Kansas City Solar Pavilion Opens, Puzzles
(photos: Gunnar Hand)
The Sun Pavilion, winner of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s design competition in conjunction with their Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World Fairs, 1851-1939, is now open. Completed in 81 days, the pavilion is an expression of the innovation that reflects the ideals of World’s Fairs. Read More
Books and Mortar
A corbel dome made of books. (Courtesy Miler Lagos)
Artist Miler Lagos is building a library, but think twice before pulling out a book. For his recent installation called Home at the Magnan Metz Gallery in New York City, Lagos constructed an entirely self-supporting dome out of nothing but books.
Van Valkenburgh to Design Gardner’s Garden
The Monks Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1946, following a Japanese-inspired redesign. (Courtesy Gardner Museum)
“I don’t have time to read, because I trot about with the gardeners. And the little monk’s garden at Fenway Court is very dear too,” Isabella Stewart Gardner wrote to her art advisor Bernard Berenson in 1908.
The walled “monk’s garden” flanks the Gardner Museum‘s Venetian-style palazzo (the house originally known as Fenway Court that became today’s museum) and was first planted in 1903 in an Italianate-style with elegant evergreens running along the walls and pathways. In the 1940s museum director Morris Carter resdesigned the Monks Garden using a Japanese style plan but seeding it with New England wildflowers. For the garden’s last update in the 1970s, Sasaki Associates added bluestone pavers and wooden benches. And the recent addition to the Gardner campus by Renzo Piano included a repositioning of the museum’s main entrance, a move that gives the Monks Garden a much higher profile, warranting another facelift. Read More
Taylor Family Digital Library Sunscreen
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The self-tensioning system has 52 percent open area (Cambridge)
LEED Gold-certified building protects old documents with a modern mesh design
The new Taylor Family Digital Library houses some of the University of Calgary’s prized documents—more than 800,000 architectural drawings, one million maps and aerial photographs, and thousands of print monographs are among the nine million items in the collection. The university built the library as part of its mission to become one of Canada’s top five research libraries by 2016, the year of its 50th anniversary. But the library also serves the practical goal of protecting the special documents and art collections that were relocated there from other facilities. To that end, architect Kasian Architecture Interior Design and Planning envisioned the 265,000-square-foot building enshrouded in a veil of mesh that would provide solar protection while creating a semi-transparent facade and day-lit interiors to be enjoyed by students and community members.
Is Brooklyn Becoming Farm Country?
Inside the rooftop greenhouses. (Courtesy Bright Farms)
A massive new urban farming project in Sunset Park, Brooklyn was announced last week by New York City-based Bright Farms, a company dedicated to building hydroponic farms close to supermarkets. The Sunset Park project will be the largest rooftop farm in the city, and possibly the world. At 100,000 square feet, it could potentially yield 1 million pounds of produce a year and joins several other agricultural projects in Brooklyn. Brooklyn Grange, another rooftop farming operation located in Queens, is planning to open a 45,000 square foot urban farm at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and farm-developers Gotham Greens will be opening a new location in the borough as well.
Blanc’s Bronx Vertical Garden
Patrick Blanc's cube installation at the New York Botanical Garden. (AN/Stoelker)
As architects like Herzog & de Meuron and Jean Nouvel tap into the potential of vertical gardens, they’ll often seek the expertise of Patrick Blanc. For the past thirty years Blanc developed vertical gardens while researching adaptive strategies of plants at the National Center for Sceintific Research in France. His research of plant growth in nature’s more hostile environs, such as hanging off of stone cliffs or springing from rocks next to waterfalls, has yielded a uniquely urbanistic solution for gardening. For the next ten days there’s a small window of opportunity left to see the work of Blanc at its most luxurious. The botanist designed the New York Botanical Garden‘s annual Orchid Show which ends on April 22. As a bonus, this also happens to be the moment that the Gardens’ 250 acres are at the height of their springtime burst.
Shortlisted Teams Reveal a Reimagined National Mall
Constitutional Gardens proposal by Nelson Byrd Woltz and Paul Murdoch.
The Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit devoted to restoring the heavily used park in the core of Washington, D.C., has released the shortlisted design concepts in its National Mall Design Competition. The 10 teams in the contest’s final stage were asked to reimagine three sites on the Mall most in need of repair or improvement: Constitution Gardens, near the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool; the Washington Monument grounds; and the area around the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial facing the U.S. Capitol’s west face.
NYU Takes a Shave; Locals Still Not Pleased
The NYU expansion master plan as seen from above will not change drastically. (Courtesy NYU)
As was largely expected following comments from Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer‘s office leaked to the press last month, officials from NYU announced that the university has agreed to shave off 370,000 square feet from their 2,275,000 square foot expansion plan, The New York Times reported.
In a telephone interview with AN, Andrew Berman, of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, said that even with those changes the project is still out of scale for the neighborhood. Berman added that he was disappointed that the Borough President (BP) didn’t hold public meetings for the ULURP, as was done for the Columbia University expansion in Morningside Heights. “If there was ever a ULURP to hold a public hearing for, it was this,” he said.
Architectural League Honors Amanda Burden’s Commitment to Quality Design
Amanda Burden. (David Malosh)
Amanda Burden, Chair of the New York City Planning Commission and Director of the Department of City Planning, is the recipient of the Architectural League of New York’s highest honor, the President’s Medal. The League’s President and Board of Directors grant the award to individuals in recognition of an exceptional body of work in architecture, urbanism, or design. The medal was presented to Burden last night at an awards ceremony.
The accounting methods that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie used to put the kibosh on new cross Hudson train tunnel were called in to question in a report released today, the New York Times reports. Christie said that the project, called the Access to the Regions Core (ARC), could run up to $14 billion, but independent Congressional investigators found that it would cost no more than $10 billion. He also claimed that New Jersey would foot more than 70 percent of the bill, but investigators said it would have been more like 14 percent. It should be noted that a constant Christie critic, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, commissioned the report. No matter, it seems to be no skin off the governor’s nose. NJ.com grabbed a quotable quote from the governor speaking in New York this morning at the George W. Bush Institute Conference on Taxes and Economic Growth: “So when they want to build a tunnel to the basement of a Macy’s and stick the New Jersey taxpayers with a bill of $3 to $5 billion over, no matter how much the administration yells and screams, you have to say no.”
Bjarke Gets A Tan: Twin Torquing Towers Planned in Miami
The torquing towers. (Courtesy Grove at Grand Bay)
After a loss in Chicago, Bjarke Ingel’s North American tour continues unimpeded as the design for his latest project, a set of twisting towers in Coconut Grove, Miami, was revealed at an invitation-only party in late March. Called the Grove at Grand Bay, the set of 20-story towers will contain a combined 96 luxury residences, 59 units in one tower and 37 in the other, on the three-acre site currently occupied by the once-hip-but-now-shuttered Grand Bay Hotel that once entertained the likes of Michael Jackson, Prince, and Pavarotti. Tenants of the new towers, however, are likely to be just as rich and possibly as famous.
Twenty Years Later, Las Vegas’ Starship Enterprise That Almost Was
1992 Downtown Las Vegas proposal that was nearly built. (Courtesy Goddard Group)
The above might be the most spectacular project to (n)ever happen. In 1992, The Fremont Street Experience, by the Jerde Partnership, became the project that was built to save downtown Las Vegas, at a time when the boom of casinos along “The Strip” was siphoning business from the city’s core. But no one knew—until now—that apparently the real winner of that project’s competition was Gary Goddard and his team, who claim to have proposed to build a full-scale Starship Enterprise in downtown Las Vegas. The spectacular mirage-city in the Nevada desert is the only place where a project this amazing could ever (not) happen.
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