KPMB’s Ductal facade in Toronto
 |
Brought to you by: |
The Rotman School of Management under construction (KPMB/Tom Arban)
Rotman School makes the most of high-performance concrete and glass
The University of Toronto Rotman School of Management’s nearly $100 million expansion project will more than double the size of the business school. A new 161,000-square-foot building designed by Toronto-based KPMB Architects mediates between its neighbors—a historic 19th century brick home on one side and the towering Brutalist Robarts Library on the other—while maintaining views to the medieval Oxbridge-style Massey College to the east. The architect’s solution to the architectural mixture is an elevated box made with floor-to-ceiling glazing punctuated by slivers of Ductal, a patented ultra-high performance concrete made by Lafarge.
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.
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.
Pictorial> An Artistic Tour of Rudolph’s Ill-Starred Government Center
The Orange County Government Center by Paul Rudolph faces an uncertain future. (Courtesy Aracelis Diamantis).
[This photo essay accompanies AN's recent article on the pending demise of Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center in New York. Read more here.]
The day before Orange County Executive Director Eddie Diana presented plans for replacing architect Paul Rudolph‘s Orange County Government Center, AN took a trip up to Goshen, New York with photographer Aracelis Diamantis to check out the scene. Diamantis ditched her SLR in favor of a Hipstimatic app on her iPhone. The effect gave the building a haunted-Brutalist-house quality and amplified the the architect’s multi-textured use of concrete.
Bill Kreysler’s Digitally Fabricated Aquarium Liner
|
Brought to you by: |
Installers finished their work from floating platforms (Monterey Bay Aquarium)
California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium updates its million-gallon Open Sea exhibit
Located on the former site of a sardine cannery overlooking the Pacific, the Monterey Bay Aquarium pumps 2,000 gallons of seawater into its more than 100 exhibit tanks every minute. When its Outer Bay exhibit opened in 1996, it had the world’s largest single-pane window, measuring 56 feet long and 17 feet high. But turbulence created by the sea creatures inside unexpectedly damaged the aquarium’s liner, which flexed and loosened the grout that held its blue glass tiles in place. Large, fast-swimming tunas housed in the tank also caused damage by occasionally colliding with the lining. In 2010 the aquarium hired architectural composite consultant and fabricator Bill Kreysler, founder of Kreysler & Associates (K&A), to create a new Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) liner for the exhibit, which recently reopened as the Open Sea galleries.
The initial SOM proposal for Cornell's tech campus. (Courtesy SOM)
And then there were six. Cornell University announced that six firms were selected from a field of 43 contenders to design their new tech campus on Roosevelt Island. SOM, the firm that pushed Cornell over the top in the national competition to build on Roosevelt is still in the running, alongside OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture)
, Diller Scofidio + Renfro
, Morphosis Architects
, Steven Holl Architects
, and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. SOM will remain on the job to define an overall campus plan. The university is still running with its net-zero plan for the first core building. Residences and other multi-use buildings will follow. A contract with the winning firm is set to be signed in April.
Urban Movement Design to Transform Hadid’s MAXXI for Young Architects Program in Rome
Rendering of Urban Movement Design’s Unire/Unite, winning design of YAP MAXXI 2012. (Courtesy Urban Movement Design)
Earlier this month, we were first to bring you renderings of HWKN’s planned installation for MoMA’s P.S. 1 Young Architects Program (YAP), but now AN has learned that YAP’s counterpart in Rome has selected Urban Movement Design’s proposal for a series of sinuous benches and archways covered in grass and hanging plants as the winner to fill Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI museum piazza this June.
Selling Via Verde
About 40 co-op units are still available at Via Verde. (Courtesy Phipps Rose Dattner Grimshaw)
Who wouldn’t want buy into an eco-conscious, sustainable, and affordable apartment building whose Grimshaw/Dattner-designed architecture received rave reviews on the front page of the New York Times? With more than 40 of the 75 co-ops still available at Via Verde, the gang at developer Jonathan Rose Co. and Dattner are giving the project the full media push. Jonathan Rose’s Ari Goldstein and Dattner’s Bill Stein were on New York 1 this morning promoting the design and high living standards. The 151 rental units of this muli-income complex were snapped up right away. But while the co-ops sales aren’t exactly flagging, they’re not exactly flying off the shelves in this economy.
Breaking> Chinese Architect Wang Shu Awarded Pritzker Prize
Wang Shu in front of his New Academy of Art Hangzhou, China. (Iwan Baan)
Chinese architect Wang Shu has been named the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate, marking the first time a Chinese architect has been honored prize which brings a bronze medal and $100,000 purse. Wang Shu is known for building with traditional Chinese forms and materials, often recycling bricks and tiles to form a patchwork mosaic in his buildings, which demonstrate a distinct modern sensibility. He is professor and head of architecture at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China and founded Amateur Architecture Studio with Lu Wenyu in 1998 where he has taken an outspoken stance against architecture that he perceives as destroying vast urban and rural landscapes across China.
CB2 Votes Unanimous Nay on NYU Expansion
Arial view of NYU's expansion plans.
Manhattan Community Board 2 unanimously voted against the NYU expansion plan in Greenwich Village last night citing the impact its scale would have on the neighborhood. Grimshaw with Toshiko Mori designed four of the proposed towers and Michael Van Valkenburgh designed the landscape for the 2.4 million square foot expansion. The plans were set within two superblocks that sprang from Robert Moses-era urban renewal projects that featured buildings by I.M. Pei, Paul Lester Weiner, and a garden by Hideo Sasaki.
Read More
Hunter S. Thompson-Inspired Gonzo Balcony
|
Brought to you by: |
The 5-by-8-foot balcony, photographed before installation of a second-story doorway and ipe deck (Courtesy Active Alloys)
A traditional brick condo gets unconventional in Chicago
If such a thing as Gonzo Architecture exists, Kujawa Architecture has made a small contribution to the genre on Oakdale Avenue in Chicago. Their client, Ed Hoban, was a longtime confidant of journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and conventional proposals had fallen short of his desire for a balcony that would project from the second-story bedroom of his brick condo, allowing him to enjoy a blossoming crabapple tree in the garden below. The firm’s principal, Casimir Kujawa, took matters into his own hands after looking at unsatisfactory plans from a contractor Hoban had initially hired. The team, including firm members Mason Pritchett and Patrick Johnson, started calling the project the Gonzo Balcony. “The title seemed apt because of Ed’s friendship with Hunter, but primarily in the sense that the building itself as well as the balcony are a bit unconventional. For us the entire experience of working closely with Ed, and with Bill Tellmann and Collin Smith, of the metal fabricator Active Alloys, allowed for a more experimental approach which also seemed to resonate with the ‘gonzo’ term.”
Unveiled> Bjarke Ingels Does the Twist in Vancouver
BIG's proposed tower in Vancouver. (BIG/Courtesy Vancity Buzz)
When Bjarke Ingels makes news, he really makes news. The superhero force behind the juggernaut that is BIG is in the running on Chicago’s Navy Pier, has a giant heart pulsing in Times Square, just won a competition for Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah, and now plans for his 49-story skyscraper in Vancouver, Canada have leaked, revealing a new “twist” on the traditional skyscraper. We’ve known for over a year that Ingels was planning the Vancouver tower, but now Vancity Buzz has revealed, in addition to the renderings, project details for the Beach & Howe Tower garnered from documents filed with the city.
Advertise on The Architect's Newspaper.
Archives
Categories
Architecture
Design
East Coast
Midwest
National
Planning
Shft+Alt+Del
Sustainability
Transportation
West Coast
