Design Group developed 70 housing units,” points out Brian M. Malarkey, AIA, president of the AIA Houston chapter. Parra is a member of the Houston Minority Business Council and the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. As such, he “serves as an outstanding role model for the students at our historically black university,” adds Ikhlas Sabouni, dean of the Prairie View A&M University School of Architecture.

Tania Salgado, AIA

A design principal with RNL, Tania Salgado has a refined acumen for process and research as precedents to high-quality design. “She has truly excelled in every aspect of professional practice,” writes RNL President Richard L. von Luhrte, FAIA, “from design through client development, practice management, and community service.” In addition to volunteer work with numerous Denver nonprofits, Salgado is an active leader in the AIA at the local and state levels. Currently, she serves as AIA Denver president-elect. Mary Morissette, AIA, the AIA Colorado 2009 President-elect writes: “While Tania has attained a highly impressive list of credentials and accolades in her career, I believe her most influential contributions lie in the future.”

Michael W. Schellin, AIA

Michael Schellin “is a very talented young practitioner who is positioning himself for leadership both as a firm principal and member of AIA,” writes James W. O’Brien, FAIA, in his nomination. In addition to his committee work with AIA Minnesota, Schellin is his region’s liaison with the national Young Architects Forum. “Mike’s commitment to the profession, as well as his involvement in AIA at the local and national levels, make him a person to watch in the future,” writes Greenway Group Chair James P. Cramer, Hon. AIA.

AIA Announces 2009 Honor Awards

2009-02-01T01:22:00.000-08:00

By Braulio Agnese at ARCHITECT Magazine

The American Institute of Architects has announced the recipients of the 2009 Institute Honor Awards, which recognize excellence in architecture, interior architecture, and urban design. All 25 winning projects—chosen from more than 700 entries—will be celebrated at the AIA's national convention this April.

ARCHITECTURE
Jury: David Lake (chair), Lake|Flato Architects; Carlton Brown, Full Spectrum of New York; Michael Lehrer, Lehrer Architects; James Malanaphy III, The 160 Group; Paul Mankins, Substance; Anna McCorvey, AIAS director, Northeast Quad; Anne Schopf, Mahlum Architects; Suman Sorg, Sorg and Associates; Denise Thompson, Francis Cauffman.

* Basilica of the Assumption , Baltimore, John G. Waite Associates
* Cathedral of Christ the Light , Oakland, Calif., Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
* Charles Hostler Student Center , Beirut, Lebanon, VJAA
* The Gary Comer Youth Center , Chicago, John Ronan Architects
* Horno3: Museo del Acero, Monterey, Mexico, Grimshaw Architects
* The Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life, New Orleans, VJAA
* The New York Times Building, New York City, Renzo Piano Building Workshop and FXFowle Architects
* Plaza Apartments, San Francisco, Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects and Paulett Taggart Architects, in association
* Salt Point House, Salt Point, New York, Thomas Phifer and Partners

INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE
Jury: Mark Sexton (chair), Krueck & Sexton Architects; Joan Blumenfeld, Perkins+Will; Elisabeth Knibbe, Quinn Evans Architects; Arvind Manocha, Los Angeles Philharmonic Association; Kevin Sneed, OTJ Architects.

* Barclays Global Investors Headquarters, San Francisco, Studios Architecture
* Chronicle Books, San Francisco, Mark Cavagnero Associates
* The Heckscher Foundation for Children, New York City, Christoff:Finio architecture
* Jigsaw, Washington, D.C., David Jameson Architect
* R.C. Hedreen, Seattle, NBBJ
* School of American Ballet, New York City, Diller Scofidio + Renfro
* Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, New York City, Lyn Rice Architects
* Tishman Speyer Corporate Headquarters, New York City, Lehman Smith McLeish
* Townhouse, Washington, D.C., Robert Gurney
* World Headquarters for IFA, Yarmouth Port, Mass., DesignLAB Architects

REGIONAL AND URBAN DESIGN
Jury: Jonathan Marvel (chair), Rogers Marvel Architects; Samuel Assefa, City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development; Tim Love, Utile; Ivenue Love-Stanley, Stanley Love-Stanley; Stephanie Reich, City of Glendale Planning Division.

* Foshan Donghuali Master Plan, Guangdong, China, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
* Orange County Great Park, Irvine, Calif., TEN Arquitectos
* Between Neighborhood Watershed & Home, Fayetteville, Ark., University of Arkansas Community Design Center
* Southworks Lakeside Chicago Development, Chicago, Sasaki Associates and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
* The Central Park of the New Radiant City, Guangming New Town, China, Lee + Mundwiler Architects
* Treasure Island Master Plan, San Francisco, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

library and learning centre by zaha hadid architects

2008-12-21T21:31:00.000-08:00

Zaha Hadid Architects won the competition of designing a library and learning centre for the University of Economics & Business in Vienna, Austria.

2009 Driehaus Prize

2008-11-28T23:37:00.000-08:00

The 2009 winner of the Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture is Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil. Most of El-Wakil's work has been in the Middle East. Early in his career he worked with the legendary Hassan Fathy for five years. During the 1970s and '80s, he completed more than 15 mosques in Saudi Arabia using traditional masonry construction techniques. From 1991 to 2001, El-Wakil maintained an office in Miami, where he taught at the University of Miami. Since 2001, the architect has divided his time among various Middle Eastern capitals.

ANARA TOWER

2008-11-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

Anara Tower, an ambitious project crowned with an eye-catching propeller-shaped peak,designed by Atkins Designs Studio and Developed by Tameer Holding Investment. the skyscraper will be aiming for LEED silver certification when construction begins next year.
The 125 story Anara Tower is a mixed-use high-rise that will features residences, offices, retail spaces, a hotel, and a world-class art gallery.

Construction is currently slated to begin at the end of 2009.

The Watercube Wins Australia’s Highest Architecture Award

2008-11-09T21:53:00.000-08:00

The Chinese National Aquatic Center, better known as the Watercube, recently won the most prestigious architecture award from the Australian Institute of Architecture! Although not officially a cube, the incredible aquatics facility is the 2008 winner of the Jorn Utzon Award for International Architecture. The design and construction of the memorable facility was a collaboration between Australian firm PTW Architects, Chinese practices CSCEC and CCDI, and international firm Arup.

MAD Tianjin project - Sinosteel International Plaza

2008-08-03T21:12:00.000-07:00

Sinosteel International Plaza designed by the young dynamic architectural firm - MAD now is under construction.

zaragoza bridge pavilion

2008-07-06T22:05:00.000-07:00

The Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion by Zaha Hadid Architects in Zaragoza, Spain.

The Strata Tower by Asymptote

2008-06-04T20:18:00.000-07:00

Strata Tower, a forty-story, luxury residential building designed by New York-based architects Asymptote in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Principal Architects: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Structural and MEP Engineer: ARUP, New York
Façade Consultant: Front Inc., New York
Building Information Modeling (BIM) Consultant: Gehry Technologies, Los Angeles & New York
Environmental Designers: Atelier Ten, New York & London

The 2008 Top Ten Green Projects

2008-05-11T22:18:00.000-07:00

News from AIA - The American Institute of Architects has selected the top ten examples of sustainable architecture and green design solutions that protect and enhance the environment.

Aldo Leopold Legacy Center
The Kubala Washatko Architects, Inc., Cedarburg, WI
Aldo Leopold Legacy Center" />
Completed in spring, 2007, the 12,000sf building includes office and meeting spaces, interpretive hall, archive and workshop. The Center was envisioned as a small complex of structures organized around a central courtyard. This design provides flexibility in managing energy use based on program requirements, creates outdoor spaces for work and gathering, and reduces the scale of the buildings on site. The Aldo Leopold Legacy Center is the first building recognized by LEED as carbon-neutral in operation.

Cesar Chavez Library
Line and Space, LLC, Tucson, AZ
Cesar Chavez Library" />
In order to protect the outdoor and indoor space from the sun’s radiation, the building uses extensive overhangs to create a ‘hat’ in the desert. The scarcity of water led to roof top rainwater collection for irrigation, while water reducing fixtures are used indoors. Always a concern in the desert, an area of high consumption, the building was carefully cut into the site and the excavated material was used to berm the building for further thermal mass. The windows are also properly shaded to reduce solar gains.

Discovery Center at South Lake Union
The Miller/Hull Partnership, Seattle, WA
Discovery Center at South Lake Union" />
A primary program element for this particular center, alongside numerous other environmental goals, was to create a building and core that could provide adaptable exhibit space, capable of being reconfigured and reused for the presentation of multiple residential neighborhoods throughout the South Lake Union Region over a lengthy period of time. In addition to creating flexible interior space, the building itself was designed to be demountable, separating at three integrated joints to break into four separate modules capable of being transported along surface streets.

Pocono Environmental Education Center
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Wilkes-Barre, PA

The building is designed to reinforce the mission of environmental stewardship and education. Through careful site and materials selection, analysis and design of building systems, the structure outwardly expresses the principles of sustainable design. The building is a flexible, multi-purpose gathering space for dining, meetings, lectures and other environmental learning activities. As part of the site design, native grasses were planted to provide a landscape that is low maintenance and integrates the project into its natural surroundings.

Garthwaite Center for Science and Art, Cambridge School of Weston
Architerra, Inc., Boston, MA
Garthwaite Center for Science and Art, Cambridge School of Weston" />
The facility is designed to advance sustainability, creating an exemplar and educational tool through a design process that engaged the entire community. This LEED Platinum design incorporates dozens of green features that students can view as well as measure and manipulate. The result is a compelling model for educational institutions. Fifty-five detailed sustainability goals included renewable energy, no water to be discharged to the local sewer, 100% storm water infiltration on-site, artificial lighting designed to less than one watt per square foot and minimal maintenance for 20 years.

Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life
VJAA, Minneapolis, MN

The existing building was stripped to the concrete frame, expanded by 33% and redesigned with a variety of environmental systems. The hot and humid New Orleans climate is further tempered with strategies for expanding the comfort zone; including programming for thermal zoning, and technically innovative systems for variable shading, moving air and radiant cooling. Despite its high ambitions, the project had a modest budget and was completed for $189/SF, fourteen months after Hurricane Katrina. Since then, Tulane sees the project as a new model for sustainable design in New Orleans.

Macallen Building Condominiums
Office dA Inc. and Burt Hill Inc., Boston, MA
Macallen Building Condominiums" />
The 140-unit condominium is a conscious and deliberate effort by both client/developer and the architectural and engineering team to incorporate sustainable design measures. It utilizes green design as a way of marketing a lifestyle and concern for the environment, while simultaneously increasing revenue from the design project as a business strategy. The building, just completed in South Boston, is striving for LEED Gold certification in sustainable design. Some of the green building features include innovative technologies that will save over 600,000 gallons of water annually while consuming 30% less electricity than a conventional building.

Malecha added, “This project was built on an environmentally challenged site that was previously unused space. So not only does in enhance the environment, but it provides valuable inner city housing and shows a certain amount of urban savvy.”

Queens Botanical Garden Visitor & Administration Center
BKSK Architects, New York, NY
Queens Botanical Garden Visitor & Administration Center" />
In looking to the future, the Garden has propelled itself into the front ranks of its field as the first botanical garden in the country devoted to sustainable environmental stewardship. The goal has been to integrate a beautiful contemporary building into the experience of its varied gardens and landscapes, heightening the visitor experience of the natural environment and conveying the key elements of successful sustainability. A water channel surrounds the building and weaves through the garden, fed by rainwater that cascades off of the sheltering roof canopy.

The Nueva School, Hillside Learning Complex
Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects, San Francisco, CA

The 33-acre campus, located in the semi-rural coastal hills of the San Francisco Peninsula, features a thriving coast live oak woodland ecosystem, a variety of dispersed structures and dramatic views of San Francisco Bay. The design is grounded in the desire to integrate straightforward, appropriate and cost-effective sustainable design solutions within the broader language of contemporary architectural expression. Through a variety of simple, observable systems and strategies, reduce site energy use by at least 65% from the national average for schools and meet the 2030 Challenge.

Yale University Sculpture Building and Gallery
KieranTimberlake Associates LLP, Philadelphia, PA

Situated on a former brownfield site, the new complex is comprised of three new buildings. To provide maximum daylight and exceptional energy efficiency, a wall system was designed that incorporates solar shading, a triple glazed low-e vision panel, 8-foot high operable windows and a translucent double cavity spandrel panel. Consequently, the entire skin of the building admits natural light. The green roof on the gallery and native plant landscaping, which includes mature trees, serves as a connective habitat patch for avian species moving through the urban corridor between these parks.

Images for OMA's Bryghusgrunden Project

2008-04-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

Shenzhen International Airport by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas

2008-04-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

Italian architects Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas have won the competition of Shenzen International Airport new terminal design in China.

2008 Pritzker Prize_Jean Nouvel

2008-04-03T23:09:00.000-07:00

Architect Jean Nouvel of Paris, France has been selected as the 2008 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and will receive the bronze medallion and $100,000 grant in a ceremony on June 2, 2008, at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Members of the jury that selected Nouvel described his career as one of courageously pursuing new ideas and challenging accepted norms to stretch the boundaries of architecture. They cited his abundant "persistance, imagination, exuberance, and above all, an insatiable urge for creative experimentation."

Jean Nouvel (born 12 August 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (technically, the prize was awarded for the Institut du Monde Arabe which Nouvel designed), the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005. A number of museums and architectural centres have presented retrospectives of his work.

Foster 's Abu Dhabi World Trade Center

2008-03-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

Architects Foster + Partners have launched their design for Abu Dhabi World Trade Center, part of the Al Raha Beach development in Abu Dhabi.

The design strategy is a highly specific response to the climate and topography of this dramatic coastal site and the building has evolved through a process of sophisticated environmental computer analysis. The resulting scheme provides shade while also admitting light; is cooled by a natural flow of air but is buffered against the strong desert wind; is asymmetrical and sculptural yet is environmentally and functionally coherent.

The Abu Dhabi World Trade Center is a multi-use building that brings together offices, apartments, a hotel and shops to encourage a constant pattern of economic and social activity throughout the day.

The form of the building is rooted in a sustainable environmental strategy that relies on a series of passive controls. To the south, the building is indented to reduce the external area most vulnerable to direct sunlight. The services and circulation cores occupy most of the remaining exposed areas. At ground level, the overhang of the roof creates a shaded walkway that wraps around the building, and the roof is streamlined according to the prevailing winds to encourage cooling air currents around and through the building.

The project is due to start on site this summer.

Extension of the Eiffel Tower top floor

2008-03-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

Serero Architects unveils its design for the extension of the Eiffel Tower top floor. The project will extend the top floor plate of the tower by grafting a high performance carbon Kevlar structure on it. The structure will be temporarily bolted to the slab without requiring any modification of the existing structure. It will expand the usable floor area from 280 m2 to 580m2.

40 Bond - Herzog and de Meuron

2008-03-08T22:26:00.000-08:00

"It should be the art of living"
40 Bond was designed by Herzog and de Meuron. New York is enjoying an architectural boom, with new projects in development from a who’s who of the world’s most notable architects, but none are as eagerly anticipated as 40 Bond Street from Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Basel, Switzerland.

Photo by Iwan Baan

Foster + Partners_The supertall Index of Dubai

2008-03-04T23:32:00.000-08:00

A mixed-use skyscraper designed by Foster + Partners currently under construction in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The supertall will be 328 meters (1,076 feet) tall and have 80 floors. Of those 80 floors, the lower 25 will be offices and 47 will be for residential use, including the world's highest apartment for a time when construction ends in 2008.

The tower is oriented in such a way that the eastern and western concrete cores shelter the floors from the harsh, desert sun and the climatic effects of the area.

The south-facing facade will utilize extensive sun shades to lower solar gain. A double height sky lobby will separate the offices and apartments; recreational facilities like a swimming pool, gym, and restaurants will be located on the sky lobby.

Zaha Hadid's Nordpark Cable Railway

2008-02-28T00:11:00.000-08:00

Nordpark Cable Railway Stations,Inssbruck,Austria..designed by Zaha Hadid.

“The railway reflects the city’s continued commitment to the highest standards of architecture and pushes the boundaries of design and construction technology. These stations are the global benchmark for the use of double-curvature glass in construction.”
Zaha Hadid

“Each station has its own unique context, topography, altitude, and circulation. We studied natural phenomena such as glacial moraines and ice movements - as we wanted each station to use the fluid language of natural ice formations, like a frozen stream on the mountainside.”

Renzo Piano to Add to Le Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut

2008-02-28T00:04:00.000-08:00

By Stephani L. Miller from architectmagazine.com

Renzo Piano is set to create additions for the grounds of the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, the 1955 building by Le Corbusier that is widely considered to be among the 20th century architect's greatest designs. But the plans are coming under fire from the Fondation Le Corbusier, the organization created to safeguard and celebrate his life's works.

Last summer, the Association Œuvre Notre-Dame-du-Haut, which owns the chapel and its grounds, announced plans to replace the existing visitor center, add housing for a small population of nuns and a few guests, and add meditation space; the association also announced its choice of Piano to design the new buildings. The Fondation Le Corbusier has voiced concerns over the project and certain aspects of Piano's design, particularly the proximity of the new convent to the main chapel and its annexes.

"This construction might be seen from far away and change the perception of the chapel," says foundation director Michel Richard. "We are not completely convinced of the necessity of the additional convent and of the need to be so near the chapel. We have no guarantee of the convent remaining a convent for the coming generations, and we fear that it could be used for any kind of auberge [inn] in the future."

As part of its mission to preserve and achieve greater recognition for Le Corbusier's work, in January 2008 the foundation—along with the French Ministry of Culture and six other countries—submitted selections from his architectural portfolio, including the chapel at Ronchamp, for inclusion in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO's) World Heritage List.

Because France's Ministry of Culture must approve construction plans that involve national cultural landmarks, last June the foundation's president, Jean-Pierre Duport, wrote to Minister Christine Albanel about the chapel additions, asking her to defer any decision that might "compromise the authenticity of the work and the integrity of the site." The foundation's fear is that any addition to or alteration of Le Corbusier's original plans for the chapel grounds could endanger the chances of the proposed portfolio's being placed on UNESCO's World Heritage List. "We trust the architect, but we are not sure that he will perfectly manage architecture and vegetation so that the site won't suffer from the new buildings and their services—new large roads, materials, etc.," Richard says.

In its October 2007 newsletter, the foundation discussed its concerns over the project, stating that it "fully shares the concern of the association owning the chapel for the need to undertake work aimed at restoring the site and endowing it with reception facilities equipped to cater to the increasingly numerous streams of visitors, while at the same time remaining in keeping with the cultural and spiritual quality of the work." According to Richard, the foundation's position is that the association should have taken more time to find alternate solutions regarding not only the feasibility of the construction in the proximity of the chapel but also other locations, as well as the problems of managing visitors, locating bus parking, and establishing the quality of the reception area, services, shops, restaurants, and exhibition of the chapel. The foundation maintains that it will cooperate in finding a solution that meets the needs of all involved parties and secures the lasting spirit and character of the chapel.

The lighthouse

2008-02-20T20:55:00.000-08:00

The lighthouse, called as the first net zero carbon house in the UK, is also the first to attain level six in the Code for Sustainable Homes, which indicates that it is carbon neutral. Solar panel, solar rubes, ventilation chimneys, and biomass boiler are applied to this two-bedroom 2-1/2 story house which annual energy bill is around 31 pounds.

1. Wind catcher, for summer ventilation
2. Solar array at back of house for hot water and electricity
3. High-level of wall insulation
4. Biomass boiler

Young Architects Program this year

2008-02-12T20:44:00.000-08:00

A proposal by Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, the husband-and-wife duo behind Work Architecture won this year's Young Architects Program at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center in Long Island City, Queens.

What if NYC design competition

2008-02-12T20:32:00.000-08:00

OEM announced the results of the What if New York City. . . Design Competition for Post-Disaster Provisional Housing. Ten Winners and ten Honorable Mentions were selected by the Jury on January 22, 2008.

For more information, please check the site http://www.whatifnyc.net/

American's Top 5 favorite architecture

2008-02-04T21:46:00.000-08:00

What's the favorite architecture for Americans? Here is the top 5 voted by Americans on favoritearchitecture.org.
1.Empire State Building. 1931 New York city by William Lamb

2. White House. 1792 Washington D.C. by James Hoban

3. Washington National Cathedral. 1990 Washington D.C. by George Frederic Bodley and Henry Vaughan

4. Thomas Jefferson Memorial. 1943 Washington D.C. by John Russel Pope

5. Golden Gate Bridge. 1937 San Fransisco by Irvin F. Morrow and Gertrude C.Morrow

AIA 2008 Young Architects Award

2008-02-04T21:40:00.000-08:00

AIA announced the ten recipients of the 2008 AIA Young Architects Award.The Young Architects Award will be presented to the recipients at the AIA 2008 National Convention and Design Exposition in Boston in May.
Victoria Beach, AIA
In 1995, Victoria Beach was an essential component to what is now the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s first ethics course, which is now required for all architecture students. In 1998, Beach began her affiliation with the Center for Ethics and the Professions at Harvard, where she became a member of the International Ethics Forum. In 1999, Beach became the first and only architect ever admitted into Fellowship at the Center for Ethics and the Professions. Beach published a 30-page exposé on the treatment of interns as well as having established her own nonprofit organization, Design Foundations, to restore the dignity and productivity of the internship experience through community service. Design Foundations has since donated more than a quarter million dollars worth of design services to underserved communities and was chosen as an example of ethical practice in the upcoming AIA 150th anniversary book: Celebrating the Past, Designing the Future.

David Gamble, AIA, LEED-AP
David Gamble holds a BArch from Kent State University and a MArch in urban design. Gamble has done extensive work abroad as well as having served as a full-time assistant professor at Syracuse University, where he taught design and drawing from 1997 to 2001. At Syracuse, Gamble founded the interdisciplinary Community Design Center (CDC). In 2003, Gamble was awarded the Western European Architecture Foundation’s Gabriel Prize, a grant for the study of architecture and urbanism in Paris. Now a senior associate at Chan Krieger Sieniewicz in Cambridge, Mass, Gamble has led urban design projects throughout the United States. He served as project architect for the award winning General Aviation Facility, recently completed at Boston’s Logan International Airport. In addition, Gamble is currently a part-time design instructor at Northeastern University’s School of Architecture in Boston. He also serves as a member of the board of directors of the newly established Community Design Resource Center-Boston and is an active member of the Boston Society of Architects Urban Design Committee.

Emily A. Grandstaff-Rice, AIA
Emily Grandstaff-Rice, an architect with Cambridge Seven Associates Inc., has shown exceptional leadership in her commitment to design and construction through projects such as the Boston Children’s Museum and Liberty Hotel. Her commitment to education is demonstrated through her volunteer work with children and activities with the AIA Young Architects Forum (YAF), Continuing Education Quality Assurance Panel, and her firm’s AIA/CES program. She is involved in two unique projects within the AIA: the YAF 150 at 150 Project featuring podcasts of Fellows discussing mentoring and their career choices and the CEQAP Knowledge Communities Subject Matter Planning project to integrate AIA knowledge within a curriculum format to allow members to choose better paths for continuing education. She also teaches at the Boston Architectural College. In 2003-2004, she participated in the BSA Young Designers Professional Development Institute, which was awarded, through Grandstaff- Rice’s successful nomination, the 2004 YAF/NAC Emerging Professionals Program of the Year.

Kelly Hayes-McAlonie, AIA, MRAIC, LEED-AP
Kelly Hayes McAlonie an associate vice president with Cannon Design, has dedicated her career to design for education and improving learning environments. Upon graduation from the Technical University of Nova Scotia (now Dalhousie University), Hayes-McAlonie joined Leathers & Associates where she planned and designed more than 100 learning gardens for clients throughout the United States and abroad and co-authored a multidisciplinary architecture curriculum for grade-school children. Hayes-McAlonie joined Cannon Design’s Education practice in 1998 as a planner for pre-K-12 and higher education clients. One of her projects, the Montante Cultural Center, received an AIA Honor Award for Interior Architecture. Hayes-McAlonie also was instrumental in the development of Cannon Design Academy, a professional development program. Hayes-McAlonie has become a champion of the legacy of Louise Bethune, FAIA, the nation’s first woman registered architect, and through Hayes-McAlonie’s efforts, Bethune was inducted into the Western New York Women’s Hall of Fame. She was named as one of Business First of Buffalo, Forty Under 40, and is a member of Leadership Buffalo Class of 2007.

Grace H. Kim, AIA
Grace Kim is a co-founding principal of Schemata Workshop, an architectural collaborative in Seattle where she authored the book The Survival Guide to Architectural Internship and Career Development. During her early career, she was an active participant in AIA Chicago’s Young Architects Committee and has since been involved nationally on issues related to internship and mentorship. Her participation in the 1999 Summit on Architectural Internship resulted in her appointment to the Collateral Internship Task Force as a representative for Emerging Professionals. In 2006, Kim was appointed as a member-at-large on the inaugural national Board Community Committee, through which she spearheaded an initiative called “Welcome to the Profession”—a program to welcome graduates into the architecture profession. Kim also serves on the AIA Mentorship Task Group, through which she developed unique methods of fostering mentorships. For the past seven years, Kim also has served as a session presenter at Expanding Your Horizons, a conference for junior high and high school girls to foster an interest for professions in the math and science field.

Samuel Lasky, AIA
Samuel Lasky, a senior associate with William Rawn Associates (WRA), Architects Inc., Boston, graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1997. He started work with WRA in January of 1998 and was assigned to help refine and detail the facades of the first building being built as part of Northeastern University’s new West Campus residential precinct. After detailing three of the project’s glass towers, the largest expanse of curtain wall WRA had ever designed, he became the office’s de facto curtain wall expert and had the right experience to serve as project architect for the largest building designed by WRA to date: the 400,000-square-foot W Hotel and Residences under construction in the heart of Boston’s Theater District, where he leads a team of 20 people. He also is working on the College of Computer and Information Science & Residence Hall at Northeastern University, a mixed-use residential and academic building. This project was awarded the Boston Society of Architect’s Harleston Parker Medal for the “most beautiful building in Boston.” Before starting with WRA, Lasky had taught in Harvard’s Career Discovery program and at the Boston Architectural Center, and subsequently taught at the GSD.

Michael J. Meehan, AIA
Michael Meehan, the 2007 chair of the Young Architects Forum (YAF) Advisory Committee, has focused on validating and redefining the mission of the committee. In practice, he is the professional development manager at BWBR Architects in Saint Paul. In 1997, Meehan became co-chair of the AIA Minnesota Intern Development Program Committee. While working with the IDP Committee, Meehan began teaching ARE review seminars for AIA Minnesota. In 2006 Meehan served as co-chair of the YAF and also began his rotation as a member of the AIA/AGC Joint Committee. As YAF chair, Meehan focused on activities that included the YAF 15 Summit (in recognition of the committee’s 15th anniversary) and creation of a 10-year strategic plan. Meehan recently worked with the Hazelden Foundation as project architect and project manager on their new Women’s Recovery Center in Center City, Minn. Architecturally, Meehan’s projects reflect his passion for buildings and clients that contribute to society and the built environment. Meehan sits on the board of directors of a civic group formed in 2006 within his historic neighborhood of Northfield and is also a member of the Northfield Zoning Code Advisory Group.

David Montalba, AIA
David Montalba’s work, often executed in tandem with local builders and artisans, has garnered numerous design awards including several from the AIA Los Angeles. Born in Florence, Italy, and raised in both Switzerland and California, Montalba earned his BArch at SciARC and a MArch at UCLA. He then worked for a number of architects in the LA area, including Frank Gehry and Pugh + Scarpa, before creating Montalba Architects Inc. in 2004. Montalba has been actively involved in local, regional, and international architecture communities as a member of the boards of AIA Los Angeles, Swiss Institute for Architects, Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects and AIA Europe and also as a board member of the Architecture & Design Museum Los Angeles. He currently serves as treasurer of the LA/AIA and serves as a past as co-chair and advisor to the LA/AIA Academic Outreach Committee. He has also been largely responsible for raising nearly $100,000 for student scholarships on behalf of the AIA. For the last several years, David has organized the highly visible LA/AIA annual 2x8 exhibit, bringing together the schools in an annual exhibit of work.

Robert Pasersky, AIA
In February 2006, after closely following news reports of how 10 churches in rural Alabama were destroyed by arson, Robert Pasersky, a native of Atlanta, felt an ineffable need to volunteer his services, pro bono, to help the victims get their places of worship rebuilt. Two took him up on his offer, and, as a framework through which to offer pro-bono design services to both churches, as well as other projects, he established Open House Works. To define its commitment better, his company joined the 1%, a program of Public Architecture through which design professionals pledge a percentage of their time to working pro bono for their community. Pasersky earned his BArch from Tulane University where he received the F.W. Lawrence Memorial Medal for design excellence upon graduation. He earned his MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Pasersky joined Payette in 1999 and was named an associate of the firm in 2002. Pasersky also has taught advanced studio and has served as a thesis advisor at Boston Architectural College since 1998. In 2000, Pasersky earned a certificate of achievement from the Boston Society of Architects Young Designers Professional Development Institute.

Tim Schroeder, AIA
Graduating cum laude from Iowa State University in 1994, Tim Schoeder received the Kocimski Award, the highest award available to graduating architecture students. Schroeder, in 2000 at age 30, became a vice president of Neumann Monson Architects and has led many of the firm's design and sustainability endeavors. An outstanding designer, his work has been honored by the AIA and other organizations and environmental groups at the local, state, and regional level. He created Iowa’s first green roof project, the first LEED-certified school, the first LEED-certified public building and was the recipient of AIA Iowa’s first Sustainability Award. Schroeder also served on the Iowa Architectural Foundation Board and the editorial board for the award-winning Iowa Architect magazine, for which he recently became editor-in-chief. He also serves as a guest lecturer for his alma mater and leads building tours on behalf of the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City Architects Council. His recent community-oriented service activities include the Hickory Hill Park prairie restoration, the City of Coralville’s Iowa River Landing wetland restoration and planting, and the Iowa City tornado clean-up.

OMA in Singapore

2008-02-03T22:03:00.000-08:00

OMA's first project in Singapore is a 36-storey residential tower for the Far East Organization, Singapore’s largest private development company. The tower was designed by OMA Partner Ole Scheeren.

This year OMA has announced it's second project, a large residential complex containing over 1,000 apartments, in Singapore. It is commissioned by CapitaLand Residential, a leading developer in Asia.

Zaha Hadid design the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan

2008-01-27T15:28:00.000-08:00

Zaha Hadid, known for bold, unconventional forms, was selected in a competition for the design of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. The other finalists were Morphosis of Santa Monica, Calif.; Coop Himmelb(l)au of Vienna and Los Angeles; Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects of New York; and Randall Stout Architects of Los Angeles.

The museum, which is expected to open in 2010, will be Ms. Hadid’s first university building and only her second project in the United States, after the 2003 Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati.

The museum will be the new home of the university’s art collection, which is currently housed on campus in the Kresge Art Center. The center, part of the university’s College of Arts and Letters, will continue to hold the art and art history department and provide classroom, studio and exhibition spaces.

Tour Carpe Diem - Robert A.M. Stern Architects

2008-01-18T23:05:00.001-08:00

Aviva France announced that Robert A.M. Stern Architects has been selected to design a new office tower at La Défense on Jan. 10, 2008.

Robert A.M. Stern Architects is the latest to join this stellar galaxy of architects. The New York City-based firm was selected over Jacques Ferrier Architecte (Paris) and Foster + Partners(London)to design Tour Carpe Diem. Aviva is the world's fifth-largest insurance group and the leading provider of life and pensions products in Europe, with substantial business interests elsewhere around the world.

The project includes a landscaped pedestrian street lined with cafés that leads to an 18-meter-high (60 feet), skylit atrium, and rooftop conference and dining facilities surrounded by a garden and dramatic views of Paris.

The RIBA Stirling Prize 2007

2007-12-19T22:52:00.000-08:00

The Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, Germany, designed by David Chipperfield Architects, has won the 12th RIBA Stirling Prize in association with The Architects' Journal.
The winning architect receives a cash prize of £20,000. The prize is named after the great British architect Sir James Stirling (1926-1992).

Brazil Rendering System v2 available now

2007-12-11T23:45:00.000-08:00

Seattle, WA (Nov. 28, 2007) -- SplutterFish, developers of the award-winning, fully-integrated rendering suite for Autodesk's top-selling animation software, 3ds Max and Autodesk VIZ, today announced the worldwide availability of Brazil r/s version 2.0. Super-stable, packed with powerful features, Brazil r/s v2 provides incredible speed and performance and offers a natural, accessible workflow, without sacrificing the high-end quality that today's CG artists demand. Whether a professional working in film, broadcast, architectural and other visualization industries, or simply a hobbyist or student looking to improve your own toolkit, Brazil r/s v2 empowers you to create new, compelling, and superior-quality imagery.

In addition, SplutterFish is also pleased to announce the immediate availability of its first Professional-Edition beta version (2.1 Pro-Beta), which introduces even more new features, and is available exclusively to Brazil r/s v2 Professional Edition clients.

The President's Medals Students Awards 2007

2007-12-04T21:42:00.000-08:00

The winners of the President's Medals Student Awards 2007 were announced in a ceremony at RIBA last week.

The RIBA has been awarding the President's Medals more than hundred years. The aim of these awards is to promote excellence in the study of architecture, to reward talent and to encourage architectural debate world-wide. Widely regarded as the best student awards in the world, students aspire each year to be selected by their school to enter for the medals and for the opportunity for their work to be recognised and publicly exhibited.

The winners of 2007 are as following.

The Cabinet of Curiosities - Amandine Kastler
The Lost Soul Hotel - Andrew Street
Transology; a Vehicle Manufacturing Plant for Southwark, London - Claudia White
A Script Writers’ Retreat - Sarah Custance
Euphonic Engine, West Smithfield. - Arya Safavi
urban sustention (b) - Akram Fahmi
Greenwich Perceptual Observatory - Steve Westcott
Mies Immersion - Isabel Pietri Medina
DARK FRUIT - Rosy Head
Geological Archive - Ed Butler

Greenwich Perceptual Observatory by Steve Westcott

DARK FRUIT by Rosy Head

Mercedes-Benz Museum by UNStudio wins German Architecture Prize 2007

2007-12-04T20:58:00.000-08:00

The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, designed by Ben van Berkel of UNStudio, wins German Architecture Prize 2007. It also wins European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award.

The following is the description of Mercedes-Benz Museum on Unstudio's website.
"The Museum’s sophisticated geometry synthesizes structural and programmatic organizations resulting in a new landmark building celebrating a legendary car. The geometric model employed is based on the trefoil organization. The building’s program is distributed over the surfaces which ascend incrementally from ground level, spiraling around a central atrium. The Museum experience begins with visitors traveling up through the atrium to the top floor from where they follow the two main paths that unfold chronologically as they descend through the building. The two main trajectories, one being the car and truck collection and the other consisting of historical displays called the Legend rooms, spiral downwards on the perimeter of the display platforms, intersecting with each other at several points allowing the visitor to change routes."

Arthur Erickson Concrete Poetry

2007-11-20T18:59:00.000-08:00

Arthur Erickson Conservancy (AEC) presents Arthur Erickson: Concrete Poetry, a Radio-Canada documentary by Michele Smolkin On Thursday, November 22nd at The Vancity Theatre. Made in French in 2003, this is the first public showing on the big screen of this poetic film in English.

German Architect Wins Stockholm Library Extension Competition

2007-11-16T21:59:00.000-08:00

By Jonas Bergman
Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- German architect Heike Hanada won the competition to expand Gunnar Asplund's Stockholm City Library with a design she called Delphinium.

Hanada beat out five other finalists from Denmark, Italy, Finland, Lithuania and the U.K. in the competition to expand the famed rotunda library, which opened in 1928. More than 6,000 architects from about 120 countries submitted proposals when the competition was announced in May last year.

``Delphinium is a skillfully executed proposal -- delicate, bright and with the quality of a new icon,'' the Stockholm city- appointed jury said in a statement. ``It will make an exceptionally beautiful addition to Stockholm architecture.''

The project includes a glass building, which connects to Asplund's library by a low, podium-like structure enclosing a circular, `` secret'' garden. The white glass building lights up at night and will ``invite to discussion or to just a quiet moment to oneself amongst other people,'' the jury said.

Hanada, born in 1964, lives in Weimar in Eastern Germany, and teaches architecture at Bauhaus University there. She has lectured extensively around the world and has had exhibits in Tokyo, Berlin and Luxembourg, according to the jury.

``I'm very happy and will devote all of my energy to this project,'' she said in a statement. ``My vision of the finished result is a library of our time with open, light flowing spaces, which has a complementary relationship to the Asplund building and makes its own imprint on Stockholm.''

A plan for the project will now be drafted for the city council to make a financial decision next year. The library has about 3,000 visitors daily.

Beijing Is Ready for the Olympics

2007-11-16T21:55:00.000-08:00

By Ullrich Fichtner in www.spiegel.de
en months before the official kickoff of the Summer Olympics, China has already prepared the stage for the world's top sporting event. Twenty new sports facilities have been built and 11 others renovated. The message from Beijing is clear: Nothing about the 2008 Olympics has been left to chance.
It's raining sparks in Beijing. Showers of sparks burst from the steel frame of the Olympic Stadium, from the flat-topped shell of the Central Television Headquarters, from the scaffolding on Tower 3 of the China World Trade Center. It's raining sparks in the Jade Garden, on the Beijing Riviera and in Capital Paradise, where the high-rise apartment blocks of the nouveau riche emerge from thin air by the dozen. Sparks cascade from the façades along the ring roads.

Beijing is being welded, sawn, constructed, repaired, renovated and retouched. Burning shavings fall to the ground in a shower of golden rain, with 265 days still to go before the start of the Olympic Games.

The city is smartening itself up in the gleaming mirrors of the 31 sporting facilities that are scattered, seemingly at random, throughout the city. The stadiums, arenas and sports fields stand in three or four clusters to the north, west and east of the city center. Whoever visits them, or indeed anyone who even wants to find them, needs an expert driver and nerves of steel; the route will take them through a sprawling, congested, swamped city, an immense urban settlement that covers 16,800 square kilometers.

That's the size of a real metropolis. It is 20 times the size of Berlin and it's a city with no defined edges, with an interior accessed by elevated highways and multi-level expressways, divided by five many-lane ring roads that sketch out their wide, crooked circles around the center point of the Forbidden City, the ancient heart of China.
If one starts out at Tiananmen Square, the Square of Heavenly Peace, and heads west, the path soon leads to Wukesong. There, a mighty hall that looks as though it is made of turquoise frosted glass stands in a large, fenced-off building site.

In August 2008, this hall will host the basketball tournament of the Games of the XXIX Olympiad; it will be all about free throws, technical fouls, points scored in the last remaining seconds, as if these were the only things of any importance. But the sporting dramas fade into insignificance, because in fact the whole of the vast country that is China is perpetually in play: as a former empire but also as a new country that wants to demonstrate how brilliantly it has entered the 21st century.

The forecourt of the Wukesong Indoor Stadium, to the left of which three Olympic baseball fields can be made out, is intimidating in its hugeness. Migrant laborers in everyday clothes populate the building site. Not one of them wears a hardhat as they swarm like bees over the square. Behind the sports grounds, cranes stretch up over the shells of the buildings that comprise a new business quarter, where banners flutter, with their message printed in white on red: "Celebrate the 58th Anniversary of the Founding of the People's Republic of China."

In front of the site fence, old men play with Dou Kongzhu, diabolos, making the cones dance on strings like yoyos, elegant acrobats with weathered faces, old enough to have heard Mao on the radio live. Many wear soft-peak caps and buttoned-up overalls. They hold aloft small dragons that they have made out of cut-up shopping bags from the French supermarket chain Carrefour. They stand with their backs to the new Olympic sports hall, but the old and the new are in close proximity here: opposite, the windows of Military Hospital 301 can be seen, where Deng Xiaoping died in February 1997.

Satellites to the Mother Ship

To some extent these are his games, and if Deng, the architect of the new China, were still alive, maybe Swiss construction company Burckhardt + Partner's original plan would have come to fruition.

Their idea was to cover the exterior wall of the basketball hall with LCD panels, making the entire facade a screen for live broadcasts from inside. But the project was stopped when, three years ago, all plans had to be rethought on cost grounds. But it also likely had to do with a general suspicion in China of too much Western influence, too much transparency.
Many of the new Olympic buildings are reminiscent of space ships, of flying saucers, of UFOs and of science fiction generally. The centers outside of the Olympic Green, often hidden away on rambling university campuses, are clad with various light alloys or are finished as though they were sealed, often windowless, smooth and closed. The buildings, which are often round and often have no angles, are to the new Chinese National Theater in the center of Beijing (the controversial "Egg" designed by French architect Paul Andreu) like satellites to a mother ship. They offer little resistance and they show little face.

This also applies to the two gymnasiums in the Tongzhou district, southeast of the center, on the Peking University of Technology campus. These buildings are reminiscent of melting golf balls, in which badminton and rhythmic gymnastics will be the order of the day. A UFO has also landed northwest of the center, on the Beihang University campus, where a cheerful aluminum building has been provided for the weightlifters.

But the good news, and that's what it's all about, is that Beijing is ready. The games could essentially start the day after tomorrow, because the sports halls and the stadiums are built and the stage is set.

Banners hang over the building sites with mottos like: "Work hard, make sure the building is a success." Beneath them, parquet is already being swept, lines are already being drawn, pitches laid out, nets put up. Water will soon flow into where it is required and ammunition will be laid in where it is needed for shooting range competitions.

On a visit to the table-tennis hall on the Peking University campus, loudspeaker announcements resound through the domed hall and fire sirens are tested several times, with announcements in Chinese and English. Far out to the west, at the Olympic shooting range, a bold line in front of the Western Hills district, access is already strictly forbidden, so that not a single speck of dust will be brought in.

At the old Capital Indoor Stadium, built in 1968, all that is required before the Olympic volleyball tournament is a bit of cosmetic work. As with almost all of the competition sites, only minor work is left -- a little green here and there, some decorative stones.

The message here is loud and clear: We are ready. And moreover: We could have done it even in 2000, when Sydney's bid won at the last minute. But now, in 2008, nothing will get in the way and nothing will be improvised, there will be nothing like the hectic last dash for Athens 2004, everything will go according to the far-sighted plan. In the catacombs of the wrestling stadium 280 days before the huge opening celebration, computer-printed labels are already stuck on the doors, reading "fresh flowers," "referees" and even "medals." Nothing will be left to chance in Beijing in 2008.
Bringing in Farmers to Build the Stadiums

To provide labor for all this construction work, huge numbers of China's farmers have had to become laborers. Hundreds of thousands have made the long journey to the capital city. On the western outskirts of Beijing, in front of the new velodrome designed by the architecture firm Schürman, men and women from the province of Hebei and from Sichuan add the finishing touches to paths and borders, shoveling stones seven days a week for the glory of the nation, and all for 800 yuan ($107) each month. The builders are constructing a new Olympia in the Far East.

Droves of them are building the square in front of the Laoshan cycle track, which also looks like a spaceship -- round, futuristic, while at the same time vaulted like a church dome.

In the shadow of the velodrome, just a few meters from the huge hall, oppressively close, two low apartment blocks have been left standing. Socialist accommodation with flaking stucco; they look as though the demolition balls left them behind by mistake.

Between the buildings two elderly women are walking a Pomeranian. They say that there are no vegetable markets left in the area. They can't think of anything else to say about Olympia. A girl in a sweat suit says that where the hall now stands there once were fields. But she can't remember exactly -- they might have been the training grounds for a driving school, she says. Work began on the cycle track three years ago. And three years is a very long time in today's Beijing.

Growth is visible everywhere. The vehicle fleet of the capital city alone increases by 1,000 vehicles daily. No one counts the apartment blocks any more, hundreds are under construction with hundreds more planned. Foreigners who have lived here for a long time no longer talk of development, but of explosion. In 1994 the city laid its third highway ring road, in 2001 its fourth and in 2003 its fifth; now the sixth is underway. And all of that has always had a lot to do with sport, with sports policy in China.

A Storm of Progress

Beijing experienced its first major modernization push after the Mao era in the run-up to the Asian Games of 1990. At the time, one year after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the government presented new, magnificent buildings to gloss over the disgrace. New housing and business centers sprang up around the competition sites. The Asian Games were the prelude to the fugue that is the Olympics.

The storm of progress since 1990 has not come without a price. The average speed on the roads has dropped to 12 kilometers (7.4 miles) per hour thanks to perpetual jams. It will soon be possible to travel faster on foot, but that involves breathing in the notorious Beijing air, air that is pregnant with sulfur dioxide, with nitrogen oxide, with heavy metals, with fine particles, all at levels that regularly show contempt for national and World Health Organization guidelines.

On bad days, when it's foggy, when the coal heating is lit, when dust storms hit the city and yet the air nevertheless stays still as though in a bell jar, the pollution makes itself felt, thick on the tongue, causing the throat to ache.

But the Games take place in summer and a travel ban will be slapped on car drivers in their millions. The government wants to impose temporary factory closures, will bring old power plants to a standstill and is already making large-scale shifts from coal to gas, a move which has been applauded by the United Nations Environment Program.

And if none of this helps or if it is too slow, then the government's weather-makers will have it rain, or they will shoot missiles into the clouds to disperse them; they will do everything without a second thought to make sure that the air over the huge Beijing sports festival will at least not be as dirty as for Athens 2004 or Los Angeles 1984.

There are another 265 days before the Games open on Aug. 8, 2008. Twenty new sports grounds have been constructed, 11 have been fully renovated and anyone who finally manages to approach the Olympic Green on the fourth city ring road is suddenly and overwhelmingly confronted with the most emblematic building of the forthcoming Games, the National Stadium, also known as the "Bird's Nest."

Beside it, the Olympic Campus stretches two, maybe three kilometers to the north, with the spectacular swimming pool, the Olympic Hall and the Conference and Meditation Center strung out in a row, behind them the trifling Olympic Village, the tennis courts, another park with trees and ponds -- that's what Olympia will look like next year. Pictures will be supplied to sweep away old clichés. And each picture, even before the games, is a small victory for China.

But nothing has a more impressive or more moving effect than that of the huge stadium itself. The interwoven steel nest is a proud emblem, a monumental building with a human face, an ingenious design by the architect duo Herzog & de Meuron, together with the artist Ai Weiwei. It's as though this stadium is the first of China's great gifts to the world in the 21st century. Nothing material, nothing that is for sale, but rather an original piece of global culture, made in China.

Designed to last: Richard Rogers

2007-11-16T21:52:00.000-08:00

From Timeonline/Tom Dyckhoff
At 74, Richard Rogers is as busy as ever shaping the future. Slippers are not an option.
And before you ask, no, I’m not going to retire.” You can forgive the preemptive strike. Richard Rogers, Lord Rogers of Riverside to give him the grand title he rarely uses, has fielded a lot of questions about the “r” word lately. The young Turk who gave the world those once futuristic, still shocking buildings with their guts hanging out – Paris’s Pompidou Centre, London’s Lloyd’s Building – nowadays, at 74, looks like nothing more radical than your favourite grandpa, the one with the twinkly eyes and endearingly rambling tales about the war – the war against the Prince of Wales, architectural conservatism and cities gone to the dogs.

He’s reached “that retrospective time of life” – later this month a massive exhibition of his life’s work opens at the Pompidou, marking the building’s 30th birthday – so “they expect you to pop off at any minute”. Rumours mounted after a remarkable year so backed up with plaudits – the Stirling Prize last autumn for his Madrid airport, the Pritzker Prize, and the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, for starters – you half-wondered if the juries had got wind of his imminent demise. Final proof? Last year, the name of the firm he established 29 years ago, Richard Rogers Partnership, was changed to Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Partners, to honour the next generation of young Turks – Ivan Harbour and Graham Stirk – increasingly taking the reins. Slippers and cocoa seemed certain. “Can you imagine?” he breaks out into one of his guffaws, as if the very idea was the most ridiculous thing in the world. “Which it is.” That’ll be a no then. “

I enjoy life too much,” he says. And Rogers really does seem to have a lovely life. His place in history is guaranteed by the Pompidou and Lloyd’s. He still has fulfilling work – more than ever, with Heathrow’s Terminal 5 opening next spring, a City skyscraper, Leadenhall Building, in the offing, and his largest building to date, the Javits Centre in Manhattan, on the drawing board. It’s a buzz of activity in an office which, a few years previously, seemed in hiatus compared with that of his friend and eternal rival, Norman Foster.

His treasured roles as Ken Livingstone’s adviser and Labour peer mean he is still hard-wired into politics, taken seriously. There’s the big artsy family: still on good terms with his first wife Su, five sons all in influential, creative, fulfilling jobs (one, Abe, has designed the exhibition). There’s the lovely office by the Thames in Hammersmith, filled with 180 reverential staff. And, icing on the cake, there’s having the River Café for your staff canteen just by the front door. The cherry on top? Your wife, Ruthie, runs it! Extra portions of chocolate nemesis all round!

With nearly 50 years of hindsight poured through the exhibition, his life’s work seems less about architecture than selling this Pollyannaish, liberal lifestyle to a mercenary, puritanical world. Born to creative, professional, left-wing Italian parents who escaped fascist Italy for Britain in 1938, his view of life is distinctly Italian – “Where public life and family are entwined,” he says, “as long as I was sitting at the family table everything was OK. I was very affected when I was 5, in Florence, and I’d look across the street and see this café, and every morning I saw what I assumed was an accountant, who’d come in, they’d put a table on the pavement, they’d give him a phone, and he’d do his job. And I thought that’s what I want to do. Not to be an accountant, of course. But the idea that you could mix in your lifestyle, your work, your city, your quality of friendship.”

His wish came true. There are few architects who live the worlds they espouse quite so wholeheartedly as Rogers. Foster – with whom he started in business in the early 1960s – may now have the thousand-strong design-factory, but Rogers, you suspect, has the nicer life. Rogers’s high-tech, drenched in old-fashioned modernist optimism for this thing called “society”, has soul and colour, Foster’s has rigour, but no passion. Indeed, once you get past the shock value of his eviscerated buildings, Rogers’s architecture isn’t really about looks at all. He despises the word “style”, instead his buildings – and this is what was so radical about Pompidou – are basically big family tables, public spaces in which people come together arguing, sharing, resolving differences, given form by the life inside. His vision for cities, now applied patchily as government policy, is all about public space, generosity, tolerance.

Not everyone has shared the Rogers vision: the architecturally conservative, for instance will never warm to his Heath Robinson buildings. There are those who quite rightly state that his “guts on the outside” aesthetic was never very practical (he hasn’t used it himself in a while).

Last year his support for Palestine nearly cost him the Javits job in New York. “The office constitution states you have to think before taking on work which is antienvironment, military, and so on. But then people say ‘airports?’ In that case, since an architect alone cannot stop airports being built he should make them as good, as environmentally sound as possible. But it’s a difficult excuse to make. All architecture is political. All work involves debate, compromise. You’re always juggling, questioning yourself.” This is what makes him unique in Britain, where architects, eyes on realising their monuments and plumping the bank balances tend, as far as possible, to eschew politics.

Rogers marched for CND in the 1950s, against Bush in the Noughties. When Margaret Thatcher started dismantling the public realm so dear to him, private politics became professional. The crux came while designing “London as it could be”, highlight of the Royal Academy’s 1986 exhibition, Foster Rogers Stirling, which envisaged London as a Thames-side playground – fantastical at the height of the no-such-thing-as-society era. Thereafter, building took a backseat to campaigning for Britain’s “urban renaissance” through the Reith Lectures, new Labour’s Urban Task Force, battling with John Prescott, and, today, Livingstone. He concedes that he is somewhat on his own: “I do sometimes feel like an eternal refugee.”

When he arrived in 1938, “there was only one espresso machine in London”. Now, he thinks, we’re at last starting on the right road towards civilised life and decent coffee for all. . . Pollyanna again? “There are a lot of big ifs: the distribution of wealth is horrific. But overall, what an evolution – life is a lot better, especially for those of us who are more fortunate. For those who are not, life is tough. But what can an architect do for them?” his voice trails off. “I don’t know... ”

Dear Architects, I am sick of your shit

2007-11-08T16:40:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a friend who sent me an open letter by Annie Choi.

Here is for the hard of reading.

Once, a long time ago in the days of yore, I had a friend who was studying architecture to become, presumably, an architect.
This friend introduced me to other friends, who were also studying architecture. Then these friends had other friends who were architects - real architects doing real architecture like designing luxury condos that look a lot like glass dildos. And these real architects knew other real architects and now the only people I know are architects. And they all design glass dildos that I will never work or live in and serve only to obstruct my view of New Jersey.

Do not get me wrong, architects. I like you as a person. I think you are nice, smell good most of the time, and I like your glasses. You have crazy hair, and if you are lucky, most of it is on your head. But I do not care about architecture. It is true. This is what I do care about:

* burritos
* hedgehogs
* coffee

As you can see, architecture is not on the list. I believe that architecture falls somewhere between toenail fungus and invasive colonoscopy in the list of things that interest me.

Perhaps if you didn’t talk about it so much, I would be more interested. When you point to a glass cylinder and say proudly, hey my office designed that, I giggle and say it looks like a bong. You turn your head in disgust and shame. You think, obviously she does not understand. What does she know? She is just a writer. She is no architect. She respects vowels, not glass cocks. And then you say now I am designing a lifestyle center, and I ask what is that, and you say it is a place that offers goods and services and retail opportunities and I say you mean like a mall and you say no. It is a lifestyle center. I say it sounds like a mall. I am from the Valley, bitch. I know malls.

Architects, I will not lie, you confuse me. You work sixty, eighty hours a week and yet you are always poor. Why aren’t you buying me a drink? Where is your bounty of riches? Maybe you spent it on merlot. Maybe you spent it on hookers and blow. I cannot be sure. It is a mystery. I will leave that to the scientists to figure out.

Architects love to discuss how much sleep they have gotten. One will say how he was at the studio until five in the morning, only to return again two hours later. Then another will say, oh that is nothing. I haven’t slept in a week. And then another will say, guess what, I have never slept ever. My dear architects, the measure of how hard you’ve worked and how much you’ve accomplished is not related to the number of hours you have not slept. Have you heard of Rem Koolhaas? He is a famous architect. I know this because you tell me he is a famous architect. I hear that Rem Koolhaas is always sleeping. He is, I presume, sleeping right now. And I hear he gets shit done. And I also hear that in a stunning move, he is making a building that looks not like a glass cock, but like a concrete vagina. When you sleep more, you get vagina. You can all take a lesson from Rem Koolhaas.

Life is hard for me, please understand. Architects are an important part of my existence. They call me at eleven at night and say they just got off work, am I hungry? Listen, it is practically midnight. I ate hours ago. So long ago that, in fact, I am hungry again. So yes, I will go. Then I will go and there will be other architects talking about AutoCAD shortcuts and something about electric panels and can you believe that is all I did today, what a drag. I look around the table at the poor, tired, and hungry, and think to myself, I have but only one bullet left in the gun. Who will I choose?

I have a friend who is a doctor. He gives me drugs. I enjoy them. I have a friend who is a lawyer. He helped me sue my landlord. My architect friends have given me nothing. No drugs, no medical advice, and they don’t know how to spell subpoena. One architect friend figured out that my apartment was one hundred and eighty seven square feet. That was nice. Thanks for that.

I suppose one could ask what someone like me brings to architects like yourselves. I bring cheer. I yell at architects when they start talking about architecture. I force them to discuss far more interesting topics, like turkey eggs. Why do we eat chicken eggs, but not turkey eggs? They are bigger. And people really like turkey. See? I am not afraid to ask the tough questions.

So, dear architects, I will stick around, for only a little while. I hope that one day some of you will become doctors and lawyers or will figure out my taxes. And we will laugh at the days when you spent the entire evening talking about some European you’ve never met who designed a building you will never see because you are too busy working on something that will never get built. But even if that day doesn’t arrive, give me a call anyway, I am free.

Yours truly,
Annie Choi

Canadian Architecture Directory

2007-10-08T20:55:00.000-07:00

There is a Canadian Architecture Directory on ArchiZ website to help find architectural design firm in Canada. It's handy for someone wants to find other opportunities in those Canadian architectural firms.

Beijing National Theater

2007-10-05T20:55:00.000-07:00

Beijing National Theater designed by Paul Andreu. Located beside the largest square, Tiananmen Square. west corner of Changan avenue and west Renmindahuitan road.

Construction workers are still working during the evening.

What's going on there? Why so quiet?

We are all on stage.

Eggs in Egg.

Parliament hall is standing in background.

The stage curtain is closing.

Seldom people interested in concert?

oh that crack.

Which concert is coming?

AIA/UK Design Awards 2007

2007-05-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

by ArchitectureWeek

The United Kingdom chapter of the American Institute of Architects has announced the recipients of its annual awards for design excellence. This awards program honors exemplary buildings by UK architects anywhere in the world and by architects of any nationality working within the United Kingdom.

One of the three projects to receive top honors is The Collection in the medieval English town of Lincoln. The museum by Panter Hudspith Architects was lauded as a "beautiful sculptural piece, different and really beautifully detailed... almost baronial."

The more, please read here

Future City Competition

2007-05-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

There is a Future City Competition held on National Engineer Week at futurecity.

The mission of the National Engineers Week Future City Competition is to provide a fun and exciting educational engineering program for seventh- and eighth-grade students that combines a stimulating engineering challenge with a "hands-on" application to present their vision of a city of the future.

This will be accomplished by:

Fostering engineering skills, such as teamwork, communication and problem solving skills;
Providing interaction among students, teachers, and engineer mentors;
Informing the community about the multi-disciplines within the engineering profession;
Inspiring students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering.

The National Engineers Week Future City Competition requires:

Problem-solving
Team work
Research and presentation skills
Practical math and science applications
Computer skills

The competition employs a team-based approach. All members of the team have an important role that is necessary for the completion of the project.

Expo 67 Montreal

2007-05-05T21:43:00.000-07:00

The 1967 International and Universal Exposition, or simply Expo 67 was the World's Fair held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada from April 27 to October 29, 1967. It coincided with the Canadian Centennial that year. Expo 67 was originally going to be held in Moscow, to help the Soviet Union celebrate the 50th anniversary of its revolution.

Logo designed by Julien Hébert

Aerial View

Most of the 62 participating countries in Expo 67 had their own national pavilions; however, a number of them were grouped together, such as the Scandinavian countries and some African countries. A few Canadian provinces and American states also had their own pavilions. Other pavilions represented particular industries or explored the relationships between human beings and universal themes such as health, the environment, and work. A commissioner headed each pavilion, and a number of hostesses acted as ambassadors.

United States' pavillion - Biosphere

Canadian Pavillion

Federal Republic of Germany pavilion

UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS (USSR) Pavillion

The Pavillion of the Republic of China

The Pavillion of France

Habitat 67 - created by architect Moshe Safdie based on his master's thesis at McGill University and built as part of Expo 67.

Graphisoft announces bidirectional connectivity between ArchiCAD 11, Google Earth and the Google 3D Warehouse

2007-05-04T21:31:00.000-07:00

This capability moves users past the Virtual Building to the virtual world. Users can not only download 3D models from building product manufacturers for use in their projects, they can also publish their designs for the world to experience via Google Earth.

Budapest, May 2, 2007 - Graphisoft announced today that its Google connectivity plug-in for ArchiCAD® 11 will be available for download from its official website at the same time ArchiCAD 11 starts shipping.

“Readily available content that complements a great design is of high value to our users. Google is the perfect place to turn to get a large library of content and, of course, to contribute models for the rest of the ArchiCAD community”, said Miklos Szovenyi-Lux, Director of ArchiCAD Product Management. “Coordination with Google Earth adds another positive dimension to design decisions.”
The bidirectional Google connection enables ArchiCAD 11 users to:

Import terrain and coordinate information from Google Earth – In the early stage of design, even a rough terrain model can significantly help the visualization of the model in context. With the help of Google Earth Connections, users can take a snapshot of terrain and imagery data from Google Earth.

Import 3D buildings and building manufacturer parts from the Google 3D Warehouse – The Google 3D Warehouse site contains thousands of real-world buildings and manufacturer-specific building products for use in your designs. If the architect needs a special car or household appliance for a design project, they can simply search for it on the Warehouse and download it to ArchiCAD with just a few clicks.

Evaluate ArchiCAD designs in Google Earth – With the help of the Google Earth Connections tool, users can easily export textured 3D models to Google Earth to create compelling client presentations.

Publish ArchiCAD designs to the Google 3D Warehouse – Since the 3D Warehouse is the source for 3D building models for Google Earth, if the architect wants to share his/her real-world 3D building model with others, publishing the model will allow for it to be viewed by hundreds of millions of Google Earth users around the world.

Availability

The English and German versions for the Windows platform will be available at the same time ArchiCAD 11 starts shipping. Further versions will be available according to the localization schedule of ArchiCAD 11.
About Graphisoft:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it!" Alan Kay.1

Graphisoft is the pioneer and leader in developing Virtual Building™ solutions. It is widely acknowledged as the world's #1 supplier of model-based software and services for the building industry. Our clients are at the forefront of the industry - delivering projects that are better designed, more predictable to construct and less expensive to operate. Further media requests for information can be made to Akos Pfemeter at: press@graphisoft.com

1 Alan Kay. Inventor of Smalltalk - the inspiration behind windowing-based computer systems.

Graphisoft and ArchiCAD are registered trademarks of Graphisoft. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Richard Meier shows his collection of models

2007-04-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

Architectural models are often shoved into back rooms or even relegated to the scrap heap, given that architects don’t necessarily want to show off their rough drafts.

But, like outtakes from a classic film or early versions of a great novel, the models can be more interesting to students and architecture fans than the final product, since they offer a window onto the creative process. In an age of computer renderings, they also give a vivid sense of how a building looks and feels.

So at age 72, the architect Richard Meier has decided to invite the outside world in, giving visitors a chance to sample an array of models from projects spanning his 40-year career. Stored in a bare-bones 3,600-square-foot studio in Long Island City, Queens, the collection ranges from Mr. Meier’s residential houses of the 1960’s to early versions of his J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1997.

It’s not an elegant space: the lighting is not particularly striking, and the floor is scratched from moving the models this way and that. But Mr. Meier is eager to welcome visitors.

“I realized I should really have people in because it just sits here,” the architect said in a recent interview at the studio. “To have all this and have no one see it is kind of crazy.”

The space, which can be seen by appointment only on Fridays, by no means contains the entirety of Mr. Meier’s work; much of it is still kept at his 10th Avenue office in the West 30s in Manhattan. But there is a substantial sampling — about 300 models. “You see I don’t throw a lot away,” he said.

While Mr. Meier has gained broad attention for projects like the 2003 Jubilee Church on the outskirts of Rome, with its soaring white concrete sails, or his recent boxy glass condominiums along the Hudson River in Manhattan, he is perhaps most closely associated with his sprawling hilltop complex for the Getty in the Santa Monica Mountains.

And it is the Getty that dominates Mr. Meier’s Long Island City studio. Until 1996, the models were kept in Los Angeles, but when the museum needed the space, Mr. Meier had them shipped to a warehouse in Queens. “I didn’t want them to get destroyed,” he said. “There is too much work here to discard them.”

The Getty remains perhaps Mr. Meier’s most ambitious project, with six separate buildings, plazas, an underground parking garage and a tram station on a challengingly steep 110-acre site. Landscaped gardens integrate the structures into the topography.

Immense models of the Getty are on view at the studio — the largest is 18 feet long and 11 feet wide, on wheels and with detachable pieces. “You can get into it more by being able to pull it away and really see into the spaces,” Mr. Meier said. “We had to take the skylight out to get it in here.”

Mounted on the wall is another large model that reflects how the structures were organized along a natural ridge in the hilltop. “You can see the way in which we cut into the earth, as well as building on top of the earth,” Mr. Meier said.

Perhaps most striking is a large-scale gallery mock-up that Mr. Meier had constructed so that people could step inside to experience it — how the sun slanted through the skylight, for example, and whether that natural light landed softly enough on reproduced paintings from the Getty’s collection, pinned to the walls. “We would wheel this into the parking lot and sit in it with curators,” Mr. Meier said.

Over all, the project took 13 years to complete, from 1984 to 1997. When the Getty Center finally opened, Herbert Muschamp, writing in The New York Times, called it “a stupendous new castle of classical beauty.” Some 30,000 people normally visit each week.

Smaller Meier study models focus on specific aspects of the Getty — different versions of skylights, trellises, land contours. You can see how he experimented with the Getty’s auditorium, playing with the seating arrangements and the shape of the ceiling. Shelves hold miniature versions of Mr. Meier’s boxy, modern furniture designs for the Getty — single chairs, double chairs, triple benches.

Among the other buildings represented are Mr. Meier’s first model of the Smith House (1967), a Connecticut residence overlooking Long Island Sound whose private areas are organized on three levels behind an opaque facade with windows. His Hoffman House in East Hampton, N.Y., completed the same year, is a three-dimensional abstraction of interlocking geometries.

And there is his Royal Dutch Paper Mills headquarters in Hilversum, the Netherlands, from 1992, featuring an interior street illuminated by natural light that enters through each side of a winglike roof.

There are also the projects that never got built. Mr. Meier offers glimpses of a 1981 headquarters for Renault outside Paris, and a “Memorial Square” he designed for the former World Trade Center site in Manhattan in collaboration with Eisenman Architects, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates and Steven Holl Architects. Mr. Meier said he was still fond of the design for the square, defined on the east and north with geometric gridlike buildings made of glass, and referred to it as “a lost opportunity.”

On the studio floor are Mr. Meier’s quirky, hulking sculptures, fashioned from the detritus of various architecture projects. Assemble the castoffs, Mr. Meier said, and “it becomes something else.”

But he hasn’t been making them lately. “I have no more room,” he said.

Serpentine Unveils Thorsen and Eliasson Design

2007-04-26T21:35:00.000-07:00

By Lucy Bullivant on Architectural Record

Final designs for the Serpentine Gallery’s annual summertime pavilion were unveiled in London yesterday. After a last-minute decision to postpone the German architect Frei Otto’s scheme (ArchRecord.com, March 23, 2007), the gallery gave Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, co-founder of Snøhetta, and the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson a joint creative role. The duo created a top-like, spinning form clad in plywood with a steel structure flanked by a double-layer curved skin of teeth-like white baffles.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Eliasson said that their design takes its cue from “the dynamics of movement, exploring vertical circulation in a single space.” He added that it is intended “not to be about decoration but the interaction of people as they journey through the space.”

Visitors will enter the 50-foot-high pavilion via a spiralling helical ramp. On its ascent, the ramp curves upward into the outer wall in one form, taking visitors to the roof; there, an oculus will let daylight into the interior and provide a bird’s eye view of the space below as well as panoramic views of a park that surrounds the gallery. The upper roof cantilevers over an interior void.

“The program is now in its eighth year and we’ve been looking at how we can develop the project so it stays fresh,” said Julia Peyton-Jones, the Serpentine’s director, explaining the gallery’s decision to give Eliasson a substantial design role with Thorsen. Since the 1990s, she added, his work has “explored a new dynamic of what architecture could be.”

For his part, Eliasson said that he would conduct experiments with people inside the pavilion. These might include adding vibrational qualities to the building that would make it resonate like a musical instrument, and experiments with food and light. His Berlin-based studio researches the relationship between people and their surroundings and the impact of light conditions that the pavilion aims to reflect.

The Serpentine’s temporary summertime pavilion, which opens in July, attracts an average of 250,000 visitors. In the past it has featured designs by Rem Koolhaas, Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind, and Zaha Hadid. As it has before, Arup will engineer the pavilion.

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AIA COTE Announces 2007 Top Ten Green Projects

2007-04-26T21:27:00.000-07:00

Projects showcase excellence in sustainable design principles and reduced energy consumption

Washington, D.C., April 23, 2007 — The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) have selected the top ten examples of sustainable architecture and green design solutions that protect and enhance the environment. The projects will be honored on May 3rd at the AIA 2007 National Convention and Design Exposition in San Antonio.

The project descriptions highlight both the design innovations and sustainable strategies, along with the metrics achieved in terms of reduced carbon emissions, reduced energy consumption and improved building functionality.

The 2007 COTE Top Ten Green Projects program celebrates projects that are the result of a thoroughly integrated approach to architecture, natural systems, and technology They make a positive contribution to their communities, improve comfort for building occupants, and reduce environmental impacts through strategies such as reuse of existing structures, connection to transit systems, low-impact and regenerative site development, energy and water conservation, use of sustainable or renewable construction materials, and design that improves indoor air quality.

The jury included: David Brems, FAIA, Gillies Stransky Brems Smith PC; Alisdair McGregor, PE, Arup; John Quale, LEED AP, University of Virginia School of Architecture; Traci Rose Rider, LEED AP North Carolina State University; Anne Schopf, AIA, Mahlum Architects; and Susan Szenasy, editor-in-chief, Metropolis.

“Both the number of submissions and level of sophistication have increased dramatically since the AIA COTE Top Ten Green Projects program’s inception in 1997. This program examines a metrics that address context, transportation, energy, water, light and air, and other characteristics,” said Kira Gould, Assoc. AIA, chair of the AIA Committee on the Environment. “We are pleased to see design teams getting increasingly comfortable with such metrics, which suggests that performance standards are being effectively integrated into the design intent, rather than being understood as something separate.”

The 2007 Top Ten Green Projects (listed in alphabetical order):

EpiCenter, Artists for Humanity / Boston, MA
Arrowstreet Inc.
The first Platinum LEED Certified building in Boston, the EpiCenter is a simple, functional building that achieves the highest levels of sustainability on a tight budget. Rainwater collected from the roof is channeled through a transparent drain pipe which runs through the gallery into a holding tank to serve the irrigation needs of the grassy recessed courtyard. Concentrated windows on the south side of the building provides for the deep penetration of warming sunlight in the winter. Large floor-to-floor heights, 12 and 18 feet, allow daylight to penetrate deep into the building. The building uses no refrigerant-based cooling.

Juror Traci Rider said, “This project is not just about design and environmental sustainability, but reaching cultural sustainability. They had a low budget, and there is something terrific about what they achieved. This infill project has this elegant photovoltaic roof, and it’s really producing for them.”

Global Ecology Research Center / Stanford, CA
EHDD Architects
Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford University is a 10,800 square-foot, low-energy laboratory and office building for the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The unique sustainable design resulted in a 72% reduction in carbon emissions associated with building operation and a 50% reduction in embodied carbon for building materials. Biodiversity is addressed through a thorough pursuit of salvaged, recycled, and certified materials. The building facing directly to the south and north maximizes daylighting, sunshading, and ventilation opportunities.

Juror John Quale said, “LEED ratings were helpful for some of our considerations, but that played out in different ways. In this project, they intentionally opted out of the LEED process to push their own agenda. We appreciated the independent thinking and the explanation about it.”

Government Canyon Visitor Center / Helotes, TX
Lake/Flato Architects
Key goals included designing spaces that respond to climate and demonstrate both active and passive green solutions. The structures have operable windows, generous open porches and a screened exhibit building oriented toward the prevailing summer breeze, while shielding the cold winter winds. Large overhanging roofs, flaps, and deep porches shield these spaces from direct solar gains, while allowing daylight to penetrate deep into the interior. The narrow footprint allows for maximum use of indirect daylight from both the south and the north in all occupied spaces, resulting in 90% of occupied space with effective daylight and views with 100% of spaces with ventilation controllability.

Juror Susan Szenasy said, “The building opens up and shades itself and fits into the landscape in an unaggressive way. There is also something really familiar and comfortable about it. The composition is very carefully controlled, from the site plan to details.”

Hawaii Gateway Energy Center / Kailua-Kona, HI
Ferraro Choi and Associates
The Hawaii Gateway Energy Center is an excellent example of the integration of passive design strategies to conserve natural resources and achieve exceptional building performance. Passive design strategies such as induced stack ventilation, daylighting, shading, and renewable cooling from deep seawater reduce initial energy requirements to an absolute minimum. A copper roof acts as the "engine" that triggers a thermo-syphon, radiating heat from the sun into a ceiling plenum. The heated air begins to rise and is exhausted through "chimneys" on the building's north face. This hot, exhausting stream of air is continuously replenished with 100% fresh outside air that is routed across occupied space from a vented under-floor plenum.

Rider added, “We were impressed by the way they blended active and passive technologies. This project uses PV and calls attention to that, and uses seawater and condensation. It’s really using all of earth’s devices, then dramatizing that with this visible structure. This is a great advertisement for a new technology - calling attention to an ancient ‘technology,’ the sun.”

Heifer International / Little Rock, AR
Polk Stanley Rowland Curzon Porter Architects, Ltd.
The fundamental goal of the design team was to create integrated building systems that maximized both energy savings and educational potential. Gray water collected from sinks and drinking fountains, condensate from outside air units, and rain water from the water tower are reused in toilets and cooling tower. The building is designed to use up to 54.9% less energy than a conventional office building. 75% of the building’s construction waste was recycled. Significant overhangs with crown like perforated metal edges reduce solar heat gain. To promote indoor air quality, materials were selected with low emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Juror Alisdair McGregor said, “This deals with water in a very demonstrable way. It takes condensation, stores it, and uses that for cooling towers and wetlands during dry periods. Energy performance is about 54% below ASHRAE 99. The sustainable features are visible, but not in your face.”

Sidwell Friends Middle School / Washington, DC
Kieran Timberlake Associates
Solar chimneys with south-facing glass are designed for passive ventilation, operating without additional energy. Sunlight heats air within the glass chimney tops, creating a convection current which draws cooler air into the building through north facing open windows. The building uses natural daylight in lieu of artificial light as much as possible. Artificial lighting consists primarily of fluorescent light sources equipped with high efficiency lamps. The green roof functions to reduce storm water runoff volume, improve the quality of infiltrated runoff, and reduce municipal water use. The roof, walls, and windows perform over 200% better than the minimums set by the energy standard.

Szenasy commented, “The building itself is a teacher. It tells the students where they are. It helps them be conscious of the water and light. There are all these cues connecting them to the natural world. This project is really comprehensive. They have a great attitude about water. They were very careful with light. It is beautiful. It is a really aggressive kind of renovation.”

Wayne L. Morse U.S. Courthouse / Eugene, OR
Morphosis & DLR Group
This facility is a Security Level IV facility – one level below buildings such as the Pentagon. An under floor air distribution system serves a majority of spaces, including the six courtrooms. This system provides more efficient air-conditioning, uses less fan power, and provides better air quality than a traditional overhead ductwork system. The building system minimizes potable water use and associated sanitary waste with water-saving fixtures including waterless urinals, and ultra low flow lavatories, sinks and showers. Combined with fixture sensors at public locations, these measures result in savings of more than 40% over baseline case analysis.
Juror Anne Schopf said, “The security issues are such a big challenge in a building like this, and getting the daylight in while dealing with those issues is a very smart response in a complex building type. They made a big move, getting the courtrooms raised up to the light. That’s the big story here. This addressed the issue that there are some federal requirements that work directly against sustainability goals.”

Whitney Water Purification Facility / New Haven, CT
Steven Holl Architects
The new facility provides an abundant water supply to south Central Connecticut, creates a vibrant watershed ecosystem, and includes a public park and educational facility while providing a diverse habitat and sanctuary for migrating species of birds. The 30,000 square foot green roof with glazed bubbles floods the facilities below with daylight. All electrical lighting comes from low-energy fluorescent fixtures. 100 % of staff space is day lit. The geothermal system saves 850,000 kilowatt hours annually as compared to electrical resistant heaters and air cooled chillers.

Juror David Brems remarked, “They reinvented the building type along with the programmatic understanding of a water purification facility by combining it with a park, putting some thing under ground, and being really inventive with form-making.”

Willingboro Master Plan & Public Library / Willingboro, NJ
Croxton Collaborative Architects, PC
The Public Library conserves 100% of the structural steel frame and concrete foundations of the original building. Since the building orientation could not be changed, seven major clearstory skylights were oriented on a true north-south axis to maximize the duration and traverse of daylighting. These true north/south clerestories for daylighting create a criss-cross infill of existing beams and joists which achieve 95% diffuse light with transitory “dappled light” effects. The building utilizes a gas-fired heater/chiller which can be easily retrofitted to accommodate bio fuels and various fuels presenting "cost opportunities".

Schopf added, “It was a shopping mall that had gone defunct. The master plan kept many of the existing structures in place, renovating and transforming them. This is a tremendous example of how to make something beautiful and functional out of practically nothing … the original Woolworth structure with a new wrapper. This is so relevant to so much of the existing building stock that exists in this country. Addressing these neglected facilities in this way is complex. This project really transformed place in a holistic way.”

Z6 House / Santa Monica, CA
LivingHomes, Ray Kappe
The Z6 House is a single family residence that was added to a multi-family zoned lot with an existing duplex. The building takes advantage of natural ventilation and has been designed to optimize passive solar heating. The heating is accomplished through a radiant heating system that is powered by a solar hot water collector. There is a 2.4KW PV array above the roof. This array acts as a shade canopy at the roof stair access. The PV array was designed to provide 60-75% of the homes energy usage. The building has a comprehensive environmental monitoring system that will track the total water, gray water and rain water usage.

Quale said, “Spatially this is a sophisticated project. There is a subtlety to the spacemaking. Also, there are a lot of prefab projects out there that have very little rigor to the sustainability, and this challenges that.”

Honorable Mention 2007 Top Ten Green Projects:

William J. Clinton Presidential Center / Little Rock, AR
Polshek Partnership Architects
Example of reclaiming a contaminated Brownfield, and a catalyst for area improvement.

Gerding Theater at the Armory / Portland, OR
GBD Architects Inc.
Project establishes connection between historic preservation and sustainability.

Provincetown Art Association and Museum / Provincetown, MA
Machado and Silvetti Associates
Modern take on traditional regional design, with beautifully integrated into existing context.

Stillwell Avenue Terminal Train Shed / New York, NY
Kiss + Cathcart Architects
Highly visible use of photovoltaics in a public transportation project.

Jean Nouvel to Build Paris Symphony Hall

2007-04-26T21:19:00.000-07:00

by Alex Ulam
The French architect's design for the state-of-the-art symphony hall is an "exercise in disharmony"

Paris is one of the world’s cultural capitals, but a key offering is missing from its menu: a state-of-the-art symphony hall. That’s about to change. Earlier this month Jean Nouvel was selected as the winner of an international competition to design the Philharmonie de Paris, a music complex that will be the future home of the Orchestre de Paris.

Slated to open in 2012, the new complex will be located in the Parc de la Villette. In addition to providing a contemporary performance space, the Philharmonie de Paris will be the city’s first full-fledged professional music facility with offices, a library, and space for exhibitions. At its heart is Nouvel’s 2,400-seat concert hall, whose design is an exercise in disharmony. Its aluminum-clad exterior resembles a mass of crumpled metal slabs, while its interior contains bulging, sinuous shapes. The hall features a “vineyard-style” seating arrangement similar to that of Walt Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, where the audience is arrayed on raised terraces surrounding an orchestra platform.

Nouvel’s design was selected from a field of six finalists that included Francis Soler, Christian de Portzamparc, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himme(l)bau, and MRDV. The first phase of the competition drew 98 entries. Interestingly, architects who submitted designs were precluded from participating in the city’s other major architectural competition to design a two-acre superstructure that will be located at the entrance to the enormous underground Les Halles mall and transit center.

“Many of the international architects who wanted to be part of the Les Halles project, were chosen for the (Philharmonie de Paris) competition,” a spokesperson for Paris’s mayor explains. “Because the two of them are quite difficult projects, we had the idea that they wouldn’t have the time necessary to work on both of them at the same time.”

Provided by Architectural Record—The Resource for Architecture and Architects

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Calatrava’s Chicago Twisting tower-Spire got Approved

2007-04-23T00:23:00.000-07:00

Chicago's great gamble in the sky is about to begin in earnest, and the odds are now better than even money that it will succeed as a work of skyline sculpture and as a building that engages the city around it.

After months of struggle, Zurich-based architect Santiago Calatrava finally has been able to make a winning match between visual poetry and the harsh realities of economics in his design for the twisting, 2,000-foot Chicago Spire, which would be the nation's tallest building.
Even if the design that the Chicago Plan Commission approved Thursday lacks some of the balletic elan of the original plan for this tower unveiled two years ago, it remains a powerful sculptural object with a strong structural rationale -- an innovative successor to such great Chicago skyscrapers as the twin corncobs of Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City.

But the 150-story tower is nonetheless a gamble, and not just for the developer, Dublin-based Garrett Kelleher, who insists this is no pie-in-the-sky skyscraper even if he refuses to reveal its cost or the price tag of its condos.

No one has ever built a twisting tower this tall, though a smaller version of this type is under construction in Dubai. For all the allure of Calatrava's architectural models, the Spire they show is as much an abstract sculpture as it is a real building. One wonders how the stunning geometry will look when everyday necessities -- windows, for instance -- intrude.

At best, this will be a new Eiffel Tower, a scale-shattering yet superb skyline statement that becomes the new postcard image of Chicago.

At worst, as less persuasive renderings of the tower suggest, it will be a visual cartoon, a supersize, superskinny version of a soft-serve ice cream cone.

Inevitably, some will lament that this is not the original version of the tower, called the Fordham Spire, which proposed a hotel and communications antenna as well as condos on a vacant site west of Lake Shore Drive and on the north bank of the Chicago River. But that design was a seductive fantasy. This one, which would house about 1,200 condominiums, is striving to be real.

Certainly, it has made great strides toward balancing form and finance, especially since December, when Calatrava made public a banal, nearly flat-topped version of the skyscraper. It instantly was tagged "Twizzler Tower" for resembling a piece of licorice.

Since then, the restless architect has moved gradually to the present plan, in which the tower rises energetically but nobly, making a 360-degree twist as it moves from the ground to a sharply articulated summit.

In January, he unveiled sketches to the Tribune that gave the tower a newly pointed top and promised a restoration of the tower's whirling upward drive. Then, accommodating complex structural requirements, he settled on the current design, which is somewhat bulkier than the pencil-like January version but remains attractively slender. Gone is another version, also revealed to community groups last month, that had too much twist in its top and revealed Calatrava's tendency to lapse into the visually hyperactive.

But the sky-high aesthetic risks haven't disappeared.

Materials make a difference

Calatrava needs to settle on materials -- he wants the exterior to include stainless steel, like the cladding of the much-admired Inland Steel Building of 1958 at 30 W. Monroe St. -- yet how they are detailed and manufactured is crucial.

The gap between vision and reality is already apparent in the glass exterior of the under-construction, 1,362-foot Trump International Hotel & Tower by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Renderings by the architect showed an elegant glass skin, but parts of the exterior as built bring to mind distorted fun-house mirrors.

However the skyline drama turns out, the Spire has a greatly improved, ground-level design that belies the rap that Calatrava's skyscrapers are like ice sculptures, chilling the cities around them.

More-approachable approach

With Kelleher's encouragement, the architect has moved far beyond the original Fordham Spire plan, in which a ziggurat-shaped parking podium surrounded the tower's base and pretty much held the city at bay.

Instead, with Kelleher approving an expensive underground parking garage and asking the architect to plan the proposed 3.2-acre DuSable Park just to the east, Calatrava has given this enormous tower the fine-grained detail it needs to be a city-enlivening addition to both the riverfront and the lakefront.

The appealing features include a grand, circular plaza set between the tower and the north bank of the Chicago River. In addition, Calatrava's plans call for pedestrian passageways that will lead beneath the superstructure of Lake Shore Drive to the proposed DuSable Park, where Calatrava would handsomely sculpt the landscape. Undoubtedly Kelleher will market the tower as sitting in a 5-acre park, not the 2-acre building site. But the plans also promise to make this skyscraper much more than just an object to be ogled from afar.

True, traffic remains a concern, especially because tourists are sure to flock to this building. Signs will be needed to point those who come on wheels to nearby parking garages. Wisely, the tower's garage won't be open to the public, which should prevent a recurrence of the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, when a bomb-laden van exploded in the center's underground parking garage, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000.

For all the questions looming around the Spire, however, this much is clear: The planned skyscraper has the aesthetic and urban design stature to match its projected height. Now the great drama begins: Will this thing actually get built? Will the reality match the promise?

Yes, Calatrava said Wednesday in an interview, explaining that the developer already is getting bids for caissons. His talents as a real estate oddsmaker, one hopes, are a match for his skills in shaping skyscrapers.

For more information about this project, please see website www.thechicagospire.com

Architectural Record releases its Record Houses 2007 list

2007-04-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

Architectural Record releases its Record Houses 2007 list.

Christ Church Tower - by Boyarsky Murphy (London)

Boyarsky/Murphy slips an 11-hour home into the tower of Christ Church in London

Brown House - by Randy Brown Architects (Omaha)

Randy Brown draws a line in the sand for Nebraska architecture with his family's Brown House, a labor of love in Omaha

VilLA NM - by UNStudio (New York)

Joining rectilinear forms with a twist, UNStudio’s VilLA NM, in upstate New York, captures the landscape in gold reflections

Ohana Guest House - by Cutler Anderson Architects (hawaii)

James Cutler crafts an ocean cottage, Ohana Guest House, for a windy and lush site at the end of the road on Hawaii’s Big Island

Casa Poli - by Pezo von Ellrichshausen Architects (Chile)

Atop a jagged cliff in coastal Chile, Pezo von Ellrichshausen sets Casa Poli, a great concrete cube, evoking a block of porous stone

Ring House - by Takei-Nabeshima-Architects (Omaha)

A country retreat outside Tokyo, TNA’s Ring House opens itself to vertical forest views through horizontal stripes

Loblolly House - by KieranTimberlake Associates (Maryland)

On a wooded site on Taylors Island, Maryland, KieranTimberlake tested a new way of building with the Loblolly house

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ASLA 2007 Landscape Award

2007-04-16T23:30:00.000-07:00

The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has announced the recipients of its 2007 Professional Awards. The jury considered over 500 entries and selected 38 projects to receive awards. The awards will be presented on October 8 at the ASLA Annual Meeting in San Francisco at a ceremony and champagne reception sponsored by Landscape Forms.

General Design Category

Awards of Excellence

M. Victor and Frances Leventritt Garden at The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts
Reed Hilderbrand, Watertown, Massachusetts
client: Harvard University

Honor Awards

Curran House, San Francisco, California
Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture, San Francisco, California
client: Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation

The Red Ribbon - Tanghe River Park, Qinhuangdao City, Hebei Province, China
Turenscape (Beijing Turen Design Institute) and Peking University Graduate School of Landscape Architecture, Beijing, China
client: Yang Lina, The Landscape Bureau, Quinjuangdao City, Hebei Province, China

One North Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois
PWP Landscape Architecture, Berkeley, California
client: John Buck Company

The Restoration of Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park, California
National Park Service, Lakewood, Colorado
client: Sequoia National Park

Mesa Arts Center, Mesa, Arizona
Martha Schwartz Partners, Cambridge, Massachusetts
client: Mesa Arts Center

Washington Mutual Center Roof Garden, Seattle, Washington
Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg, Vancouver British Columbia, Canada
client: Washington Mutual Bank, Kent Wiegel, Lane Premo

University of Minnesota Duluth - Swenson Science Building, Duluth, Minnesota
oslund.and.assoc., Minneapolis, Minnesota
client: University of Minnesota Duluth

Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, Washington
Lead Designer: Weiss/Manfredi, New York, New York
Landscape Architect: Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture
client: Seattle Art Museum

Glacier Club, Durango, Colorado
Design Workshop, Denver, Colorado

Harvard Graduate Student Housing at 29 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Richard Burck Associates, Inc., Jonathan Levi Architects with Bergmeyer Associates, Somerville, Massachusetts
client: Harvard University

NE Siskiyou Green Street, Portland, Oregon
Kevin Robert Perry, ASLA , Portland, Oregon
client: Sustainable Stormwater Management Program Oregon

Mount Tabor Middle School Rain Garden, Portland, Oregon
Kevin Robert Perry, ASLA, Portland, Oregon
Brandon Wilson, City of Portland Environmental Services
client: City of Portland, Sustainable Stormwater Management Program

Residential Design Category, co-sponsored by Garden Design Magazine

Award of Excellence

Elie Saab Residence, Faqra, Lebanon
Vladimir Djurovic Landscape Architecture, Broumana, Lebanon
client: Elie Saab

Honor Awards

Private Residence, San Francisco, California
Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture, San Francisco, California

Erman Residence, San Francisco, California
Surfacedesign, Inc, San Francisco, California
James A. Lord, Roderick R. Wyllie, Moritz Moellers, Geoff di Girolamo
client: Mark Erman

Malinalco House, Malinalco, State of Mexico, Mexico
Mario Schjetnan/Grupo de Diseno Urbano, Mexico City, Mexico
client: Irma Romero

Manhattan Roof Terrace, New York, New York
Sawyer/Berson Architecture & Landscape Architecture, LLP, New York, New York

Farrar Pond Residence, Lincoln, Massachusetts
Mikyoung Kim Design, Brookline, Massachusetts
client: Bob Davoli & Eileen McDonagh

Pump House, Highland Park, Texas
MESA, Dallas, Texas
D.I.R.T. Studio, Charlottesville, Virginia

Sonoma Vineyard, Glen Ellen, California
MFLA Marta Fry Landscape Associates, San Francisco, California

Woody Creek Garden, Pitkin County, Colorado
Design Workshop, Aspen, Colorado

Connecticut Country House, Westport, Connecticut
Wesley Stout Associates, New Canaan, Connecticut

Lunada Bay Residence, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Southern California
Artecho Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Venice, California

Analysis and Planning Category

Award of Excellence

Hunters Point Waterfront Park Project, San Francisco, California
Hargreaves Associates, San Francisco, California
client: Arc Ecology

Honor Awards

The Park and New Town upon the fishponds -
The Planning of 2007 China International Garden Show Park Area in Xiamen, Xiamen, China
Atelier DYJG, Beijing, China

Wildhorse Ranch, Steens Mountain, Oregon
DHM Design, Denver, Colorado

Atlanta BeltLine Redevelopment Plan, Atlanta, Georgia
EDAW, INC., Atlanta, Georgia

Penn Connects: A Vision for the Future, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Sasaki Associates, Inc., Watertown, Massachusetts
client: University of Pennsylvania

University of Balamand Campus Master Plan, Al Koura, Tripoli, Lebanon
Sasaki Associates, Inc., Watertown, Massachusetts
client: University of Balamand

Lower Howard's Creek Corridor Management Plan, Clark County, Kentucky
Parsons Brinckerhoff, Lexington, Kentucky, in conjunction with Ned Crankshaw, ASLA
client: Clark County Fiscal Court and The Friends of Lower Howard's Creek

Open Space Seattle 2100 Envisioning Seattle's Green Infrastructure for the Next Century, Seattle, Washington
Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington, and the Open Space Seattle 2100 Coalition, Seattle, Washington

Research Category, co-sponsored by Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) and Landscape Journal

Awards of Excellence

Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime by Kenneth Helphand, FASLA
Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas
Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon

Honor Award

The Green Build-out Model: Quantifying Stormwater Benefits of Trees and Greenroofs in Washington, DC
Casey Trees Endowment Fund, Washington, DC

Communications Category

Award of Excellence

TOPOS - The International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design
Munich, Germany

Honor Awards

The Chicago Green Alley Handbook, Chicago, Illinois
Hitchcock Design Group, Chicago, Illinois
client: City of Chicago Department of Transportation

Cultural Landscapes as Classrooms Series
The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Washington, DC

Koolhaas and His Omnipotent Masters - William Drenttel

2007-04-16T23:06:00.000-07:00

designobserver.com

Central Chinese Television (CCTV) Headquarters, designed by Rem Koolhaas & Ole Scheeren; engineered by Ove Arup. Rendering © OMA 2007.

According to Rem Koolhaas, there are three seminal events in the history of architecture: Samson tearing down the house of the Philistines in 1100 BC, the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 AD, and his design in 2006 AD of the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing. Obviously, this is a reductionist view of history — and the kind of hyperbole one expects from a manifesto in Wired Magazine. But this is no manifesto: instead, as Koolhaas himself recounts the story, he chose between working on NYC's Ground Zero and the Beijing project based on a fortune cookie he was given at a Chinese restaurant — in it, the goofy prognostication "Stunningly Omnipresent Masters Make Minced Meat of Memory."

The story of a single cookie presaging the most important building in China is, quite simply, bizarre. It may be a romantic notion, but most of us still want to believe that great architecture is made on a napkin, the source of inspiration being anything except hard work. (According to Paul Goldberger, the design of Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library can be traced to a single diagram.)

The idea that one of the world's leading architects would glorify "making minced meat of memory" is beyond comprehension.

Rem Koolhaas, illustration (reconfigured) from the "Beijing Manifesto," Wired Magazine, 2007.

But manifestos often sound like nonsense. As Allan Chochinov of Core77 has written, they often "reek of dogma and rules. ...they appear (or are written so as to appear) self-evident. This kind of a priori writing is easy, since you simply lay out what seems obviously—even tautologically—true." The Beijing Manifesto of Rem Koolhaas is no exception:

In the free market, architecture = real estate. Any complex corporation is dismantled, each unit sequestered in place. All media companies suffer a subsequent paranoia: Each department — the creative department, the finance department, administration, et cetera — talks about the others as “them”; distrust is rife, motives are questioned. But in China, money does not yet have the last word. CCTV is envisioned as shared conceptual space in which all parts are housed permanently, aware of one another’s presence — a collective. Communication increases; paranoia decreases.

It's one thing to build the building. But isn't Koolhaas sounding like an apologist for the corruption and extreme capitalism of Beijing? His manifesto seems to embrace the language of Mao for a media conglamerate that is one of the the great powers in the People's Republic of China, and the source of much of the censorship in that country. According to Koolhaas's thesis of Forward Compatibility: "China is characterized by the need to spread opportunity and information rather than protect manufacturers and other established interests. It could use its dominant position, the force of its numbers, its economic power, and its central government to lead the world into a digital future." What would lead an architect of Rem Koolhaas's standing to voice such propaganda? Perhaps Koolhaas is simply taking advantage of the pervasive authoritarianism that is still the Chinese norm. Design approvals? No problem, when everyone serves at the pleasure of the Party! He almost seems to be luxuriating in the absence of the nuisance of the free market.

Sadly, his apologia seems vaguely reminiscent of the post-WWII trompe l'oeil of Leni Riefenstahl: the heroic language necessary to justify heroic art. "In communism, engineering has a high status, its laws resonating with Marxian wheels of history." It's easy to get lost in, or angry at, such Wired-Magazine-grandiloquence. Or as Paul Goldberger observes, "Koolhaas has always been a better architect than social critic."

There are numerous examples of Koolhaas producing flawed social commentary to rationalize his architectural conclusions. George Packer, a seasoned on-the-ground journalist writing in The New Yorker, tells of Koolhaas visiting Lagos, Nigeria with his Harvard graduate students. They were all so terrified by the chaos, degradation and poverty that they were incapable of getting out of their cars (undoubtedly Range Rovers), or leaving their hotel for any length of time. Only by flying over the city in a helicopter (rented from the Nigerian president) were they "granted a more reassuring view" — at which point Lagos was deemed to be splendid as an urban model. As Packer observes, "The impulse [by Koolhaas] to look at an 'apparently burning garbage heap' and see an 'urban phenomenon,' and then make it the raw material of an elaborate aesthetic construct, is not so different from the more common impulse not to look at all."

The truth, though, is that the CCTV building is stunningly beautiful. End of story — except that Koolhaas didn 't stop there. And here, the architect — master of rhetoric that he's become — asks the very question that most confounds his critics. "Was it merely a landmark, one more alien proposal of meaningless boldness? Was its structural complexity simply irresponsible?"

OMA in Beijing exhibition, MoMA, 2006. Photograph by Iwan Baan.

In the OMA in Beijing exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the viewer is overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the CCTV enterprise. "A selection of architectural drawings from MoMA's collection will situate the project as one of the most visionary undertakings in the history of modern architecture." Whew! So from MoMA we get outright hero worship instead of any type of critical dialogue. And The New York Times reviewed the exhibition with a fawning piece by Robin Pogrebin titled, "Embracing Koolhaas's Friendly Skyscraper." (One is reminded, of course, that neither MoMA nor The New York Times Company selected Koolhaas for their own New York City headquarters.) The most striking curatorial intervention in the MoMA exhibition is the inclusion of the famous Mies van der Rohe drawing, Glass Skyscraper, elevation study, 1922. Koolhaas has aligned himself with Mies van der Rohe for a long time because he was the most modern of the moderns: reductive, universal, abstract. Koolhaas even speaks of "a return of Miesian Puritanism about steel."

The CCTV building has now reached fourteen stories, and we can easily anticipate the photographs of Chinese workers scaling the steel structure, much like the Lewis Hine photographs of steel workers building the Empire State Building, mostly Mohawk Indians "known for their agility and courage in working on steel beams far above the city below." So far, however, most of the construction photographs we see are devoid of workers, steel being the hero. ("Quite impressing amount of cranes and steel" [sic] reads a typical photo caption.)

Maybe the real hero worship around Koolhaas's architecture should be reserved for the engineers who have poured so much steel into this structure. For perspective, the World Trade Towers (completed 1970-72), each with 110 floors, required 200,000 tons of steel for 13 million square feet of space, or 31 lbs/sf of steel.

CCTV, at only 55 stories, requires 123,750 tons of steel for 4.8 million square feet of space, or 51 lbs/sf of steel. The punch line is that CCTV is the architectural equivalent of a gas-guzzling SUV. A structural engineer might talk about pounds of steel per square foot as a measure of a building's structural efficiency. CCTV has a beautiful structural design considering what it is required to do, but any engineer, I believe, would describe it as a "heavy" building. By comparison, the World Trade Towers were a super tall, extreme structure and they were still 40% lighter than CCTV. There is a lot of extra steel (20 to 30 lbs/sf) in the CCTV structure simply to resist overturning because of the weight and stress of its free-floating bridge, even assuming contemporary code and seismic requirements.

The issue is simple: all this steel is there to support a design conceit, albeit a beautiful one, of "an eye catching megastructure which looks like it ought to fall over." Rory McGowan, the ARUP director of the collaborating structural engineers, "admits that the structural gymnastics have a purely aesthetic justification."

Madelon Vriesendorp, Après l'amour, c.1976. From Delirious New York by Rem Koolhass, 1978.

Much can be said of the architecture of Rem Koolhaas. It can be "raw, confusing, impersonal, uncomfortable, oppressive, theatrical and exhilarating." I keep coming back to the word, "exhilarating." It has been that for me since I saw the Empire State Building post-coitus with the Chrylser Building in his first U.S. exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1978. I just wish "the most visionary undertaking in the history of modern architecture" had strived for something more than a bridge of steel in China.

In the end, all the political discourse and self-serving manifestos mean little. We are left to judge this building as a piece of architecture built in 2007, in a climate of growing awareness of sustainability. Building a project of this scale with so much extra steel to support an aesthetic expression seems like a missed opportunity, if not something completely bordering on civic negligence, especially in China, one of the countries which necessarily must embrace sustainability soon. Imagine if Koolhaas had used this opportunity to build the lightest, most green building in the world? Imagine if he had marshalled all of his rhetorical verve and diplomatic savvy to argue for the critical importance of such architecture? Instead of responding to fortune cookies, Rem Koolhaas could have changed the world.

Zaha Hadid wins the 2007 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals

2007-04-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

Economist Alan Greenspan, architect Zaha Hadid, and international relations attorney and educator Anne-Marie Slaughter have been named the 2007 recipients of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals presented by the University of Virginia.

Hadid, recipient of the 42nd TJF Medal in Architecture, is a native of Iraq whose practice is based in London. Among her best known projects are the Hoenheim-Nord Car Park and Terminus in Strasbourg, France; BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany; and Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hadid, who received a mathematics degree from the American University of Beirut before studying at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, in 2004 became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize in architecture.

Richard Rogers Wins Pritzker Prize 2007

2007-03-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

By Archinect
Richard Rogers of the UK
Becomes the 2007
Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate

Los Angeles, CA—Richard Rogers, whose firm Richard Rogers Partnership is headquartered in London, has been chosen as the 2007 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The formal ceremony for what has come to be known throughout the world as architecture’s highest honor will be held on June 4 in London. At that time, a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion will be bestowed on the 73-year old architect at The Banqueting House, designed in 1619 by Inigo Jones.

In announcing the jury’s choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, quoted from the jury citation, “Born in Florence, Italy, and trained as an architect in London, at the Architectural Association, and later, in the United States at Yale University, Rogers has an outlook as urbane and expansive as his upbringing. In his writings, through his role as advisor to policy making groups, as well as his large-scale planning work, Rogers is a champion of urban life and believes in the potential of the city to be a catalyst for social change.”

In Rogers’ own words, his vision is that cities of the future “will no longer be zoned as today in isolated one-activity ghettos; rather they will resemble the more richly layered cities of the past. Living, work, shopping, learning, and leisure will overlap and be housed in continuous, varied and changing structures.”

Pritzker Prize jury chairman, The Lord Palumbo elaborated with more of the citation: “Throughout his distinguished career of more than forty years, Richard Rogers has consistently pursued the highest goals for architecture. Key Rogers projects already represent defining moments in the history of contemporary architecture. The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1971-1977), designed in partnership with Renzo Piano, revolutionized museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city. Lloyd’s of London in the City of London (1978-1986), another landmark of late 20th century design, established Richard Rogers’ reputation as a master not only of the large urban building, but also of his own brand of architectural expressionism. As these buildings and other subsequent projects, such as the recently completed and acclaimed Terminal 4, Barajas Airport in Madrid (1997- 2005) demonstrate, a unique interpretation of the Modern Movement’s fascination with the building as machine, an interest in architectural clarity and transparency, the integration of public and private spaces, and a commitment to flexible floor plans that respond to the ever-changing demands of users, are recurring themes in his work.” Terminal 4, Barajas Airport won the 2006 Stirling Prize.

Rogers is the fourth laureate to be chosen from the United Kingdom, the first three being the late James Stirling in 1981, The Lord Foster (Norman Foster) in 1999, and Zaha Hadid in 2004. He is the 31st laureate since the prize was founded in 1979. Rogers was appointed a Labour life peer in 1996 taking the title, The Lord Rogers of Riverside.

In addition to London, Richard Rogers Partnership (which will be renamed Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners in the UK next month) has offices in Barcelona, Madrid and Tokyo. Some of the major projects that span the globe include: in New York, the design for a 71-story tower for the World Trade Center site at 175 Greenwich Street; in Washington, D.C., an office building under construction at 300 New Jersey Avenue; in UK, mentioning just a few works — the Leadenhall Building; the Millennium Experience; and an early project, Wimbledon House, a home for Rogers’ parents in the late 1960s; the National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff; the Nippon Television Headquarters in Tokyo, as well as several other projects there and in South Korea.

The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize is to honor annually a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.

The distinguished jury that selected Rogers as the 2007 Laureate consists of its chairman, Lord Palumbo, internationally known architectural patron of London, chairman of the trustees, Serpentine Gallery, former chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, former chairman of the Tate Gallery Foundation, and former trustee of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and alphabetically: Shigeru Ban, architect and professor at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan; Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi, architect, planner and professor of architecture of Ahmedabad, India; Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of the board, Vitra in Basel, Switzerland; Carlos Jimenez, professor, Rice University School of Architecture, principal, Carlos Jimenez Studio in Houston, Texas; Victoria Newhouse architectural historian and author, founder and director of the Architectural History Foundation, New York, New York; Renzo Piano, architect and Pritzker Laureate, of Paris, France and Genoa, Italy; and Karen Stein, editorial director of Phaidon Press in New York. Martha Thorne, formerly a curator of architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, is executive director.

The prize presentation ceremony moves to different locations around the world each year, paying homage to historic and contemporary architecture. Last year, the ceremony was held in Istanbul, Turkey at the Dolmabahçe Palace. The year before, Chicago’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion, designed by 1989 Pritzker Laureate Frank Gehry, was the venue in that city’s new Millennium Park. The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia was the site in 2004. Over the years ceremonies have been at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, Madrid, Spain; Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome, Italy; Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia; the Jerusalem Archaeological Park, and The White House in Washington, D.C.

The list of venues goes on to include not only a great many of the great museums in the United States, but also many other countries including France, England, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Japan.

“It was a fortuitous decision to go to London this year,” explains Hyatt Foundation President, Thomas Pritzker, “but it was a decision made long before the jury selected Rogers as this year’s honoree. The location for the ceremony is always planned before the laureate is chosen by the jury.”

The late Philip Johnson was the first Pritzker Laureate in 1979. The late Luis Barragán of Mexico was named in 1980. The late James Stirling of the United Kingdom was elected in 1981, Kevin Roche in 1982, Ieoh Ming Pei in 1983, and Richard Meier in 1984. Hans Hollein of Austria was the 1985 Laureate. Gottfried Böhm of Germany received the prize in 1986. The late Kenzo Tange was the first Japanese architect to receive the prize in 1987; Fumihiko Maki was the second from Japan in 1993; and Tadao Ando the third in 1995. Robert Venturi received the honor in 1991, and Alvaro Siza of Portugal in 1992. Christian de Portzamparc of France was elected Pritzker Laureate in 1994. The late Gordon Bunshaft of the United States and Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil, were named in 1988. Frank Gehry of the United States was the recipient in 1989, the late Aldo Rossi of Italy in 1990. In 1996, Rafael Moneo of Spain was the Laureate; in 1997 Sverre Fehn of Norway; in 1998 Renzo Piano of Italy, in 1999 Sir Norman Foster of the UK, and in 2000, Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands. In 2001, two architects from Switzerland received the honor: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Australian Glenn Murcutt received the prize in 2002. Jørn Utzon of Denmark was honored in 2003; Zaha Hadid of the UK in 2004; and Thom Mayne of the United States in 2005. Last year, Paulo Mendes da Rocha of Brazil was the Laureate.

The field of architecture was chosen by the Pritzker family because of their keen interest in building due to their involvement with developing the Hyatt Hotels around the world; also because architecture was a creative endeavor not included in the Nobel Prizes. The procedures were modeled after the Nobels, with the final selection being made by the international jury with all deliberations and voting in secret. Nominations are continuous from year to year with hundreds of nominees from countries all around the world being considered each year.

Adobe Unveils Creative Suite 3 Design Premium

2007-03-28T16:54:00.000-07:00

By Adobe
For immediate release
Superior Product Integration and Flash Support Powers Cross-Media Content Delivery

SAN JOSE, Calif. — March 27, 2007 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the all-new Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 Design Premium, an indispensable, highly-efficient creative toolkit for print, web, interactive and mobile design. Loaded with innovative new features, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium software integrates groundbreaking new releases of Adobe InDesign® CS3 (see separate press release), Adobe Photoshop® CS3 Extended (see separate press release), Adobe Illustrator® CS3, Adobe Flash® CS3 Professional, and Adobe Dreamweaver® CS3. Adobe Acrobat® 8 Professional is also included as a key component of Design Premium. Additionally, Adobe announced Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Standard software for designers and print service providers focused on professional design and print production.

Adobe Creative Suite Design editions will be available as Universal applications for both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs and support both Microsoft® Windows® XP and Windows Vista™. The software has been optimized to deliver outstanding performance on the latest Macintosh and Windows hardware.

“With Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium, our designers have one consistent set of tools that we can apply across all media. Adobe has made huge integration advancements with the new Creative Suite 3 Design edition, not to mention impressive new functionality in each of the applications that promises to boost our productivity and put exciting new creative tools at our fingertips,” said Micha Riss, creative director for Flying Machine, an award-winning design and branding studio in New York.

“Our new Design editions are anchored by powerhouse upgrades to InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe. “And by bringing Flash and Dreamweaver into the mix, we're ensuring that interactive design is now front and center in today’s creative workflows. Creatives will do back-flips over the new levels of integration between their favorite Adobe and Macromedia tools.”
Unified Design Environment Packed With Essential Creative Tools

Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium combines indispensable tools for page layout, image editing, illustration, and Adobe PDF workflows with newly integrated components for creating compelling publications, websites, rich interactive experiences, and engaging mobile content—all in one highly efficient work environment. Dozens of new and enhanced features in InDesign CS3 make it easier and faster to handle repetitive layout tasks. The new Live Color feature in Illustrator CS3 enables designers to experiment with, save, and apply combinations of colors quickly and intuitively. Daily image editing tasks such as selecting image areas, compositing images, and applying filters are faster and more flexible with Photoshop CS3 Extended.
New Integration with Flash and Dreamweaver

New integration of Flash CS3 Professional means designers and developers can import native Photoshop and Illustrator files into projects created with Flash with full fidelity, saving time and producing higher quality results compared to previous workflows. In addition, Dreamweaver CS3 automatically optimizes for the web when designers copy and paste Photoshop files into web layouts. Designers can also repurpose print content for the web by exporting InDesign selections or documents as XHTML files and then opening them in Dreamweaver to jumpstart a web design.
Meet The Creative Suite 3 Family

The Adobe Creative Suite product line and brand has now been expanded to include Adobe Creative Suite Design editions, Adobe Creative Suite Web editions and Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium (see separate releases). The all-encompassing Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection incorporates 12 new Adobe creative applications in a single box. New to the Adobe Creative Suite 3 family, Adobe Device Central CS3 (see separate release) radically boosts the productivity of creative professionals who develop content for mobile handsets. An updated version of Adobe Bridge CS3, the hub of Adobe Creative Suite, provides instant access to Version Cue® CS3 and an expanded Adobe Stock Photos service. To celebrate the unveiling of the Adobe Creative Suite 3 family, Adobe will offer viewing of the launch event via webcast on March 27 at 3:30 p.m. EDT. To attend the webcast, please visit www.adobe.com/go/cs3launch .
Pricing and Availability

Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium and Design Standard will begin shipping in April 2007 to customers in the United States and Canada, and will be available through Adobe Authorized Resellers and the Adobe Store at www.adobe.com/go/gn_store . Estimated street price for the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium edition is US$1799 and US$1199 for Creative Suite 3 Design Standard edition. There are numerous upgrade paths available for Adobe customers. For more detailed information about features, upgrade policies, pricing, and international versions please visit: www.adobe.com/go/creativesuite .
About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information - anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

RAIC 2006 Governor General’s Medals

2007-03-28T16:43:00.000-07:00

Recipients
115 Studios – Cirque du Soleil
Les architectes FABG (Montreal, QC) – Design architect: Éric Gauthier

Bibliothèque Municipale de Châteauguay
atelier TAG et Jodoin Lamarre Pratte et Associés Architectes
en consortium (Montreal, QC) – Design architects: Manon Asselin, Katsuhiro Yamazaki (atelier TAG)

Erindale Hall, University of Toronto at Mississauga
Baird Sampson Neuert Architects (Toronto, ON) – Design architects: Barry Sampson, FRAIC and Jon Neuert, MRAIC

Institut de tourisme et d'hôtellerie du Québec
Lapointe Magne + Ædifica (Montreal, QC) – Design architect: Michel Lapointe

Structures d'accueil des jardins de Métis
Atelier in situ (Montreal, QC) – Design architects: Annie Lebel, architecte et Stéphane Pratte, architecte

Maurer House
Florian Maurer Architect, MRAIC (Naramata, BC)

SC3-Smith Carter Workplace
Smith Carter Architects and Engineers Incorporated
(Winnipeg, MB)

Schulich School of Business, York University
Hariri Pontarini Architects, Robbie/Young + Wright Architects
In Joint Venture (Toronto, ON) – Design architect: Siamak Hariri

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
Saucier + Perrotte architectes (Montreal, QC) – Design architect: Gilles Saucier

Théâtre du Vieux-Terrebonne
atelier TAG et Jodoin Lamarre Pratte et Associés Architectes en consortium (Montreal, QC) – Design architects: Manon Asselin, Katsuhiro Yamazaki (atelier TAG)

Théâtre Espace Libre
Lapointe Magne et associés (Montreal, QC) – Design architect: Michel Lapointe

Unity 2
Cormier, Cohen, Davies architectes (Atelier Big City)(Montreal, QC)

Katsuhiro Yamazaki lecture on Architecture + Design

2007-03-28T15:46:00.000-07:00

Mar. 28, 2007
Katsuhiro Yamazaki, partner of Atelier TAG, gave his speech on architecture + design last night at UBC, Vancouver. He briefly introduced his 5 projects including the theatre in terrebonne and Chateauguay Municiple Library which won 2 RAIC Governor-General's Medals for 2006.

The new Theater of Vieux-Terrebonne is located in the city’s civic park, overlooking the spectacular riparian landscape of the Mille-Isles River.

The concept proposed explores the primordial link with nature that constitutes Terrebonne’s most important heritage since the 17th century. In part intertwined, in part superimposed, the architecture of the theater blurs the limit between the cultural facility and its natural setting. The theater interior topography of interconnected social stages simultaneously engages the exterior landscape as another stage for observing and being observed. The intimate, 658-seat multi-use hall presents everything from plays, concert and films, to visits from Quebec’s astoundingly popular stand-up comics.

The new Municipal Library of Châteauguay is located in the city’s civic park, adding to the existing core of municipal services provided on site.

Upon its landscape of green dunes, the new Municipal Library appears as the city’s ‘’standing stone’’. Symbolically, the library‘s fieldstone cabinet of books levitates above the landscape and provides a new gateway for the park.

The program of the library is structured vertically in two main strata. The ground floor is conceived as a fluid ‘public place’ in continuity with the natural grades of the landscape, while the library proper is housed on the above two floors. The new Library gives access to more than 150,000 documents, including periodicals, reference and audio-visual material.

Renzo Piano's tower menaces Boston's Rudolph building

2007-03-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

An 80-storey skyscraper designed by one of today’s biggest names, the Italian architect Renzo Piano, has triggered a roaring battle in Boston. Paul Rudolph’s 1960 Blue Cross/Blue Shield office building could be demolished to make way for Piano’s Trans National headquarters, against the will of preservationists who see the building as a seminal example of mid-century Modernism.
On March 13 the Boston Landmarks Commission plans to consider the developer of the new skyscraper’s application for a demolition permit for the Rudolph building, at 133 Federal Street, in the city’s financial district, the New York Times reported.
In an interview, Mr. Piano said he wanted his tower to have a “light presence,” hovering above the proposed 70-foot-high public plaza. Without the vast open space, he said, his tower will seem too aggressive, and only demolition of the Rudolph building will make that wide plaza possible.
By www.demaniore.it

DIGITAL PROJECT_ Frank Gehry’s Vision

2007-03-12T22:54:00.000-07:00

By www.arcspace.com
Danish Architecture Centre Copenhagen, Denmark
“I started making shapes that were hard to draw. That led us to the computer and to Catia software which made me realize the possibilities and the level and degree of accuracy you could create in your documents and your relationships because of the software.”
Frank Gehry

Sketch courtesy Gehry Partners, LLP
Fish sculpture for the 1992 Olympics, in Barcelona, Spain.

Catia is Dassault Systèmes 3D modelling and fabrication software used by the aerospace industry. Digital Project, a new software that is simpler, more usable, and able to interface with other systems, was developed by Gehry Technologies to disseminate his Catia enabled design and construction methodologies to the rest of the world.

“Talking Heads” on monitors hanging from the ceiling talk about the different aspects of Digital Project. When visitors use the attached earphones the installation resembles an ongoing cocktail party.
A fast forward video, courtesy of Boeing, demonstrates how the parts come together using Catia.

Photo: arcspace

Select a subject ranging from Evolution, Collaboration, Design, Digitizing and Tools, to Virtual Building, Engineering, Contracting and Construction, and hear what “They” have to say.

Photo: arcspace

To convey how solutions often begin as simple sketches and diagrams the first gallery is wallpapered with blown up hand drawn sketches that illustrate the spontaneous and immediate outcomes of conversations with clients and project team members.

Photo: arcspace

“The model is usually built by the architect. The architect who is coordinating the project will establish a skeleton. Building off this generic skeleton, the structural engineer will then dimension and design and build his columns or his concrete structural system. The cladding fabricator will devise and design and build a model of his cladding system and integrate that. So all the different people participating in the project begin to derive information from the model and contribute information back into the model. So the model is almost like a living thing that keeps growing through the project life cycle.”
Cristiano Ceccato
Director, Research & Consulting

Gehry Partners begin the design process by creating hand-built models in order to capture the design intent. Once these models have been reworked and refined, they are digitized to create three-dimensional computer models, also known as building information models (BIM) or master models.

Photo courtesy Gehry Partners, LLP

Small SLA (Stereolithography Apparatus) models are used to physically verify the digital geometries to Gehry Partners and their consultants and accurately represent the design intent to clients.

Photo: arcspace

Four very different projects, a skyscraper in Hong Kong, the Sagrada Familia Church in Barcelona, a small project for the Danish Cancer Society, and the MIT Stata Center in Massachusett demonstrate, with videos, models and photos, how Digital Project has been used as a process tool.

Photo: arcspace

Gehry Technologies became the BIM process consultant for the 70-story Swire building in Hong Kong and used Digital Project to create the virtual 3D model prior to construction.

Photo: arcspace

“We had infused a very precise discipline into the whole design process where architects, engineering consultants, structural engineers, all had to design to the same precise vocabulary. I think it has been an incredible process of intuitive collaboration.
It is all about project certainty. We know what we’re designing, we know how much it’s going to cost, we know how it’s going to be built, and for us as a developer that is paramount to total success.”
Stephen Fong
Managing Director Swire Properties Ltd.

Photo: arcspace

The Sagrada Família Church in Barcelona has been under construction since 1882 and is still some years from completion.
As part of an ongoing involvement with the Sagrada Família Church researchers in SIAL (Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory) lead by Professor Mark Burry are currently working on investigation into Antoni Gaudí's final design models.

Photo courtesy SIAL

By using Digital Project to create designs that are consistent with all of the available historical information on the church, new insights are gained into Gaudí's own generative system. The results from these investigations are used to specify how the Church is actually being completed, thus making the church itself a statement of Gaudí's design intent.

Photo courtesy SIAL

“We don’t have to worry about whether or not we are fitting in with a paradigm of planned sections and elevations, all the other typical drawings that architects are obliged to use. We can go straight from our computer to the stonemason’s yard, to their computer and we only sort of, negotiate though the prototypes that we make, and what we look at on our screens.”
Mark Burry

Photo: arcspace

By choosing Gehry Partners for the Stata Center, MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
made a statement not only about the campus plan, but also about the process of design and construction. Project team members were asked to work in unique ways, with slightly different tools and varying regulations about how to work together.

Photo: Roland Halbe

At the center of those "unique ways" was the use of 3D modelling to guide the design, engineering, fabrication, and construction of Frank Gehry's avant-garde design.

Sketch courtesy Gehry Partners, LLP

“On MIT where the 3D model was a tool almost from the beginning, there can be a conversation about how the building is going to be put together in terms of detailing, but also in terms of construction sequence, much earlier in the process, because the understanding of what we’re trying to achieve technically and architecturally is starting to take place a lot earlier.”
Marc Salette
Partner, Gehry Partner, LLP

Photo: arcspace

Digital Project image courtesy Gehry Partners, LLP

Photo: Richard Sobol

A proposal for the Danish Cancer Society turns a 1908 building, designed by Danish architect Rudolf Clausen, into a modern, open ‘house with no doors’ for patients and their relatives.

Photo: arcspace

Digital Project image courtesy Gehry Partners, LLP

“Since the very beginning, in the initial phase when we spoke to our local architect, we have already talked about the possibility of using Gehry Technology. But the question is, how does one use the technology in the context that is not like Bilbao, that is not like Disney Hall, that has no curve? I think that the possibility is endless in the sense that, although it’s modest in scale, the idea, the premise of creating a digital model that everybody can work on, is an asset.
Using Digital Project allows everybody in the team to collaborate on the design, to work out the structure. So the opportunity to use the technology, the software, to allow us to collaborate with our local architect, and with the structural engineer, to try to come up with a solution and reach a point where we can implement the project in a timely way is very important.”Edwin Chan Partner, Gehry Partner, LLP

The exhibition, DIGITAL PROJECT – Frank Gehry’s Vision, is a collaboration between Frank Gehry, Gehry Partners, LLP, Gehry Technologies, Curator Kirsten Kiser and the Danish Architecture Centre. The exhibition is sponsored by the foundation Realdania.

Gehry Partner, LLP arcspace features

March 12, 2007

The American Institute of Architects Announces 19 Recipients of the 2007 Housing Awards

2007-03-11T21:13:00.000-07:00

By AIA
Washington, D.C., March 9, 2007 — The American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced today the 19 recipients of the 2007 Housing Committee Awards. The AIA’s Housing Awards Program, now in its seventh year, was established to recognize the best in housing design and promote the importance of good housing as a necessity of life, a sanctuary for the human spirit, and a valuable national resource.

The 2007 jury consisted of Jury Chair, Katherine Austin, AIA; Don Carter, FAIA; Jane F. Kolleeny of Architectural Record; Lisa Stacholy, AIA; and LaVerne Williams, AIA. The award recipients were selected from a record 236 submissions. The recipients will be recognized May 3 at the AIA 2007 National Convention and Design Exposition in San Antonio.

The jury recognized projects in four award categories: One/Two Family Custom Housing, One/Two Family Production Housing, Special Housing, and Multifamily Housing.

One/Two Family Custom Housing
The One and Two Family Custom Residences award recognizes outstanding designs for custom and remodeled homes for specific client(s).

House at the Shawangunks, New Paltz, N.Y.
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
The pristine beauty of this steeply sloped, wooded site called for simple geometry and clean, basic materials; Opening its face to the southeast, the house’s cubic volume projects from the hillside against the backdrop of the Shawangunk Ridge. A rectangular volume rises behind the cube, anchoring it to the sloping landscape and the cube’s black stained concrete foundation forms a pedestal.

“A whimsical, fun house nestled wonderfully in the trees…the simple, organized plan and details are exquisite inside and outside,” the jury said. “The house is respectful of its environment and pleasing to the eye.”

1532 House, San Francisco, Calif.
Fougeron Architecture, San Francisco, Calif.
This new 3,200 sf house includes two distinct volumes separated by an interior courtyard. The front structure has a garage at street grade and a painting studio above; the back volume is the main house, with bedrooms on the lower level, living spaces in the middle, and a master bedroom suite on the top floor. Floor-to-ceiling windows, glass floors and skylights manipulate natural light and allow it to penetrate deep into all rooms.

“A wonderful, tiny, narrow home that fits perfectly into the sloped site, the house has a street presence that doesn’t overpower anything on either side. The plazas, balconies, and courtyards are very inventive uses of a limited space,” jury members said.

Loblolly House, Taylors Island, Md.
Kieran-Timberlake Associates LLP, Philadelphia, PA
Positioned between a dense grove of loblolly pines and a lush foreground of salt meadow cordgrass and the bay, the architecture is formed about and within the elements of trees, tall grasses, the sea, the horizon, the sky, and the western sun that define the place of the house.

“Really innovative prefabricated home using local materials which can be dismantled and put back together easily …The design is quite remarkable and unique with its exterior façade and beautiful location. A lot of work was put into the facades and how it would respond to the light,” said jury members.

Tye River Cabin, Skykomish, Wash.
Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects, Seattle, Wash.
The Tye River Cabin is essentially a wooden tent/retreat on a platform that opens to the forest and the river. The materials were allowed to weather in keeping with the natural tone of the site.

“This project is a simple, elegant solution to having shelter but remaining one with nature…The modest size makes you feel like you’re in the forest with no boundaries. The house is a pure statement that is not over powering…the colors and details are lovely,” said jury members.

Delta Shelter, Mazama, Wash.
Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects, Seattle, Wash.
This project is a 40-acre site restoration and planning of a 100-year-old horse ranch located on a flood plain. Due to the flood plain, the project sits on stilts, which also lets it have minimum impact on the land. It is a little house on a big landscape with pre-fabricated metal frame, shutters, stairs and “gizmo” to mitigate construction site activity.

“The natural materials blend beautifully with the context in terms of materials and volume…Elevated position respects the flood plane and ensures durability,” Jury members said. “This project is gorgeous and seems in harmony with the site”

A Ranch House in the San Juan Mountains, Telluride, Colo.
Michael Shepherd Architect AIA, Telluride, Colo.
The remoteness, vast openness, and topographical qualities solicit a strong connection to the land. Conceptually the design of this house is an attempt to synthesize regional vernacular and the more universal qualities of modernism. Recycled oaks and Douglas fir were used for interior flooring, doors, and cabinet work. Solar power and propane are the primary energy sources.

The jury said, “The project is wonderfully understated; the views and light are just gorgeous. It is very respectful of ranch tradition of architecture and works with the vernacular of that area...Timeless…Serene!”

One/Two Family Production Housing
The One and Two Family Production Homes award will recognize excellent design of homes built for the speculative market.

Danielson Grove, Kirkland, Wash.
Ross Chapin Architects, Langley, Wash.
This project was developed to demonstrate the market for detached housing alternatives for small households and was built to meet the 4-Star rating of the Master Builders Association BUILT GREEN program. Each home is on a private lot facing a garden courtyard. Residents share a Commons Building, a place for potlucks, family gatherings, and meetings.

“Lots of texture and detail and works well in the context of its environment; the central courtyard with community building is a great organizing feature…beautiful…green,” the jury said.

The 505, Houston, Texas
Collaborative Designworks, Houston, Texas
Natural cross-ventilation, exceptional day-lighting, permeable ground coverings, stack-vented rain-screens on the East & West facades, radiant barrier roofing, recycled / sustainable materials & finishes, tank-less water heaters, and high efficiency appliances & equipment all combine to give the project an environmentally responsible footprint.

“Really liked the street frontage; it respected the character of the neighborhood. This was a clever plan, handled well,” said jury members. “Elegant use of materials that gives richness to the structure, all within the low budget”.

Special Housing
The Special Housing award recognizes outstanding design of housing that meets the unique needs of other specialized housing types such as single room occupancy residences (SROs), independent living for the disabled, residential rehabilitation programs, domestic violence shelters, and other special housing.

The DESIGNhabitat 2 House, Greensboro, Ala.
The DESIGNhabitat 2 Studio School of Architecture, Auburn University, David W. Hinson, AIA, Auburn, Ala.
This home is the first designed for Habitat for Humanity to integrate high design quality goals, climate-appropriate design features and energy performance with the modular construction process and offers valuable lessons and perspectives for future initiates to integrate modular construction and affordable housing development.

“Well thought out spatial organization and environmental factors included for really efficient energy consumption. Organization of the house is simple and really responds to its environment…wonderful…sophisticated simplicity,” the jury said.

The Plaza Apartments, San Francisco, CA
Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects & Paulett Taggart Architects in Association, San Francisco, CA
Its ground floor commercial space, theater entrance, and residential courtyard enhance the streetscape and the colorful exterior signals a new direction for the neighborhood. Over 100 new mini-studio apartments provide permanent housing with on-site mental/physical health services for chronically homeless people.

“This project has taken a wonderfully whimsical approach to the façade that relates to the existing neighborhood. City of San Francisco is actively trying to alleviate the homeless situation and this project has the potential to change the situation,” said jury members.

Patrolia Loft, Boston, MA
Ruhl Walker Architects, Boston, MA
This interior fit-out of an existing concrete-shell apartment for a wheelchair-bound user starts with the proposition that “Accessible Design” should first and foremost be good design. Specific accommodations for his mobility limitations are incorporated honestly; without unnecessary concealment and also without becoming unattractive afterthoughts or distractions.

“Great use of materials which goes beyond universal space… Wonderfully organized… the bathroom is really elegant and functional,” jury members said.

Shirley Bridge Bungalows, Seattle, Wash.
Ron Wright and Associates / Architects, PS, Seattle, Wash.
The project responds to the critical shortage of affordable, appropriate housing for people disabled with AIDS who are low-income and is publicly funded via HUD Section 811 funding, along with other public and private sources. The six colorful cottages were organized around a central common space to foster interaction between residents.
A forced-air heating system was also provided to increase ventilation and air quality.

“This small housing development is very serene, comforting and welcoming…a real improvement to the neighborhood and a good new neighbor for the community,” said jury members.

Regional Homeless Center, Los Angeles, CA
Jeffrey M. Kalban & Associates Architecture, Inc., Los Angeles, CA
This project was a major renovation of an abandoned 1960’s 3-story office building that was originally built for a liquor company, to a multifaceted 40,000 sq. ft. regional Homeless Center. Vibrant colors and playful uplifting forms were used to create a facility that evokes a positive, non-institutional, image and delivers a sense of hope and possibility to its users.

“This is an amazing transformation of a fairly brutal building which enhances its environment and makes it a welcome addition to the neighborhood,” jury members said. “The ground floor is beautifully detailed and the organization is terrific.”

Multifamily Housing
The Multifamily Housing award recognizes outstanding multifamily housing design. Both high- and low-density projects for public and private clients were considered. In addition to architectural design features, the jury assessed the integration of the building(s) into their context, including open and recreational space, transportation options and features that contribute to livable communities.

High Point, Seattle, Wash.
Mithun, Seattle, Wash.
The 120-acre project replaces 716 subsidized housing units erected after World War II with 1600 units designed in a fresh take on traditional residential forms. Fifty percent of the new homes are designated for low-income residents, with the remaining market value homes built by private sector builders. The neighborhood integrates a variety of incomes, ethnicities and family structures.

“The architecture was done in a public way... love the sense of community this project creates while still allowing individuality,” said the jury. “The community garden and architecture is very much in context with Seattle.”

1247 Wisconsin, Washington DC
McInturff Architects, Bethesda, Md.
Situated on historic Georgetown's main shopping street, this project restores two mid-19th century commercial/residential buildings and fills the remaining site behind them with additional retail space on the street level. Above this new space, and in the upper levels of the historic buildings, six luxury residential units create a little rooftop village floating above the bustle of the city.

“Absolutely love it! A sensitive and gorgeous way to use the space…The project is clever and respectful of the existing fabric of the city… beautifully detailed,” said jury members.

156 West Superior Condominiums, Chicago, Illinois
The Miller/Hull Partnership, LLP, Seattle, Washington
The steel frames support cantilevered decks for outdoor entertaining in each unit and a large common roof deck provides stunning views of downtown Chicago for all the residents. The building is meant to invest an image of structural architecture, conveying a sense of economy, efficiency, discipline and order, essential characteristics of Chicago’s steel and glass architectural history.

“It is nice how the project fits in the context, but not in a scale that feels overwhelming. The building is beautifully sited on narrow constricted site,” said jury members.

The Union, San Diego, CA
Jonathan Segal, FAIA, San Diego, CA
The architect took a sustainable approach and acting as owner/developer/contractor decided to adaptively reuse the old textile manufactures union hall as a fully sustainable edifice with two affordable live work lofts and his own architectural office. The homes have significant individual presence on the street and substantial private outdoor space connected to the interiors by an abundance of glazing.

“Very modern, green design on the edge of a transitional neighborhood that invigorates the neighborhood…Two story volumes with affordable units,” jury members said.

Bridgeton Hope VI, Bridgeton, N.J.
Torti Gallas and Partners, Silver Spring, Md.
Rather than rebuilding on the existing public housing site, the new housing knits into the historic fabric, filling vacant lots and blocks. The existing site was restored as riverside parkland reconnecting the city to the Cohansey. Porches, cornices, surrounds, siding, and trim, all painted with a varied historic palette, allow the houses to blend with the neighborhood context.

“Absolutely appropriate and wonderful…sensitively detailed. The site plan is very much contextual to the rest of the city,” said jury members. “Transforms the neighborhood back to what it probably was”

Salishan Neighborhood Revitalization, c/o Tacoma Housing Authority, Tacoma, Wash.
Torti Gallas & Partners, Inc., Silver Spring, Md.
This project is a H.O.P.E. VI Grant with the goal of creating a livable, vibrant community and restoring/protecting the natural resources of the neighborhood, particularly Swan Creek. The architects were able to create a connective, eco-friendly, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood through the integration of a variety of parks, paths, and swales.

The jury said of this project, “Takes an existing temporary housing for shipyard workers and transforms it to multi-generational and multi-ethnic population…The project is warm and has a sense of permanence.”

About The American Institute of Architects
For 150 years, members of The American Institute of Architects have worked with each other and their communities to create more valuable, healthy, secure, and sustainable buildings and cityscapes. AIA members have access to the right people, knowledge, and tools to create better design, and through such resources and access, they help clients and communities make their visions real. www.aia.org

The American Institute of Architects Announces the 2007 Recipients of Education Honor Awards

2007-03-11T21:03:00.000-07:00

By AIA
Washington, D.C., March 9, 2007 — The American Institute of Architects (AIA) awarded the recipients of the 2007 AIA Education Honor Awards for excellence in course development and architectural teaching. The Education Honor Awards program, now in its 18th year, recognizes collegiate faculty achievements and contributions to education and the discipline of architecture. The awards were officially announced today during the ACSA Awards Ceremony at its annual meeting in Philadelphia. The awards will be presented to the 2007 recipients in May during the AIA National Convention in San Antonio.

The following are the recipients of this year’s Education Honor Awards: ecoMOD, University of Virginia; SCI-TECH I-IV, Iowa State University; and Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas: Lifestyles and Ecologies, University of Arkansas + Washington University in St Louis.

The jury looked for evidence of exceptional and innovative courses that dealt with broad issues, particularly in cross-disciplinary collaboration and/or within the broader community, contributed to the advancement of architecture education, had the potential to benefit and/or change practice, and promoted models of excellence that could be appropriated by other educators. “All of the Award winners took on something new, were innovative models of architectural education, and used technology to facilitate their process,” said jury members.

The 2007 AIA Education Honors Award Winners:

ecoMOD
University of Virginia
Development team: John Quale, ecoMOD Project Director and Assistant Professor of Architecture University of Virginia School of Architecture; Paxton Marshall, ecoMOD Engineering Director and Professor, University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

ecoMOD is a research and design / build / evaluate project that aims to create a series of ecological, prefabricated and affordable housing prototypes. The goal of this architecture and engineering school partnership is to demonstrate the environmental and economic potential of prefabrication, and to challenge the modular housing industry to explore this potential.

Jury comments: “The project took on several topics: ecology, modular construction, and affordable housing. It put them together in a variety of prototypes that can be customized by the user.”

SCI-TECH I-IV
Iowa State University
Development team: Jason Alread, AIA, Assistant Professor; Thomas Leslie, AIA
Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Education (interim), Iowa State University Department of Architecture

SCI-TECH is an intensive, four course sequence designed to rapidly familiarize graduate students in a first professional degree program with building technology’s fundamental principles and applications. The sequence encourages connections between technology, studio, and history/theory by adopting practice as its basis.

Jury Comments: “SCI-TECH pulls together challenging subjects in a core curriculum for students in a first professional degree program. This sequence of courses is an excellent example for architectural programs that want to integrate building technology into the curriculum.”

Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas: Lifestyles and Ecologies
University of Arkansas + Washington University in St Louis
Development team: Stephen Luoni, Director, University of Arkansas Community Design Center; Aaron Gabriel, Assistant Director, University of Arkansas Community Design Center, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture; Jeffrey Huber, LEED AP, Project Designer, University of Arkansas Community Design Center; Eric Kahn, AIA, Professor, SCI-Arc, Fay Jones Visiting Professor of Architecture, University of Arkansas, Principal, Central Office of Architecture, Los Angeles; William Conway, AIA
Associate Professor, University of Minnesota, Visiting Professor of Architecture, University of Arkansas, Principal, Conway + Schulte Architects, Minneapolis; Dr. Tahar Messadi, Assistant Professor, University of Arkansas; Greg Herman, Associate Professor, University of Arkansas.

The challenge of the studio is to assist Northwest Arkansas (NWA) in understanding the community design possibilities in the development of a regional rail transit system.

Jury comments: “This is an effective use of scenario planning with legible, impactful graphics that can be shown to the community. There is an appealing levity in the work.”

About The American Institute of Architects
For 150 years, members of The American Institute of Architects have worked with each other and their communities to create more valuable, healthy, secure, and sustainable buildings and cityscapes. AIA members have access to the right people, knowledge, and tools to create better design, and through such resources and access, they help clients and communities make their visions real. www.aia.org

Honest Construction.

2007-03-07T16:19:00.000-08:00

Does people like the person who do what you told them? Look at this. It's the most creative contractor I've ever seen.

U.S. contribution to globe warming

2007-03-05T22:20:00.000-08:00

By The New York Time
The Bush administration estimates that emissions by the United States of gases that contribute to global warming will grow nearly as fast through the next decade as they did the previous decade, according to a long-delayed report being completed for the United Nations.
The document, the United States Climate Action Report, emphasizes that the projections show progress toward a goal Mr. Bush laid out in a 2002 speech: that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases grow at a slower rate than the economy. Since that speech, he has repeated his commitment to lessening “greenhouse gas intensity” without imposing formal limits on the gases.

Kristen A. Hellmer, a spokeswoman for the White House on environmental matters, said on Friday, “The Climate Action Report will show that the president’s portfolio of actions addressing climate change and his unparalleled financial commitments are working.”

But when shown the report, an assortment of experts on climate trends and policy described the projected emissions as unacceptable given the rising evidence of risks from unabated global warming.

“As governor of Texas and as a candidate, the president supported mandatory limits on carbon dioxide emissions,” said David W. Conover, who directed the administration’s Climate Change Technology Program until February 2006 and is now counsel to the National Commission on Energy Policy, a nonpartisan research group that supports limits on gases. “When he announced his voluntary greenhouse-gas intensity reduction goal in 2002, he said it would be re-evaluated in light of scientific developments. The science now clearly calls for a mandatory program that establishes a price for greenhouse-gas emissions.”

According to the new report, the administration’s climate policy will result in emissions growing 11 percent in 2012 from 2002. In the previous decade, emissions grew at a rate of 11.6 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The report also contains sections describing growing risks to water supplies, coasts and ecosystems around the United States from the anticipated temperature and precipitation changes driven by the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Drafts of the report were provided to The New York Times by a government employee at the request of a reporter. The employee did not say why this was done, but other officials involved with producing it said they have been frustrated with the slow pace of its preparation. It was due more than one year ago.

The report arrives at a moment when advocates of controls are winning new support in statehouses and Congress, not to mention Hollywood, where former Vice President Al Gore’s cautionary documentary on the subject, “An Inconvenient Truth,” just won an Academy Award. Five western governors have just announced plans to create a program to cap and then trade carbon-dioxide emissions. And on Capitol Hill, half a dozen bills have been introduced to curb emissions, with more expected.

Ms. Hellmer defended Mr. Bush’s climate policy, saying the president was committed to actions, like moderating gasoline use and researching alternative energy, that limited climate risks while also increasing the country’s energy and national security. She said Mr. Bush remained satisfied with voluntary measures to slow emissions.

Myron Ebell, who directs climate and energy policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a group aligned with industries fighting curbs on greenhouse gases, said Mr. Bush was right to acknowledge the inevitability of growing emissions in a country with a growing population and economy. Mr. Ebell added that the United States was doing better at slowing emissions than many countries that had joined the Kyoto Protocol, the first binding international treaty limiting such gases.

“Since 1990, for every 1 percent increase in emissions the economy has grown about 3 percent,” Mr. Ebell said. “That’s good, and it’s better than the European Union’s performance.”

Several environmental campaigners said there was no real distinction between Mr. Bush’s target and “business as usual,” adding that such mild steps were unacceptable given recent findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other research groups tying recent warming more firmly than ever to smokestack and tailpipe gases.

“If you set the hurdle one inch above the ground you can’t fail to clear it,” said David D. Doniger, the director of climate policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has long criticized the administration and sought binding cuts in greenhouse gases.

The report is the fourth in a series produced periodically by countries that are parties to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty signed by the first President Bush. It is a self-generated summary of climate-related trends and actions, including inventories of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, research on impacts of climate change, and policies to limit climate risks and emissions.

The last such report, completed in 2002, put the administration in something of a bind because it listed many harmful or costly projected impacts from human-caused warming. Environmental groups used those findings to press President Bush to seek mandatory caps on greenhouse gases, while foes of such restrictions criticized the findings and criticized the administration for letting them stay in the document.

While that report was approved by senior White House and State Department officials, Mr. Bush quickly distanced himself from it, saying it was “put out by the bureaucracy.”

The new report has been bogged down for nearly two years. In April 2005, the State Department published a notice in the Federal Register saying it would be released for public comment that summer.

Several government officials and scientists involved with preparing or reviewing parts of the report said that the recent departures of several senior staff members running the administration’s climate research program delayed its completion and no replacements have been named. The delays in finishing the report come even as Mr. Bush has elevated global warming higher on his list of concerns. This year, for the first time since he took office in 2001, he touched on “global climate change” in the State of the Union Message, calling it a “serious challenge.”

The draft report contains fresh projections of significant effects of human-caused warming on the environment and resources of the United States and emphasized the need to increase the country’s capacity to adapt to impending changes.

Drought, particularly, will become a persistent threat, it said: “Warmer temperatures expected with increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are expected to exacerbate present drought risks in the United States by increasing the rate of evaporation.”

Water supplies in the Northwest and Southwest are also at risk. “Much of the water used by people in the western United States comes from snow melt,” the report said. “And a large fraction of the traditionally snow-covered areas of this region has experienced a decline in spring snow pack, especially since mid-century, despite increases in winter precipitation in many places.” Animal and plant species face risks as climate zones shift but urbanized regions prevent ecosystems from shifting as well, according to the draft report.

“Because changes in the climate system are likely to persist into the future regardless of emissions mitigation, adaptation is an essential response for future protection of climate-sensitive ecosystems,” it said.

CINEMA 4D R10 ENGINEERING EDITION RELEASED

2007-03-03T18:54:00.001-08:00

MAXON, March 1, 2007 - MAXON announces the immediate availability of its brand new CINEMA 4D R10 Engineering Edition. This powerful software lets engineering professionals - even those with no graphics experience - quickly create high-end visualizations using their own CAD files. This edition combines CINEMA 4D R10 with a simplified interface, preset environments, materials and importers for a huge variety of CAD files as well as the sketch and Toon module for creating precise line drawings or sketched looks. The end result is a powerful, yet extremely easy to use system that makes visualising CAD files child's play.

Companies such as Sony Imageworks, BBC and RTL value CINEMA 4D for its superb rendering, and manufacturers including BMW, Vitra, Siemens and Flextronics rely on CINEMA 4D when creating high-quality visualizations. No matter how large or small your company, the Engineering Edition and CINEMA 4D's Hollywood-proven rendering capabilities are the perfect combination for quickly creating breathtaking visualizations using CAD files.

More information see here

maxwellrender.it Magazine 00-2007

2007-02-28T01:07:00.000-08:00

A new Maxwell Render magazine has been launched. The magazine features an exclusive interview with Victor Gonzales CEO Next Limit as well as numberous tutorials and feature articles in both English and Italian.

It can be download here

Museum for African Art Finds Its Place

2007-02-28T00:46:00.000-08:00

By The New York Times
The Museum for African Art, which has had a nomadic existence since it opened in 1984, will finally gain a permanent home in a soaring new building designed by Robert A. M. Stern, on Fifth Avenue between 109th and 110th Streets.

Models and renderings of the new structure, which will face the northeast corner of Central Park, were unveiled at a news conference at the Guggenheim Museum, some 20 blocks south of the site.

Presiding over the event, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg hailed the project as “the first new construction of a museum on Museum Mile since the great Guggenheim opened in 1959.”

With 90,000 square feet, including 16,000 square feet of exhibition space, the building will give the Museum for African Art a long-coveted base, said Elsie McCabe, the institution’s president. Officials hope to break ground in the spring of 2008 and complete construction by the end of 2009.

The estimated cost is $80 million, of which $49 million has been raised, including $12 million from the city.

A tower of 115 luxury condominiums will be built above the museum, under a partnership between the museum and two developers, Brickman and Sidney Fetner Associates. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the structure will be a shimmering glass wall made up of what Mr. Stern’s firm calls “dancing mullions,” after the slender vertical members that form the division between window units

At the museum’s center will be a great hall entered from Fifth Avenue, with the mullions on the left and a soaring wall on the right, made of richly colored etimoe wood from Ghana, that curves upward to form the ceiling.

The wall “suggests, if you look at it, the woven shapes of baskets and so forth — and weaving is so much a part of African art,” Mr. Stern said in an interview. “It’s not a literal interpretation. It’s an abstract one.”

At the rear, a cylindrical enclosure sheathed in perforated copper that Mr. Stern likened to a drum will house a staircase. Mr. Stern, who is dean of the Yale School of Architecture, called it a “21st-century version” of the concrete stairwell enclosures at Louis I. Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery, considered a Modernist masterpiece.

The New York firm SCLE Architects will work with Mr. Stern on the project.

He noted that his other works of public architecture — the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.; the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, an ornithology center in Jamestown, N.Y.; and a planned American Revolution Center at Valley Forge, Pa. — have revolved to some extent around a personality.

“This, like the Rockwell, is a major art museum, but it’s not built around a person, but around a continent,” Mr. Stern said. “It takes Africa out of the museums of natural history where it sometimes is — and also out of museums of the modern art.” He noted that over the last century, African masks and figures have sometimes been displayed as if their function were to inspire the Cubism of Braque or Picasso.

Founded as the Center for African Art in 1984 by Susan Mullin Vogel, now a professor of art history at Columbia University, the museum gained broad recognition for its innovative conceptual approaches to exhibiting African art.

It occupied two adjacent town houses on East 68th Street before moving to rented quarters in SoHo in 1993. Around 2000, Ms. McCabe arranged a partnership with Edison Schools, the for-profit education company, to buy a parcel on Fifth Avenue from a housing developer. (She said the site had once housed a low-rise commercial building.)

Plans called for Edison to build a school and a corporate headquarters on the site while providing space for the museum to build a structure for itself. In 2001 the company’s stock price nose-dived, and it abandoned the project in 2002, shortly after the museum had moved to a temporary location in Long Island City, Queens.

With a loan from the Community Preservation Corporation, the museum secured the land from Edison by 2003. Then, with help from two of its trustees — John L. Tishman of the Tishman Realty and Construction Corporation and Jonathan D. Green of the Rockefeller Group Development Corporation — the museum arranged a partnership with the two developers, Brickman and Sidney Fetner.

The city’s Economic Development Corporation recently arranged the sale of four other parcels to the partnership, clearing the way for the work to begin.

Mr. Stern said the challenge was to design a museum with “a strong civic public identity within the larger framework of a commercial apartment house — and at the same time, to make a building that is glassy and open, but not a knee-jerk glass block.”

Ms. McCabe said: “We knew if anybody could marry us distinctively with a residential building, he could. And God bless him, he did.”

A Harvard-trained lawyer who worked for Mayor David N. Dinkins from 1990 to 1993, Ms. McCabe has led the museum for nine years. She oversees a staff of 18 and an annual budget of roughly $3 million.

The museum has organized about 55 exhibitions, many of them traveling across the United States and so far to 17 other countries. It has published more than 40 books and provided teacher training and curriculums to more than 350 schools.

Although the museum has eschewed collecting in favor of borrowing works from other institutions, it does plan a small permanent exhibition at the new site.

“We’re a small museum that’s populated by zealots,” Ms. McCabe said. “We not only want to introduce children and adults to the beauty of African art, we want to introduce them in a variety of ways to the beauty and the majesty of the people who created it too.”

Mies van der Rohe Award 2007 - European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture

2007-02-25T15:38:00.000-08:00

By www.miesbcn.com

7 finalists for the 2007 edition of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award 2007 are listed as following:

Pôle universitaire de sciences de gestion (School for Management), Bordeaux, France. Architect : Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal/Lacaton & Vassal Architectes
Centre Chorégraphique National (National Choreographic Centre), Aix-en-Provence, France. (Rudy Ricciotti)
Phaeno Science Centre, Wolfsburg, Germany. Architects : Zaha Hadid/Zaha Hadid Architects
Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart, Germany. Architects : Ben van Berkel/UN Studio
Centro de Artes de Sines (Sines Art Centre), Sines, Portugal. Architects : Manuel Aires Mateus, Francisco Aires Mateus/Aires Mateus e Associados
Edificio Veles e Vents (America’s Cup Building), Valencia, Spain. Architects. David Chipperfield, Fermin Vásquez/David Chipperfield
MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla y León), León, Spain. Architects : Luis M. Mansilla, Emilio Tuñón/Mansilla + Tuñón.

Pôle universitaire de sciences de gestion
Lacaton & Vassal Architectes
School for Management
Bordeaux, France
Jean Philippe Vassal
Anne Lacaton

Centre chorégraphique nationale
Rudy Ricciotti
National Choreographic Center
Aix-en-Provence, France
Rudy Ricciotti

Phæno Science Centre
Zaha Hadid Architects
Phæno Science Centre

Mercedes-Benz Museum
UNStudio
Mercedes-Benz Museum
Stuttgart, Germany

Centro de artes de Sines
Sines Arts Centre
Aires Mateus e Associados
Sines, Portugal
Francisco Aires Mateus
Manuel Aires Mateus

Edificio Veles e Vents
America's Cup Building
David Chipperfield Architects
b720 Arquitectos
Valencia, Spain
David Chipperfield
Fermín Vázquez

MUSAC - Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla y León
León, Spain
Mansilla +Tuñón
Luis M. Mansilla
Emilio Tuñón Álvarez

The Music Building in Amsterdam - Best Dutch Building 2006

2007-02-25T10:26:00.000-08:00

The Music Building in Amsterdam by 3XN Wins Dutch Building Award 2006

A "Danish" building won the Dutch Building Award 2006! At the Gala Dinner Monday night February 5, Kim Herforth Nielsen, Principal Architect of Danish architects 3XN, received the Dutch Building Award 2006 (Nederlandse Bouwprijs 2006). The Award for Netherland's best building 2006 was given for the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, and this was the building's most prestigious recognition yet.

A hundred projects were considered, nineteen were nominated for the six categories of awards such as Materials, Systems etc. For the Building Award, five projects were nominated, each of them of very high standards. In the end, the jury decided for the "Danish" Muziekgebouw.

"I am truly amazed and grateful", says Kim Herforth Nielsen. "The Muziekgebouw was one of 3XN's first international projects, and we put a lot of effort into achieving a piece of unique architecture that places the client and the end-user in the heart of the process. This approach was already our brand in Denmark, so our challenge was to keep insisting on this when crossing the borders."

"When the Music building opened in 2005, the entire team felt that we had succeeded in this goal - the Dutch felt this was a Scandinavian building, while we thought that we had concluded a Dutch building! I guess the truth lies somewhere in between," Kim smiles. "The Dutch Building Award is the finest recognition imaginable to prove that we have reached our goal - to bring our user-centred, multiple approaches outside 'home base', and to be able to serve clients internationally this way."

The Muziekgebouw has a splendid position on a pier head very close to central Amsterdam, surrounded on three sides by the river IJ. The jury President, jhr. dr. P.A.C. Beelaerts, praised - among other things - the way in which the parties involved have succeeded in realising a building with such irradiation, considering also the budget, which seen in an international perspective has been rather restricted. "This is absolutely image-strengthening for the construction sector", Beelaerts said. After the ceremony, one of the other nominees said to Kim, that Amsterdammers were happy to finally 'beat' Rotterdam - "now we change the balance, Rotterdam always used to get the attention," he said.

The Music Building opened in the summer of 2005, and has ever since received a large attention. It has already been awarded internationally with the ULI Europe Award 2006, the Dedalo Minosse Award 2006 and the LEAF AWARD 2006.

Toronto CityHall Nathan Phillips Square design competition

2007-02-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

On Toronto Star, there is a poll for Toronto CityHall Nathan Phillips Square design competition. Four designs have been chosen as finalists.

Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, Toronto

Plant Architect Inc., Toronto

Rogers Marvel Architects, New York

Zeidler Partnership Architects, Toronto

Asymptote wins competition for WBCB Tower

2007-02-20T17:05:00.000-08:00

Millennium Tower World Business Center, Busan, Korea

Asymptote wins competition for the tallest building in Asia, WBCB Tower by World Architecture News
On 25 January, 2007 Asymptote Architecture, a New York based architecture practice led by principals Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, has been awarded the Millennium Tower World Business Center (WBCB) in Busan, Korea through an international competition organized by the Busan International Architectural Culture Festival (BIACF) and sponsored by the Municipality of Busan City and the Solomon Group. The announcement was made on January 23 in Busan after a unanimous decision by jury members selecting Asymptote's ground breaking design of three separate tapered towers rising out of a robust and powerful base. The Solomon Group, a private Korean developer, intends to move forward with Asymptote's design for a 560m tall tower, which upon completion will be the tallest building in Asia. Asymptote's three-towered design for the World Business Center Busan is a newly minted approach where the notion of singularity and autonomy gives way to a strong juxtaposition of form and voids. Simultaneously a single entity, the towers are also read as three distinct forms set against Busan's dramatic natural backdrop of sea and mountains. The base of the tower artfully negotiates the site at the entrance level while from the top of the midsection the three slender towers rise above the skylobby level and gracefully taper upwards around a spectacular central void. Through its formal and sculptural qualities this unique architectural expression is a powerful symbol of 21st century Busan and a beacon for it's trajectory into the future and onto the global stage.

Christian Kerez wins Warsaw Museum of Modern Art competition

2007-02-20T16:46:00.000-08:00

At an official event in Warsaw the winner of the architecture competition for the museum of modern art in Warsaw has been announced. Christian Kerez, Assistant Professor at the ETH and Architect based in Zürich was awarded the first prize. It's a modest L-shaped building with a wavy roof.
The future museum will be erected next to the Culture and Science Palace in the center of Warsaw. According to Libeskind the proposal fits well into the neighboorhood of the palace, which was built in a Stalinist style, despite being an avantgarde project. The museum is scheduled to be opened 2010.

Royal Haskoning's winning design in Dubai

2007-02-13T23:39:00.000-08:00

By worldarchitecturenews
Nakheel invited architects to make a concept master plan design for Palm Jebel Ali, just off the coast of Dubai. The winning design submitted by Royal Haskoning and D103 International consists of a surface area of 300,000m² to be used for sports activities, residential housing, a retail sector, and office buildings. In addition, public parks, marinas and an iconic bridge were part of the design brief. The winning design is a joint effort between Royal Haskoning’s design teams in Bangkok, Amsterdam and Dubai. Royal Haskoning has been working on various projects in the United Arab Emirates, including Palm Jebel Ali, Palm Jumeirah and The World Island, since 2000. Other activities, such as spatial development, environment, maritime, infrastructure, structural engineering and building services projects are foreseen in the very near future. Royal Haskoning’s activities in Dubai and the Middle East are co-ordinated from the company’s office in Dubai.

Virgin's Branson offers $25 million global warming prize

2007-02-12T21:30:00.000-08:00

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Airline tycoon Richard Branson announced on Friday a $25 million prize for the first person to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere in the battle to beat global warming.

Flanked by climate campaigners former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and British ex-diplomat Crispin Tickell, Branson said he hoped the prize would spur innovative and creative thought to save mankind from self-destruction.

"Man created the problem and therefore man should solve the problem," he told a news conference to reveal the Virgin Earth Challenge.

"Unless we can devise a way of removing CO2 (carbon dioxide) from the earth's atmosphere we will lose half of all species on earth, all the coral reefs, 100 million people will be displaced, farmlands will become deserts and rain forests wastelands."

Branson rejected suggestions that he, as an airline owner, was being hypocritical in announcing the prize.

"I could ground my airline today, but British Airways would simply take its place," he said, noting that he was investing heavily in cleaner engines and fuels.

Top scientists predict that global average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century due to human activities like burning fossil fuels, putting millions at risk from rising sea levels, floods, famines and storms.

Gore, whose campaign film "An Inconvenient Truth" has helped spread the message, said all science showed something was drastically wrong but that Armageddon was not inevitable.

"We are now facing a planetary emergency. The planet has a fever," he said. "This is an initiative to stimulate someone to do something that no one knows how to do. This is right at the cutting edge."

The prize will initially only be open for five years, with ideas assessed by a panel of judges including Branson, Gore and Tickell as well as U.S. climate scientist James Hansen, Briton James Lovelock and Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery.

The winner will have to come up with a way of removing one billion metric tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years -- with $5 million of the prize being paid at the start and the remaining $20 million at the end.

If no winner is identified after five years the judges can decide to extend the period.

"This is the world's first deliberate attempt at planetary engineering," Flannery said via videolink from Sydney. "We are at the last moment. Once we reach the tipping point it will have been taken out of our hands.

He said 200 metric gigatons of carbon had accumulated in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, raising concentrations by 100 parts per million. The challenge was to find ways of bringing that back down again.

Zaha Hadid

2007-02-08T14:13:00.000-08:00

She was born in bagdad, 1950.

she studied maths at the american university of beirut
(1968 - 1971) and then later architecture at the architectural
association school (AA) in london, UK (1972 - 1977).
after graduating she joined OMA (office of metropolitan
architecture) and became a partner in 1977.
she left to start her own practice 'zaha hadid office' in 1980.
hadid has has lectured across europe and america,
she is currently a professor at the university of applied arts
in vienna. in 2004 hadid became the first female recipient
of the ’pritzker architecture prize’. projects include:
vitra fire station (1994) in weil am rhein, germany;
rosenthal center for contemporary art (1998) in cincinnati,
usa; bergisel ski jump (2002) in innsbruck, austria;
BMW building (2005) in leipzig, germany
a winner of many international competitions, but a number
of hadid's winning designs were never built.
hadid has designed furniture and objects for swarovski,
dupont, sawaya & moroni, alessi and established & sons.
along with ineriors for the guggenheim museum in new york,
the vienna kunsthalle, the hayward gallery in london...
her work has been shown in exhibitions worldwide
among the many museums, we cite here the MoMA in new
york, the MoMA in san francisco and the deutsches architektur
museum in frankfurt. in 2006, hadid was honoured with a
retrospective spanning her entire work at the guggenheim
museum in new york.

http://www.zaha-hadid.com

performing arts centre, saadiyat island, united arab emirates (developed by 2012)

interior of performing arts centre, saadiyat island, united arab emirates

a model of the london olympic aquatic center (to be completed in 2012)

nuragic and contemporary art museum in cagliari, italy (to be completed 2007)

ideal house - imm cologne 2007

ideal house - imm cologne 2007
see more

‘swarm chandelier’ for established and sons, 2006

kitchen for DuPont™ Corian®, 2006

‘BMW central building’, leipzig, germany, 2006

'vortexx chandeliers', for zumtobel lighting and sawaya & moroni, 2005

‘aqua table’ for established and sons, 2005

hotel ‘puerto america’ in madrid, 2005

‘iceberg’, sitting furniture for sawaya & moroni, 2003

tea and coffee set for alessi, 2003

‘bergisel ski-jump’, innsbruck, austria, completed in 2002

‘bergisel ski-jump’

‘vitra fire station’, weil am rhein, germany, 1994

FinalRender® SP2 for Maya.

2007-02-01T17:23:00.000-08:00

(Boston – January 30, 2007) - cebas Computer, maker of finalRender®, today announces the release of Service Pack 2 for finalRender Stage-2 for Maya. Service Pack 2 fixes several important issues that were identified after the initial release of SP1. All users should download SP2 and install it today!

Service Pack 2 for Maya

Welcome to the second Service Pack of finalRender® Stage-2 for Maya. cebas is continuously enhancing the finalRender® code base and for this reason, from time to time, Service Packs are released. These Service Packs (short: SP) includes fixes and may contain new features and additions.

Check out the new fixes offered by SP2:

Maya 8.5 32 bit support

Maya 8.5 64 bit support

Installation fixes

And don't forget about all the features and enhancements from SP1 released earlier this month:

Enhanced DR core

Full Maya 8 support

Full 64 bit support

New bitmap pager

2X faster Motion blur

Amazing motion blur with GI

New image plane support

Support for multiple cameras

Added a "skip" feature to custom RE shaders

Dedicated tabs for fR attributes in the Maya Attribute Spread Sheet

Faster more robust translatior

New frCleanup command can be used to remove both fR nodes and fR attributes

Texture baking improvments

Bake progress bar now shows object names

Here's How to Get it!

SP2 is a Free download and can be acquired by registered users at the cebas Shop

If you already have an account you can simply go to the My Account section of the cebas shop and then go to My Downloads to get the update. If you are unable to see the download in your My Downloads section, you need to contact register@cebas.com and mention that you are not able to see the download in the shop. If you didn’t purchase finalRender® Stage-2 directly from the cebas shop, you will need to create an account and then press the Register Me button in the My Downloads section. Within 24 hours you will have all updates and downloads available to you for all of your cebas products.
Please be aware that all fixes are included within this latest version of the software and you do NOT need to install all of the patches in order to become current. Simply installing the SP2 build will give you all of the updates, fixes and enhancements.

About cebas Computer GmbH

cebas Computer GmbH is a German developer of advanced 3D software for 3ds max and other 3D applications, based near Heidelberg. With 14 years of experience in software development for the 3D market, cebas has become renowned for its quality and unique software products serving graphics and animation studios around the world. More info is available at www.cebas.com.

cebas USA Inc.
754 S. Main St.
Bradford MA. 01835
Michael McCarthy
email:info@cebas.com

cebas Computer GmbH
Edwin Braun
email:info@cebas.com

Autodesk and 3ds max are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk Inc./Autodesk Canada Inc., in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders.

©Copyright 2004 cebas Computer GmbH. PyroCluster, finalRender are registered trademarks of cebas Computer in Germany. All rights reserved.

VisMasters Design Modeling & Visualization Conference

2007-01-26T22:24:00.000-08:00

The VisMasters Design Modeling & Visualization Conference is a one day event focused on the business, art and technology of design visualization. Featuring speakers from some of the most prestigious and well known architectural and visualization firms, participants from all facets of the industry will find a new found appreciation for the art and insights into what lies ahead.

VisMasters has partnered with IMAGINA to bring you the first ever European Design Modeling and Visualization Conference. This year there are three days dedicated solely to Design Visualization. The third and final day is being hosted by VisMasters. VisMasters is offering two exclusive packages: 1day VisMasters DMVC Pass or 3day IMAGINA + VisMasters DMVC Pass.

Focused Program
An unprecedented opportunity to learn, to network and to evolve the industry, VisMasters Design Modeling and Visualization Conference is an intensely programmed event with highly targeted programs and opportunities to network with peers. The program is designed to ensure that everyones takes away valuable industry insight, practical skills, and information that benefits your profession and your firm.

Exclusive Opportunity
One of the hottest tickets in the Design Modeling and Visualization industry this past August, the North America conference featured an attendee list that included 39 of the Top 50 Architectural firms, in addition to industry leading product manufacturers and entertainment companies, like Whirlpool, Disney, Ford Motor Company and Renault. Hundreds of like-minded professionals will gather in Monaco to focus topics that impact the direction of the industry and ultimately affect your bottom line. Make your plans now to attend!

Connect with Industry Leaders.
VisMasters DMVC provides you an ideal environment to establish and build productive personal and professional relationships with colleagues and other industry leaders.

from http://dmvc.vismasters.com/index.cfm

First Green Convention Center in Pittsburgh

2007-01-25T16:14:00.000-08:00

by Emily form inhabitat.com

In a city that’s seen a remarkable urban resurgence in the past decade, Pittsburgh’s David Lawrence Convention Center stands along the Allegheny River as a beacon of both beautiful architecture and innovative green design. Designed by architect Rafael Viñoly, the waterfront building is certified with a Gold LEED rating, and is both the largest “green” building and first “green” convention center. Aside from its eye-catching aesthetic, Viñoly’s design boasts an impressive list of green architectural elements and high-tech systems, from large glass curtain walls that admit consistent daylight (over 75% of the center’s exhibition spaces are naturally lit) to a state-of-the-art water reclamation system that reduces potable water usage by almost sixty percent. And the list goes on…

Green in its form and architecture, the design of the center takes full advantage of its context, using the natural airflow from the river to ventilate the entire complex. This architectural solution, combined with other energy-saving tactics, results in annual energy savings of over 35 percent. In terms of materials, the structure integrates a slew of green components including low- and no-VOC paints and non-toxic carpeting. The center has also put into effect an extensive recycling program that both recognizes and mitigates the wasteful and ephemeral nature of the exhibitions and trade shows it houses. The convention center serves as a new model of a hyper-functional, aesthetically-stunning green building, proving that large-scale, utilititarian buildings need not sacrifice function or aesthetic to be environmentally responsible.

+ David Lawrence Convention Center
+ Rafael Viñoly Architects