AIANY Honors 2012 Design Award Winners: Architecture
Structure for Long Dock Park, Architecture Research Office. (James Ewing)
[Editor's Note: This the first in a four-part series documenting the winners of the AIANY's 2012 Design Awards, which are broken down into four categories: architecture, interiors, unbuilt work, and urban design. This list covers the architecture awards, but additional segments spotlight winners in interiors, unbuilt work, and urban design.]
On March 5, the AIA New York released its list of 2012 Design Award winners, honoring the best design by New York-based architects and built work in New York City. The awards in the architecture category cover a wide spectrum of scales and locations from a portico gallery at New York’s Frick Collection to a pedestrian bridge in France to a hospital in Boston. A jury consisting of Thomas H. Beeby, Anne Fougeron, and Carme Pinós selected the winners, awarding the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver by Allied Works and the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan by Handel Architects and Davis Brody Bond with Peter Walker Partners top prize, the Architecture Honor Award. An official awards luncheon will take place on April 18 at Cipriani Wall Street to honor all the winners.
Seattle to Study Self-Funded Arena for a New NBA Team
Seattle's Key Arena, former home of the Seattle SuperSonics (via Flickr by jscatty).
Thanks to Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise, Kobe Bryant’s broken nose, and Blake Griffin’s dunks, basketball is once again on everybody’s mind. Now Seattle, missing an NBA team since the 2008 departure of the Seattle SuperSonics to Oklahoma City (renamed the Thunder), has a concrete plan to bring the NBA back. Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and King County Executive Dow Constantine have announced plans for a self-funded arena sponsored by private investor Christopher Hansen, according to King County.
Mies’ Gas Station Gets Refueled
Courtesy Les Architectes FABG
Designed a year before his death in 1968, Mies van der Rohe’s Esso station on l’Île des Sœurs in Montreal has been vacant and shuttered since 2008. The station, intended to serve nearby apartment blocks also designed by Mies, was built during the early urbanization of the island and closed when another station opened closer to the island’s main thoroughfare. Having been declared a historic monument in 2009, the community eventually decided to restore the structure and convert it to an intergenerational community center.
Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail Taking Shape
(images: CDOT)
Next week a framework plan for the abandoned elevated rail embankment known as the Bloomingdale Trail will be released. Curbed Chicago has posted some preliminary images from the Chicago Department of Transportation that were shown in public meetings last fall. While advocates have stressed that the project is not a copy of New York’s High Line, these very preliminary study images look a lot like the High Line, minus the bells and whistles like the bleachers for traffic viewing. Read More
Calatrava’s First U.S. Vehicular Bridge To Open
Dallas' Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. (Marco Becerra)
The latest bridge from Spanish tension-element guru Santiago Calatrava, renowned architect behind the Milwaukee Art Museum, Puente del Alamillo, and the upcoming World Trade Center Transportation Hub, will be his first vehicular bridge in the United States. Construction has been completed on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, the first in a series of Calatrava-designed crossings over Dallas’ Trinity River. It will act as a literal and metaphorical gateway to the city.
Michael Graves Designs Dignity for Wounded Veterans
Front facade of the Patriot Home in Fort Belvoir. (Courtesy Michael Graves & Associates)
In speaking to wounded veterans and their families, the Wounded Warrior Home Project found that soldiers returning home face a cumbersome and costly adaptation to their environment. A private-public partnership, including Michael Graves and Associates, global design firm IDEO, and Clark Realty Capital, has unveiled two universally-accessible prototype houses at Fort Belvoir in Virginia where every element is designed for ease of use. Sinks and stovetops are on motorized lifts, halls and doorways accommodate a wide turning radius for navigating wheelchairs, sliding doors open with a light touch.
Rice + Lipka and Field Operations to Remake MOCA Detroit
(courtesy Zago Architecture)
When it opened in 2006, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit became known as a cutting edge venue for showing contemporary art. Designed by Zago Architecture, the museum’s raw interior and graffitied exterior seemed to fit its mission and speak to the Motor City’s gritty present. How quickly museums grow up! Today, the museum announced it had selected Rice + Lipka Architects and James Corner Field Operations to renovate the building and redesign its adjacent public space. Read More
Foreclosed Forum: Suburbs, Cities, and Crisis
The "What is Foreclosed?" Forum was held last Saturday at Columbia's Low Library.
It might have been the first time that the works of Jay-Z, Malice, and Nas were evoked under the great dome of Columbia’s Low Library, but given the trend among young academics to cite rap alongside Socrates, it’s probably won’t be the last. That the quotes were used in the panel discussion called “Suburbs, Cities and Crisis,” spoke to a slightly skewed perspective of discussing the suburbs within the confines of Manhattan.
Designer Charged After LA House Fire
The Hollywood Hills home has been repaired following the 2011 fire. (Courtesy MLS)
Designer Gerhard Becker was charged with involuntary manslaughter last week after the Hollywood Hills mansion that he designed burned down. According to the LA Times prosecutors claim that Becker installed outdoor fireplaces inside the $11 million, 13,500 square foot home at 154 Viewsite Terrace after inspections were completed. The home was set to host Germany’s “Next Top Model” TV series (we’re not making this up). The fire, which occurred in February 2011, killed veteran fireman Glenn Allen. According to the Times, Becker told investigators last year that ”he did not consider them to be fireplaces but rather architectural features or decorations.” But LA assistant District Attorney disagrees: “This man built an 18-foot fire trough designed for outdoors inside the home. It was a recipe for disaster. He essentially put this fireplace on 2-by-4s.”
Bogey at Pebble Beach: Another Neutra House in the Rough
Neutra's Connell House, Pebble Beach (Anthony Kirk)
While Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson were busy fighting for supremacy at Pebble Beach last weekend, another important battle was taking place just down the street (unbeknownst to almost everyone). Richard Neutra’s 4,124 square foot Connell House (1958) in Pebble Beach is being slated for demolition in favor of a 12,000 square foot behemoth mega-mansion. The new home was proposed in December, and still needs several permissions for approval.
Author Barbara Lamprecht, author of Richard Neutra: Complete Works (Taschen), has written a letter to the Monterey County Planning Department urging it to save the “aesthetically compelling, spatially complex house,” with its “careful asymmetric composition of volumes and opposing opaque (stucco) and transparent (glass) planes.” She encourages others to contact the department as well. Think of it as a pro/am for architecture buffs.
Rescuing Johansen’s Mummers Theater
The Stage Center, formerly the Mummer Theater, in Oklahoma City (Courtesy smallarchitects.com)
Amidst office towers in the heart of Oklahoma City sits an incongruous ensemble of multicolored boxes, tubes, concrete skywalks, and corrugated metal painted in shades of red, blue, orange, and chartreuse green. One cantilevered rectangle precariously perches at the edge of a swooping concrete form whose interior holds a theater in the round, once home to the Mummers Theater troupe. Architect John M. Johansen, of the so-called “Harvard Five,” completed the project for the Mummers in 1970, but the troupe folded just one year later. The building would go through several incarnations as a theater/arts center called Stage Center until a 2010 flood put it out of commission. Vandalism and decay ensued, and now the AIA Central Oklahoma chapter has put out an RFP for the renovation, hoping to spur design-world interest in their Save Stage Center Campaign.
LA Parking Lot becomes Urban Oasis
PDR rendering of the South Los Angeles Wetland Park. (Courtesy LADPW)
What’s the best place to build a wetland? How about at the site of an old MTA bus lot in South Los Angeles? It took more than $26 million and nearly three years to complete the transformation from parking lot to urban wetland. Open to the public as of February 9, the new South Los Angeles Wetland Park that doesn’t only efficiently process storm water runoff–it also provides crucial community green space. Read More
Advertise on The Architect's Newspaper.
Archives
Categories
Architecture
Design
East Coast
Midwest
National
Planning
Shft+Alt+Del
Sustainability
Transportation
West Coast
