Archinect - News

MAD to renovate Shanghai cement warehouse with floating metal ‘ark’

2023-10-27T11:33:00-04:00

MAD Architects has unveiled its design for the renovation and adaptive reuse of an old cement factory in Shanghai. The ‘Wanmicang’ warehouse sits on the south side of the Shanghai Zhangjiang Cement Factory grounds and has been reimagined by MAD as a “three-dimensional hierarchy of time and physical dimensions through the juxtaposition of old and new structures.”

Image credit: MAD Architects

Having ceased production in 2013 after decades as one of Shanghai’s largest cement factories, the site has been the subject of several commissions by architects aiming to preserve and reuse historical buildings while repositioning the site for research, cultural, commercial, and creative uses. Subsequently, MAD’s approach to the Wanmicang warehouse was to preserve the site’s industrial fabric while repurposing the site as a multifunctional public waterfront space holding culture, creativity, commercial, and office functions.

Image credit: MAD Architects

“Industrial heritage is preserved and utilize...

$4.5 million will open Isamu Noguchi’s private studio for the first time

2022-08-23T13:04:00-04:00

A recent $4.5 million capital grant from New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs will open the former studio of legendary sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi to the public for the first time, according to The Art Newspaper.

The 3,200-square-foot, 60-year-old warehouse space is located across the street from the eponymous museum in Long Island City, Queens, and served as his private workshop and pied-à-terre for many years following a move from Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1961.

Noguchi at the museum in 1985. Image © David Finn courtesy of National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC.

The Museum’s Director, Brett Littman, says it was “the center of his artistic practice in New York for nearly three decades.” The space was eventually retrofitted by Noguchi collaborator Yukio Madokoro to include a living room, sleeping area, and kitchen space separated by concrete blocks and fiberglass Shoji screens. Noguchi used the studio until his death in 1988.

Previously on Archinec...

Spec buildings have increasingly become the answer to commercial clients' pandemic growing pains

2022-07-29T18:09:00-04:00

“Historically, spec buildings have been risky, but in a market environment like we are in now, where there is a race to get goods to people faster and to manufacture more things, the flexibility of the spec space becomes an asset, not a liability.”

Biomedical clients are among the most popular movers of the building trend, propelled by demand imbalances for lab space. E-commerce is another common tenant, followed by light manufacturing operations from companies like IBM that leverage high-paying jobs in smaller communities like West Chester, Ohio already targeted by developers for their easier-to-navigate zoning laws.

The rise of inflation, labor shortages, materials costs, and ongoing supply chain lags are seen as both threats and contributors to the trend continuing unabatedly. Marquette University's Andrew Hunt estimated that the average warehouse construction costs 40% more when compared to last year but still thinks the economy is in developers' favor. As he told the Times, "It doesn’t feel like that party will end any time soon."

Amazon's latest warehouse battle has San Francisco lawmakers pushing for a moratorium on similar developments

2022-02-16T13:47:00-05:00

The second most valuable company in the world, Amazon has been gobbling up space throughout the southeast corner of the city, taking advantage of zoning meant to preserve blue-collar jobs in a market in which housing and office space have typically generated higher revenues.

Amazon bought a 510,000-square-foot former sanitation motor pool parcel in the Showplace Square section of the city for $200 million in December of 2020. It has since proposed an expansion of the site’s footprint into an over 725,000-square-foot distribution hub for 400 workers that neighboring tenants, including the diffuse California College of the Arts, say will create a “pedestrian nightmare” of around 2,900 vehicle trips a day.

Now, as a result of the company’s proposal, San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton is seeking legislation that would place an 18-month moratorium on any new parcel delivery services operating in the city. It has already picked up backing from the local Teamsters and UFCW unions. The legislative effort, which the paper sees as another flashpoint in the “war between organized labor and Amazon,” is also backed by more environmentally-minded Prothero Hill and Dogpatch inhabitants, who say the company “has the neighborhoods surrounded” with similar developme...

Amazon warehouses are wreaking havoc in California’s Inland Empire

2021-11-22T19:18:00-05:00

In California’s Inland Empire, dozens of mega-warehouses for Amazon, UPS and other companies are choking the cities with traffic and air pollution. Some argue that the jobs warehouses provide aren’t worth the cost, while others say it’s online shopping that’s the real problem.

Despite the boiler-plate promise of adding jobs to the community, warehouse-laden tracts have been dumping an increasing amount of pollutants into the atmosphere in the form of increased truck and air cargo traffic and propelled in part by a sharp rise in online shopping. Amazon opened its first fulfillment center in San Bernadino in 2012. Today, the company operates more than 30 in the area alone.

Southern California's Inland Empire is one of the most polluted regions in America. One study from the University of California, Riverside revealed an 11% increase in Covid-19 deaths related to the number of particulates in the air. Around 85% of the population that lives within half a mile from a warehouse identify as people of color.

“We’re dealing with smoggy summers that are getting worse and worse,” one Riverside resident told The Guardian in April. “We’re sick of getting alerts that say avoid being outside because of dirty air. This is not normal.”

...

Amazon to add 1,000 new warehouses throughout U.S.

2020-10-01T13:02:00-04:00

Amazon.com Inc. plans to open 1,000 small delivery hubs in cities and suburbs all over the U.S., according to people familiar with the plans. The facilities, which will eventually number about 1,500, will bring products closer to customers, making shopping online about as fast as a quick run to the store. It will also help the world’s largest e-commerce company take on a resurgent Walmart Inc.

Marc Wulfrat, president of the logistics consulting firm MWPVL International Inc estimates Amazon will deliver 67% of its own packages this year and soon increase to 85%, Bloomberg reports. "In just a few years, Amazon has built its own UPS," Wulfrat continued.

How vertical urban warehouses made a comeback in the age of high-speed logistics

2019-12-26T19:44:00-05:00

As the decade draws to a close, it might be worth considering one overlooked ten-year anniversary: In October 2009, the e-commerce giant Amazon introduced same-day delivery service. [...] Amidst these transformations, one long-standing building typology has found itself again at the cutting edge of commerce: the vertical urban warehouse.

Architectural critic, curator, and educator Nina Rappaport penned an insightful Urban Omnibus essay on the revived vertical urban warehouse typology — and the physical infrastructure that surrounds these facilities — in the age of online retail and instant gratification.

"New York City’s abundant warehouses are becoming key nodes in the granular networks of the on-demand economy," Rappaport writes. "Following decades of decline and retrofitting for other uses, they’re returning to prominence in the city’s logistical landscape. Beyond renovation, developers are building new warehouses along the city’s key transportation corridors."

Amazon to re-program human workforce

2019-07-11T16:42:00-04:00

Amazon has increasingly turned to robots and automation technology to fetch products from the shelves of its warehouses to ship to customers. Now the company says it needs to help its workers adapt to the rapid change. The e-commerce giant said on Thursday that it planned to spend $700 million to retrain a third of its workers in the United States, an acknowledgment that advances in technology are remaking the role of workers in nearly every industry.

Amazon is planning to spend $700 million over the next five years retraining 100,000 human workers to help smooth a transition toward greater automation in its operations.

“When automation comes in, it changes the nature of work but there are still pieces of work that will be done by people,” Ardine Williams, Amazon’s vice president of people operations, told The New York Times. She added, “You have the opportunity to up-skill that population so they can, for example, work with the robots.”

The retraining effort, according to The New York Times, will include software engineering classes, part of the company's plan to fill a growing need for data mapping specialists, data scientists, security engineers, and logistics coordinators.

Are there other ways to imagine sculpture's relationship to architecture?

2019-01-31T18:36:00-05:00

We’re used to images of nature reclaiming abandoned buildings – but artists Filthy Luker and Pedro Estrellas have put a playful twist on this concept. They’ve erected a giant sea monster that appears to burst through an abandoned warehouse in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard.

The relationship between public sculpture and architecture has been the subject of sharp criticism among architects. James Wines of SITE famously referred to most of what the sculptures typically installed in building plazas as "plop art," suggesting that they rarely contribute to the architecture on their sites but rather carelessly sit in front of them. Rachel Whiteread, a British sculptor, has taken on the same criticism, suggesting that much of the public art in her native London is “ill thought-out and put in places that it shouldn’t necessarily be.”

While Wines, Whiteread and other designers of the built environment continue to search for ways to integrate sculpture into architecture, Group X may have found a bold way forward. The anonymous art collective produced ‘Sea Monsters HERE,’ made up of 20 tentacles, each around 40 feet long, bursting through an abandoned warehouse’s steel skin and windows in Philadelphia's Navy Yard.

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MIT School of Architecture to move into Diller Scofidio + Renfro-renovated warehouse

2018-12-15T13:15:00-05:00

“A project of this scale and complexity, which demands a design sensibility informed by both art and technology — along with a deep understanding of architecture education as well as the role of public space — is made for a firm like DS+R,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning.

The MIT school of architecture, which has long been dispersed across the campus, will soon have a central base in a large brick warehouse across the street on Massachusetts Avenue. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the New York-based architecture firm responsible for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and Moscow's Zaryadye Park, have recently been announced as the project leader for the renovation of Met Warehouse.

DS+R's Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Image: Boston Magazine.

According to the MIT News, "the proposed renovations would preserve the structure’s distinctive external features and create 200,000 square feet of state-of-the-art interior spaces including classrooms, studios, workshops, galleries, and an auditorium." The conceptual design work has yet to be developed.

A 1950's replica town in San Diego aids patients with memory therapy

2018-09-17T14:12:00-04:00

On August 13, a brand-new town in Southern California welcomed its first residents [...] on a light-industrial stretch of Main Street in Chula Vista, a San Diego suburb. Then they emerged in Town Square®—a 9,000-square-foot working replica of a 1950s downtown, built and operated by the George G. Glenner Alzheimer’s Family Centers. Unlike the businesses around it hawking restaurant supplies and tires, Town Square trades in an intangible good: memories.

The new 50's replica town in San Diego is the largest US investment in reminiscence therapy for dementia and age-related cognitive impaired patients. The industrial warehouse has been transformed into a fake town of 14 storefronts complete with a diner, a movie theater, a pet store, a park-like square, and a city hall. Patients are aided in therapy by props from the years between 1953 and 1961. Several other locations are forthcoming, the next planned for a former Rite Aid in Baltimore.

Amazon's patent for "Aquatic Storage Facilities" could turn lakes into underwater warehouses

2017-07-13T15:53:00-04:00

American e-commerce giant Amazon has filed a patent with the US patents office for a system for storing and retrieving goods in an underwater facility. When an item is ordered for delivery, a sonic signal is transmitted from a buoy to the warehouse, which activates an air canister that inflates a balloon, allowing the chosen product to float to the surface where it would be dispatched to the customer.

Just last month, Amazon made headlines when it filed a patent for a drone tower design, essentially a multi-level fulfillment center for unmanned aerial vehicles in densely populated areas.

Now a recent Amazon patent for "Aquatic Storage Facilities" has surfaced, allowing us a glimpse into the engineers' quest to overcome limitations in storage capabilities, tackle inefficient use of space in vast fulfillment centers, and eliminate the extremely long distances staff members or robots have to cover when fulfilling orders.

United States Patent Office

"Because today's online marketplaces offer a wide variety of items to customers [...]," the patent description explains, "fulfillment centers now include increasingly large and complex facilities having expansive capabilities and high-technology accommodations for items, and feature storage areas as large as one million square feet or more. Therefore, in order to prepare and ship an order that includes a large number or different types o...

Marijuana Real Estate: This isn't just another greenhouse

2017-05-21T23:57:00-04:00

Innovative Industrial Properties, Kalyx and other similar groups are following the same strategy: buy buildings, retrofit them and lease them to commercial or medical marijuana growers. But it can often cost millions to turn a vacant warehouse into a facility suitable for cannabis cultivation.

David Gelles reports that the spread of legalization means the weed business is booming and with it, demand for commercial, industrial space. The latest post-industrial trend in states like California, Colorado, Massachusetts or even New York is a retrofitted industrial-scale "cultivation center."

photo by Ryan Mungia

Related readings include; a 2005 look at how Pot Clinics (were) Grow(ing) Like Weed in SF and last year's photo essay of L.A.'s "Green Mile." Or back in February, the Marketplace Morning Report on how these new REITs could help grow the medical-marijuana business.

photo by Ryan Mungia

Finally, last year over at the Weed thread, gruen noted "Big gold rush here to convert disused industrial facilities to indoor grow in advance of legislation."

Atelier Bow-Wow helps design Honolulu's first "indoor park" pavilion

2014-02-12T14:30:00-05:00

Interisland Terminal from Honolulu is on a mission to show the creative potential of their city's neighborhood with their latest endeavor known as Kaka'ako Agora. Located in the neighborhood of Kaka'ako, the project is an empty warehouse-turned-community space designed and planned in collaboration with Japanese architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow.

Surrounded by plenty of local outdoor parks, Kaka'ako Agora will be the first "indoor park" for the Honolulu neighborhood. Once complete, the new space will serve as a local gathering area for various public programs, educational use, and other community-driven purposes.

Interisland Terminal recently launched a Kickstarter with a $15,000 goal to partially raise funds to purchase building materials for the pavilion's final pieces. The Kickstarter closes on Sunday evening, March 16.

For more details on Kaka'ako, click here.

domæn ltd.'s NAN hints at Orange County's potential for more innovative design

2014-01-16T19:11:00-05:00

domæn ltd.'s remodel project "NAN" reminds us that an ordinary industrial warehouse is always full of refreshing design possibilities. Located on 1907 Nancita Circle in Placentia, CA, NAN shows off domæn's signature sharp lines and black-and-white color schemes that give the structure an edge over the area's numerous warehouses and the generally lackluster landscape of Orange County.

On the other hand, in addition to being a recent example of adaptive reuse, remodeling projects like NAN could be another sign of potential growth for the city of Placentia and its neighboring cities, which have been aiming towards economic revival in the past decade.

Below are more details to NAN that the architects shared with us:

"The NAN project seizes the opportunity to play on typical office configurations, and offers a lofty, industrial appearance. The exterior treatment follows the interior logic, taking advantage of the precast concrete facade and playing with contrasting textural qualitie...

A Minneapolis Warehouse Reborn as Artist-style Chiropractic Office

2012-05-24T16:04:00-04:00

"Beauty is not an additive act but rather a coherent aesthetic. Anything else would be irrelevant. We have been advocating a total and integral environment for both physical and mental wellbeing, in other words, a healthy environment must work on all levels." - Ali Heshmati, '92 graduate from the School of Architecture at College of Design

Darin Duch, Associate Intern Architect at Laboratory for Environments, Architecture, and Design (LEAD, Inc.), and Ali Heshmati, owner of LEAD Inc., recently completed work on Ambiente Gallerie, a new artist-style chiropractic office located in Northeast Minneapolis. Duch and Heshmati both graduated from the School of Architecture in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota.

The project was designed for Dr. Kari Boudreau, who wanted to integrate art and design into a healing space for her business, formerly Art of Chiropractic. The 1910 warehouse has an open space flanked with exposed brick walls decked with original paintings, floating cloud lighting, and sheer fabric convertible rooms that resemble ultra modern pods. The massage and exam rooms utilize curved, boomerang pivot doors, "Duchamp doors" covered with a translucent skin of fiberglass that offer privacy without feeling confined.

"Beauty is not an additive act but rather a coherent aesthetic. Anything else...