Trends Are Coming
A design for post-diluvian Bangkok by Thai-architects S+PBA
The Future is always a draw, especially if it comes with fresh croissants and coffee. And so some hundred or more AEC industry types showed up this morning for a smartly-packaged and wide-ranging keynote and panel called “A View from the Future,” organized by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. The opening talk was by Edie Weiner, president of futurist trend consultants, Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.
Stop Dumping on Hadrian’s Villa
The Maritime Theatre at Hadrian's Villa. (Courtesy Wikimedia)
Hadrian’s Villa—the real one, the 2nd century site of pilgrimages by architects, classicists, and any human interested in the origins of culture—has been selected as the site of a new garbage dump by a Berlusconi-appointed sanitation minister. That stinks!
MOCA Cleveland and the Big Blue Yonder
The exterior of MOCA Cleveland nears completion. (Courtesy Farshid Moussavi Architecture)
If Foreign Office Architects’ first project, the huge Yokohama International Port Terminal in Japan, was the vast scale of rolling dunes, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland—begun when the firm was still known as FOA and carried to completion by Farshid Moussavi Architecture—is compact as a cube. And size has made all the difference in keeping on track through the economic downturn with the $27.2 million building poised for opening in October.
Cooper-Hewitt Releases 2012 National Design Awards
Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center and Davis Garage at Wellesley College. (Timothy Hursley)
And the winners of what wants to be the Academy Awards of design are as follows!
The Cooper-Hewitt’s ’s 2012 National Design Award in Architecture goes to Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam in Atlanta. We love the factory for Herman Miller and the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center for Wellesley College is very cool, too. The Landscape Design award goes to Boston-based Stoss Landscape Urbanism whose interest in infrastructure at such projects as Erie Street Plaza in Milwaukee—part-civic, part-storm-water drainage—is so on message. Totally groovy LA architect Clive Wilkinson Architects wins for his interiors; his clients—Google, Nokia, 20th Century Fox, Disney—are running the world of infotainment!
Kazi Leaving Van Alen
Olympia Kazi. (Lila Sotiriou)
Olympia Kazi has resigned as executive director of the Van Alen Institute one year and a day since the opening of Van Alen Books, possibly her most visible contribution to the 100-year-old organization known for its engagement with pressing urban issues through competitions, exhibitions, research, and public programs.
Princeton Zeroes in on Zaero-Polo as Next Dean (Updated)
Alejandro Zaera-Polo in front of his Yokohama Terminal project in Japan. (Wikipedia and Naoya Fujii/Flickr)
It is now confirmed that the next dean at Princeton University School of Architecture will be Alejandro Zaera-Polo. The last lap of the race to take Stan Allen’s position as dean had narrowed down to three with odds on one of the several female contenders including Sylvia Lavin and Keller Easterling. But when the London-based, Spanish-born architect was called in London on March 18 and asked to fly to Princeton, where he is currently a visiting lecturer, the die seemed cast. And now Dean Allen confirms.
A Questioning Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas at the New York Public Library. (Jori Klein)
Rem Koolhaas cut the interviewer short when asked if he had any regrets: “That’s a private matter and therefore not one I will answer.” And yet the entire hour-long conversation provided what seemed to be almost shockingly intimate glimpses into the architect’s state of mind, where feelings of being lonely, isolated, ineffectual, nostalgic, and even old seemed simmering.
Chakrabarti Joins SHoP as Partner
The partners of SHoP (from right) Gregg Pasquarelli, William Sharples, Christopher Sharples, Coren Sharples, Kimberly Holden, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Jonathan Mallie
Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of the Columbia Center for Urban Real Estate since 2009, has been appointed a partner at SHoP Architects effective immediately. The seventh partner (and only the second not related to the firm’s founders by blood or marriage), Chakrabarti will focus on large-scale urban projects, drawing on his years of expertise through such on-going endeavors as Related Companies’ involvement with the Moynihan Station project and development at Hudson Yards. (While he will remain director of the Columbia real estate program, he will forgo his consultancy with Related.)
Port Authority Confessional: Audit Reveals Dysfunction
An early model for Frank Gehry's WTC performing arts center. (Courtesy Gehry Partners)
The long-expected audit of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is available, and—apart from the opaque bureaucratese—it reads just like the dysfunctional family memoir you might expect. In fact, the word dysfunctional is at the top of the summary letter sent to Governors Chris Christie of NJ and Andrew Cuomo of NY. To wit, the Navigant Consulting assessment concluded that the PA is “a challenged and dysfunctional organization suffering from lack of consistent leadership, a siloed underlying bureaucracy, poorly coordinated capital planning processes, insufficient cost controls, and a lack of transparent and effective oversight of the World Trade Center program.”
Board Named for WTC Performing Arts Center
Possible site of the proposed performing arts center sits directly east of One World Trade Center.
It had to happen before midnight December 31. And it did, although quietly. Downtown Express reports that five founding board members for the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center (PAC) were announced by National September 11 Memorial President Joe Daniels in the nick of time, in order not to forfeit access to $100 million in LMDC funds set aside in fall 2010 for the lone surviving cultural venue–apart from the September 11 museum–at the site, where once many were envisioned as the most sure-fire way to lift ground zero out of the psychological depths of mourning for the lost.
Will Cornell stand by SOM to build NYC Tech Campus?
Inside the proposed Cornell campus.
Multiple factors helped the Cornell/Technion team win what is shaping up to be Mayor Bloomberg’s favorite super-scale legacy project. Stanford, the only real competition, withdrew; a windfall of a $350 million donation blew in; local Cornell alums pulled out the stops with petitions. High on that list is SOM’s preliminary design proposing a net-zero building and a permeable landscape, developed with Field Operations, woven in, over, and into multiple structures lending an interactive and public character to the entire campus.
This wholly sustainable, radically accessible design plan has become a signature of the project as the city ambitiously strives to become an East Coast high tech start-up incubator bar none. And yet it is unclear if SOM will remain on the job.
Cornell Wins: Next Stop Roosevelt Island
SOM's plan for Cornell's tech campus on Roosevelt Island.
With his hand essentially forced by a hasty withdraw of Stanford on Friday, and the hugely enticing carrot of a $350 million gift from Duty-Free billionaire and Cornell alum Charles Feeney, Mayor Bloomberg announced on Monday that the Cornell team will be building the NYC Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island. The terms “game changer” and “transformative” were bandied about with regularity throughout the mayor’s midday press conference, which was streamed live on the net to the delight of Cornell’s partnering campus, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology. The Israeli students’ digitally lapsed cheering added a techy touch.
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