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Earlier this month, developer Townscape Partners and Gehry Partners presented an unsolicited plan to the Beverly Hills City Council to build a huge mixed-use campus that would include hip office space, a five-star hotel, retail, and a three-acre public park on about seven acres of land...the council is expected to approve an agreement at their meeting tonight that should help this unexpected and enormous project take a big step forward. — Curbed
You can find the full project staff report here.More recent news about Frank Gehry:Mayor Eric Garcetti on Frank Gehry's plans for the LA River: "a cooperative, collaborative, regional approach"Frank Gehry is the first architect to be awarded the Harvard Arts MedalFrank Gehry and Maya Lin find... View full entry
3 Sutton Place, a planned 950-foot-tall, 68-story Manhattan condo tower, won’t be materializing along the East River. After defaulting on $128.8 million in loans from lender Gamma Real Estate, developer Bauhouse Group‘s site at 426-432 East 58th Street will face foreclosure sale February 29th.
The site currently houses three contiguous five-story apartment buildings, which Bauhouse purchased to make way for the massive Foster + Partners-designed midtown skyscraper project.
— BuzzBuzzHome
Interested in other articles about Foster and Partners? Check out some of our past coverage:Masdar abandons its dream of becoming the first zero-carbon cityNorton Museum of Art breaks ground on Foster + Partners-designed expansion projectThe selective amnesia of Foster + Partners' Maspero Triangle... View full entry
Three Taiwanese construction company executives have been detained on charges of professional negligence resulting in death following the collapse of an apartment building that killed dozens.
The district prosecutor's office in the city of Tainan said [...] that Lin Ming-hui and architects Chang Kui-an and Cheng Chin-kui were suspected of having overseen shoddy construction of the 17-story Weiguan Golden Dragon building, which crashed onto its side following an earthquake Saturday.
— america.aljazeera.com
Previously in the Archinect news: Taiwan earthquake: tin cans found as fillers may have caused high-rise to collapse View full entry
The proposed Fourth and Columbia Tower...would be a mixed-use office and residential tower rising up 1,111 feet above the street. It would be 101 stories, with two levels of retail shopping, four levels of above-grade parking, and six levels of office space. It would also play home to 350 hotel rooms, and 1,200 residential units...But being the tallest could be something [developer] Crescent Heights may not want to give up. — KOMO News
Previously on Archinect:Proposed Seattle Tower, designed by LMN Architects, could become the West Coast's tallest View full entry
“There are a lot of people working in architecture who are very frustrated with what’s happening, but feel like they don’t have a voice to speak out,” said Sarah, another of Concrete Action’s co-founders, who also wished to remain anonymous. “We’re hoping that this is going to give them an avenue to do that without worrying about losing their jobs or getting into trouble.” — Vice
Architects who are dismayed by working on projects that tend to harm, not improve, the neighborhoods in which they are sited now have a secure whistleblowing option: U.K.-based Concrete Action allows architects to anonymously submit rent-inflating building plans to the public. The site, which... View full entry
Seen exclusively by the Guardian, the document sheds new light on why so little affordable housing is being built across England; why planning policy consistently fails to be enforced; and why property developers are now enjoying profits that exceed even those of the pre-crash housing bubble. — theguardian.com
And the affordable housing crisis is certainly not restricted to the greater London area as many recent headlines on Archinect show:No room for affordable housing in SF? Build it in Oakland"We've got enough millionaires": George Lucas wants to build affordable housing on his own landDevelopers in... View full entry
Often, at least in America, we think of regular people as the agents of change—the artist, the boutique coffee shop owner, the tech startup. But as much as gentrification is an organic process, fueled by opportunity seekers and bargain hunters, it’s developers and financiers who have become the savvy midwives of change. Once they detect the early signs of gentrification, they bring on the serious money. — Quartz
More:"Eco-Gentrification," or the social ramifications of "urban greening"Revisiting Sharon Zukin's "Loft Living" and NYC gentrificationWith gentrification, the end of racial segregation moves into LA's Highland Park neighborhoodAmsterdam's "ugly" architecture from the 70s proves resilient against... View full entry
the System-Built developer may indeed have constructed this home without Wright’s knowledge — Urban Milwaukee
Alas, some thing never change. View full entry
"There's actually such a lack of transparency that it is difficult to understand what developers and property owners are actually planning ... There's no mechanism for us or the city for us to understand ahead of time what's in the planning" [...]
The board ultimately wants Mayor Bill de Blasio to take steps to create more comprehensive zoning laws that would assess the impact of large towers on open space and mitigate any potential impacts, like shadows on Central Park.
— wnyc.org
Listen to the full report from WYNC below: View full entry
There are ways to bring elegance to 5 over 1 structures, but it requires a high degree of skill and commitment. Only a very talented designer can take such a limited palette of materials and make the resulting building interesting, if not elegant. But developers must be willing to hire those skilled designers. Many are simply not interested. [...] Hence, the wildly uneven — and often uninspiring — architecture in Seattle today. — crosscut.com
Similar tenor in other booming parts of the nation:Blair Kamin not impressed by Chicago's latest housing developmentsJeff Sheppard calls downtown Denver's new housing developments "meaningless, uninspiring" View full entry
This would be the first U.S. tower for Snøhetta, founded in Norway but on the rise in the United States since being selected in 2004 to design the pavilion for the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum.
Snøhetta will replace an even better-known architect for the corner: Richard Meier, the Pritzker Prize-winning designer of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, whose firm has been working on a tower in the same location since 2008.
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The site in question is directly adjacent the Civic Center's metro stop on Market St., and a large part of the developer's plans revolve around shifting this existing stop one block north, to avoid (in the SFGate author's words) the "squalid even by neighborhood standards" area. The residential... View full entry
RFR plans to spend $250 million on Manhattan land purchases, up to $500 million on office building deals and $100 million to $150 million more on retailing properties — all before the end of the year. [...]
Perhaps the most under-the-radar purchase was 190 Bowery... Developers have been trying for years to buy the six-story Renaissance Revival structure, which appears abandoned, with blocked-off doorways, boarded-up windows and graffiti covering nearly all of the lower facade.
— nytimes.com
For some more context on 190 Bowery, check out Wendy Goodman's 2008 profile of the family living there. View full entry
Conditions that have been agreed are relentlessly renegotiated at reserved matters stage. Good architects are employed to win outline planning, then ditched for a cheaper alternative; high-quality materials are substituted for flimsy plastic panels – all in the name of viability. — the guardian
The song remains the same, and you know your favorite Pritzker Prize'rs are involved in them.It is usually the floodgate scheme; “Once an outline permission is granted, it makes it very difficult for us to refuse a scheme further down the line,” says one officer. In Stratford... View full entry
current conventional wisdom embraces density, sky-high scrapers, vastly expanded mass transit and ever-smaller apartments. It reflects a desire to create an ideal locale for hipsters and older, sophisticated urban dwellers. [...]
Overlooked, or even disdained, is what most middle-class residents of the metropolis actually want: home ownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools and “human scale” neighborhoods.
— washingtonpost.com
In recent years developers putting up a forest of residential towers have been accused of turning the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront into Miami-on-the-East-River. With his new plan for the 11-acre Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg officially unveiled on Sunday, Jed Walentas has crafted something that might better be described as Dubai-on-the-East-River. — Crain's
Audacious new waterfront development designed by SHoP unveiled in Brooklyn. Transforms derelict Domino Sugar refinery into 24/7 community with designs the likes of which New York has never seen. View full entry