James Corner Field Operations is revamping Chicago’s touristy Navy Pier. Phase one of the redevelopment is scheduled for completion by summer 2015, in time for the pier’s centennial the following year. From an economic standpoint, Chicago’s Navy Pier is already a success. With amenities like a 150-foot ferris wheel, a children’s museum, a Shakespeare theater, and …Continue Reading
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Demolished Too Soon: 11 Buildings That Should Still Be Standing!
The Folk Art Museum in New York City, by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. Photo: Ozier Muhammad for NYTimes. When the news broke that MoMA was planning on demolishing the former American Folk Art Museum, the design community responded with a gigantic petition to preserve the architectural gem, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, which had …Continue Reading
Demolished Too Soon: 11 Buildings That Should Still Be Standing!
The Folk Art Museum in New York City, by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. Photo: Ozier Muhammad for NYTimes. When the news broke that MoMA was planning on demolishing the former American Folk Art Museum, the design community responded with a gigantic petition to preserve the architectural gem, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, which had …Continue Reading
LuxeHome’s GE Monogram Design Center Is A Showroom That Feels Like A Home
According to Kate Flaherty, vice president of building products and special projects at MMPI, the opportunity to build LuxeHome’s newest addition, the GE Monogram Design Center, seemed like an architect’s dream. “There are only two GE Monogram Design Centers in the world including the LuxeHome location,” Flaherty said. Speaking enthusiastically about the 30 premier kitchen, …Continue Reading
‘Motion Matters’ Exhibition / UNStudio
Currently on view until July 4th at the Aedes Gallery in Berlin, UNStudio‘s ‘Motion Matters’ Exhibition presents ten of UNStudio’s milestone projects, in addition to conveying their perspective on 25 years of architectural production, their current approach to architectural practice and the wider discourse that determines design challenges today. For many years UNStudio has been investigating the potential of the temporary installation as an experimental testing ground for manifold architectural concerns and it is these investigations that form the basis of their exhibit. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Ben van Berkel: “When we talk of ‘motion’ within architecture we not only refer to buildings and their potential effects, but also to shifts, or twists in the whole, integrated practice of the profession; we talk of the mobile forces which engender change and where the future of architecture may lie. ‘Motion’ therefore also encapsulates the past, the present and the possible future of the profession.
Motion
The effects of situation, light, color, and material on viewer perception are tested in a spatial installation of shifting perspectives. Within a trajectory of transitional spaces, optical illusions and trompe l’oeil effects are brought to contemporary structures, generating an experience that negotiates the ideal and the relational. The many interactions possible between building, programme and user which can engage the public in a dynamic and challenging confrontation is a key element in UNStudio’s designs. The exhibit itself is not merely a showcase, nor an object to passively observe, but instead interacts with the visitor whilst simultaneously demanding active participation in order to create a spatial and dynamic experience.
Matters
At an almost 1:1 scale the visitor can, as it were, step into the projects on display: these include the Burnham Pavilion (Millennium Park, Chicago, USA), the Centre for Virtual Engineering – ZVE (Fraunhofer Institute, Stuttgart, Germany), the Theatre Agora (Lelystad, Netherlands), the Galleria Centercity (Cheonan, Korea), the Arnhem Central – Platform Roofs (Arnhem, Netherlands), the MUMUTH Music Theatre (Graz, Austria), the Holiday Home (ICA, Philadelphia, USA), the Education Executive Agency & Tax Offices (Groningen, Netherlands), the Haus am Weinberg (Stuttgart, Germany), and the Mercedes-Benz Museum (Stuttgart, Germany).
Knowledge Based
In addition to the primary focus on these key projects, a more detailed view is generated by means of five thematic threads which bind the projects together along a three-dimensional ribbon which meanders through the exhibition space. These threads consist of numerous small images which afford the reading of the various relationships between the exhibited projects within a larger context of inspiration, debate and realisation processes and provide insight into the knowledge driven nature of UNStudio’s practice.
For more information on the exhibition, please visit here.
'Motion Matters' Exhibition / UNStudio originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 21 May 2013.
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Updated Plans Released for Chicago’s Navy Pier
James Corner Field Operations (JCFO) and nARCHITECTS have released updated renderings for their competition-winning redesign of Chicago’s 3,300 foot long Navy Pier. The slightly scaled-back, revised plans seemed to have dismissed the more “dramatic” and costly facets reviewed in last years’ submittal, such as the floating pool and sand beach, to depict a contemporary “park-like feel.” Highlighted features include the south-facing Wave Wall and grand stairway, inspired by the Spanish Steps in Rome, along with an interactive splash fountain-turned-winter ice skating rink at the beginning of a heavily vegetated promenade.
These updated plans for phase-one of the Navy Pier redesign were released alongside an announcement by the Chicago Mayor’s office that confirmed the project will receive $55 million in public funding.
More images and information after the break…
As featured in the Chicago Tribune, nARCHITECTS’ Wave Wall will connect the pier dock to an upper level amusement park, providing a large south-facing social space with views of the lake and access to more than 500 linear feet of retail spaces below.
Other featured structures include the slender glass Info Tower and a series of Lake Pavilions. By combining boat ticket kiosks with undulating polished stainless steel canopies, the Lake Pavilions will provide shade and shelter along the pier, while reflecting the rippling water of Lake Michigan back onto the dock (more information on the Navy Pier redevelopment scheme here).
Construction is expected to start this fall and be completed in time for the pier’s centennial in 2016.
via The Chicago Tribune, nARCHITECTS
Updated Plans Released for Chicago's Navy Pier originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 20 May 2013.
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Never Leave The Gayborhood Again: LGBTQ Senior Housing Coming To Chicago’s Boystown
This summer Gensler will break ground on Chicago’s first affordable housing development for LGBTQ seniors. Located in the heart of Lakeview (aka Boystown, the city’s most prominent gay district), the project will offer the area’s 55-and-over set the chance to grow old in their own neighborhood. It’s not exactly aging in place—this is still a retirement facility, after all—but it sure beats getting shipped off to unfamiliar surroundings. Read more!
Slated to open in August 2014, the project follows in the footsteps of Los Angeles’s Triangle Square, an affordable LGBTQ elder-housing development built by Van Tilburg, Banvard & Soderbergh in 2007. (Full disclosure: Architizer CEO Marc Kushner’s firm HWKN has also developed a project serving the 40+ LGBT community, BOOM Palm Springs.)
Chicago’s version, which is a collaboration with the nonprofit affordable-housing developer Heartland Alliance, grew out of the senior program at Center on Halsted, an LGBTQ community center built by Gensler in 2007. “When we finished the center, no one knew how successful it was going to be,” says Elva Rubio, principal and regional design leader at Gensler’s Chicago office. “The senior program was basically a room next to the kitchen. Then it grew to the front of the building, and it’s taken over the whole front of the building.” Eventually Halsted realized it was devoting nearly a quarter of its programming to the elderly, and it was time to expand.
Seventy-nine new studios and one-bedrooms will occupy a six-story tower on the same block as the Center on Halsted. Gensler is also converting a 1907 brick police station into an adjoining senior center. And with street-level retail planned for the tower—plus a Whole Foods that’s already on the block—this stretch of Halsted Street will soon be known as the largest mixed-use LGBTQ development in the country (hold the Greenwich Village jokes, please!).
The building will be open to anyone with an annual income below $32,000, but the project team expects most residents to come from the LGBTQ population. “Housing has become a huge issue in the community,” says Rubio. “Not all institutions support alternative lifestyles, and in a lot of situations this group of people are being isolated like they were when they were young. They’ve been experiencing discrimination their whole lives, and here we get to the end of their lives and still it’s there.”
“The idea is to create a place where you can live and it’s safe and inclusive,” she says.
Images: courtesy of Gensler
AD College Guide: InSB, Integrated School of Building
The ongoing struggles in the world’s economies has produced several innovations in the field of Architecture. One important change has been for professionals and students to seek more interdisciplinary skills that better prepare them for these inevitable economic shifts. Schools have responded in kind, defining those skills in either intellectual, analytical terms (i.e. teaching students how to better critically analyze situations while eschewing superficial “theoretical” approaches) while other schools have emphasized a more practical approach.
InSB exemplifies the latter: a program that combines all aspects of AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) into a single curriculum for both undergraduates and graduates. Founded by Tabitha Ponte and co-founder Arturo Vasquez, the school has an ambitious mission: to offer a truly integrated AEC education that is tuition-free.
It begins with a curriculum which the school has retooled from traditional models. While still under development, the contours of the program it has a definitive approach. For undergraduates, “All students who enter the program, ideally students interested in all facets of AEC, will begin with architectural and structural design and analysis, building systems and sustainability, and will move into practical skills development like documents and administration.” These foundational years are complemented by the last two years which build upon these skills through actual work in firms, as well as investigations that develop students’ own strengths and interests. The goal is to produce professionals who possess the intellectual and practical abilities to solve complex spatial issues. The graduate program is even more self-guided, under three main course areas: “Advanced Human Capital + Team Structures”, “Advanced Project Deliveries + Contracts”, and “Advanced Business Development + Management.” Central to both programs is a mission shaped by a commitment to incorporating AEC into a single educational model rather than continuing the specialized approach seen in schools today. As Ms. Ponte observes, “Significant money is wasted due to this fracture. If it were not this way, not only the project (the Owner) would win, but all parties involved would too. Everybody wins.”
How can the school be tuition-free? That depends upon the core values of the school. which in this case believes in a different approach to tuition’s purpose and its source. Explains Ms. Ponte: “I personally believe tuition is mostly to cover administrative costs and payroll. Yet AEC as an industry is a very powerful and wealthy machine. It moves a lot of capital – most of the GDP in any economy. We intend to tap into this power and wealth to simply displace the economic burden. This means that the education is being paid for in a different way.” What’s more, she continues, “Existing University institution’s cost increases are at about 4.8%, more than double the country’s regular inflation rate -recorded at about 2% in February 2013. We will not increase the costs of the school except maybe at the regular inflation rate to meet general increasing costs.” That said, the school does charge an administrative fee of $1000 per year for undergraduates and $2000 per year for graduates. There is also the Exam fee of $125 and $250, respectively.
Of course, the success of this program will rest on the visionary quality of its students and the faculty. As to the faculty, it is comprised of members from both the Executive and Advisory boards, whose professional and educational experience promise a wide range of perspectives to students. To this will be additional professionals and professors specializing in different areas of AEC. Interestingly, the school will not institute tenure positions for faculty, instead relying on the continued satisfaction of students to determine who continues teaching. Most classes will also be team-taught to provide different practical as well as analytical perspectives.
Sound interesting? The school is now accepting applications for its founding class.
[Full disclosure: David Basulto, founder of ArchDaily, is a member of the Advisory Board]
AD College Guide: InSB, Integrated School of Building originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 19 Apr 2013.
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