Archinect - News

Bjarke Ingels and Robert de Niro preview Wildflower Studios project in Queens

2024-09-26T11:11:00-04:00

“Cinema is probably the art form most similar to architecture,” [Ingels] says, in that both require “armies of people” to bring singular visions to life.

BIG’s 765,000-square-foot design is equipped with 11 sound stages is one of a pair the firm has designed in the New York area. De Niro is one of several celebrity clients to have worked with the mainstream media darling, including fellow Dane Lars von Trier.

Adam Gordon is the developer behind the Wildflower Studios project. He says: "Some of the most talented creative artists have been spending large parts of their career working in completely dehumanizing spaces. And I thought, 'van Gogh painted in Arles, right? Picasso lived in the South of France.' And that’s the spirit of the creative process [...] It’s having beautiful circumstances that make you feel like making art."

Four contemporary Los Angeles media studios by Relativity Architects: Your Next Employer?

2023-03-21T11:00:00-04:00

Following last week’s visit to New York City-based Workshop/APD, we are moving our Meet Your Next Employer series to Los Angeles this week where we meet Relativity Architects.

Founded in 2013 by Tima Bell and Scott Sullivan, the practice now operates offices across Los Angeles, Colorado, and Spain. With a stated ambition of “materializing inventive solutions into influential, evocative, and functional design projects,” the studio has built a diverse portfolio from residential and commercial to institutional and creative studios.

Over on Archinect Jobs, the firm is currently hiring for several positions across their Los Angeles office. For candidates interested in applying for a position, or anybody interested in learning more about the studio’s work, we have rounded up five media and technology studios by Relatively Architects that exemplify their pursuit of “culturally relative architecture.”

Capture Studio

For their Capture Studio project, Relativity Architects remodeled an existi...

BIG's Wildflower Studios project tops out in Queens

2023-02-28T18:06:00-05:00

Last week marked the topping out ceremony for BIG’s new $600 million Wildflower Studios venture in Astoria, Queens.

Backed by actor Robert De Niro, the project transformed the famous site of the former five-acre Steinway Pianos warehouse into a seven-story and 760,000-square-foot comprehensive multimedia production facility clad in two-toned pre-cast concrete.

It is the first of two film studios now planned for BIG in the New York area, preceding a newly-announced $400 million “vertical village” design to be constructed in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Image credit: SYNOSIS

“The vertical media production village will be home to storytellers working across all mediums — a three-dimensional hub of collaboration, creativity, and innovation,” Ingels said at the project’s announcement last year. “While New York City is no stranger to being the star of many visual stories — the city effectively a character in itself — this first ground-up vertical production stage complex marks a new chapter in the ...

'Hollywood of the Midwest': $100 million media campus in Chicago's South Side breaks ground

2023-02-14T15:42:00-05:00

The City of Chicago and Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot are celebrating the groundbreaking of a 380,000-square-foot, seven-acre enclosed media campus and sound stage development in the heart of the city’s South Side. Called the Regal Mile Studios Campus 1, the privately funded project is sponsored by investment bank Loop Capital, which supports Mayor Lightfoot’s INVEST South/West investment initiative.

The $100 million development is located in the Stony Island neighborhood and intends to reimagine the pre-existing Regal Theater and 79th Street Corridor, with designs led by Chicago-based practice Bauer Latoza Studio. The scheme will include three film studios, office space, staging areas, and adequate parking space. All of these components will be divided across three areas within a triangular site. The studio will feature a central internal portion that will act as an open flex space for staging and staff access.

Aerial view of the project site. Image: Bauer Latoza Studio

The project’s eq...

BIG designs film studio as ‘dynamic vertical village’ on the Brooklyn waterfront

2023-02-03T10:58:00-05:00

Bjarke Ingels Group has designed a new movie studio to be constructed along the Brooklyn waterfront. Commissioned by production company Samson Stages, the Red Hook Studio is imagined as a “dynamic vertical village, where the building structure is created from the stacking of eight stacked stages.”

Image credit: Samson Stages

The 330,000-square-foot building is projected to cost $400 million to deliver and will include green terraces, parking, and a new public park. Internally, the building will feature a cafe alongside the eight stacked stages.

The Brooklyn studios project is separate from the BIG-designed Wildflower Studios development currently under construction in nearby Queens. Designed for the Robert De Niro-led Wildflower Development Group, the Queens project shares Red Hook’s approach of a vertical film studio, with two levels of sound stages.

Image credit: Samson Stages

News of the studio comes weeks after BIG and Safdie completed a jagged new tower in Quito, Ecuador, as well...

RIOS continues to cultivate the film studio market with a new $600 million Hollywood expansion project

2022-10-10T18:18:00-04:00

RIOS has just been announced as the architects of a new $600 million television studio project in Hollywood, California.

The studio will look to expand on its other ongoing television production projects in the delivery of its latest venture, which is set to transform the former corporate headquarters of the early TV pioneers Technicolor on 6311 W. Romaine Street into a comprehensive studio campus for developers BARDAS and Bain Capital Real Estate.

Image courtesy RIOS

The 620,000-square-foot Echelon at Television Center involves the restoration of two existing Art Deco structures and the addition of two new six-story office towers on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard on a two-block site that also includes multiple sound stages, a “basecamp,” and a new public restaurant.

Image courtesy RIOS

The rise of streaming services has meant an increase in demand for technologically-advanced studio and production spaces around the Los Angeles area. RIOS has already begun the planning process f...

Grimshaw will deliver a new production studio campus to Downtown LA's Arts District

2022-08-29T12:14:00-04:00

Grimshaw has revealed its design for a new 16-studio production campus to be located in Downtown LA’s Arts District.

The project will transform a disused 15-acre industrial site that was recently purchased by East End Studios. According to Urbanize LA, the site will also include four office buildings totaling 292,000 square feet, another 106,000 square feet of production spaces in addition to the total 321,000 square feet of studios, and below-ground parking that will allow for 1,327 vehicles daily. In addition to Grimshaw, Studio-MLA has been attached to provide a landscaped connection to the intersection of 6th and Alameda streets, with a new open public space sited along Mill Street to the eastern side of the new “campus on top” studios.

Image courtesy Grimshaw

“By taking a vertical approach to the campus design, we free up valuable land area for larger studios and base camps while also creating better pedestrian and vehicular circulation between the soundstages and creative work...

BIG designs $600M film studio with Robert De Niro in Queens, New York

2022-02-15T12:24:00-05:00

Bjarke Ingels Group’s Wildflower Studios has been given the green light for construction in Queens, New York. Designed for the Robert De Niro-led Wildflower Development Group, the new seven-story building will contain a vertical commercial film, television, and creative studio.

Located in Astoria, Queens adjacent to the manufacturing warehouse of the highly-prized Steinway Pianos, the 775,000-square-foot complex will contain 11 main stages, supported by production areas, open and private offices, a fitness room, cafes, and lounges. Externally, the five-acre former industrial plot will contain 310 off-street parking spaces and a waterfront public realm.

Image credit: SYNOSIS

The stages within the building measure 18,000 square feet, with dimensions 150 feet long, 120 feet wide, and 60 feet high. Due to the site’s limited area but generous height allowances, the internal program has been arranged as a vertical film studio with two levels of sound stages, which the team believes to ...

Daniel Libeskind designs a new mixed-use complex at the heart of Germany’s film industry

2021-11-16T15:11:00-05:00

Following up on recent superlative creations in Poland, Kenya, and Chile, Studio Daniel Libeskind is back with a proposed design that would bring a new media arts complex to the German city of Potsdam, just south of Berlin.

Developer Jan Kretzschmar tapped the firm to create a filmmaking-inspired five-building program in what has been considered the epicenter of the German entertainment industry.

Per the architect: “The design concept is focused on creating human-scaled buildings that encourage community and flexible office and public spaces throughout. The design proposes a 66-meter-high (217 feet) circular office tower that anchors four lower-rise arc buildings of 44 and 22 meters. The lower, wider buildings are to be built at the front of the street, with the higher tower set back from the street creating more open space.”

Image © Studio Daniel Libeskind

Spread out across an unused 94,000-square-meter (about 1 million square feet) site in the historic Babelsberg district of Potsd...

MVRDV unveils plans for a revamped BUFA campus in Berlin

2021-11-12T17:55:00-05:00

Plans are moving forward for a “low-tech transformation” of West Berlin’s storied film and television studios Berliner Union Film Ateliers (BUFA) called Atelier Gardens from London-based developer Fabrix and MVRDV.

Approval has been granted for a six-acre adaptive reuse project at the southern edge of the former Tempelhof Airport in the merged borough of Tempelhof-Schöneberg.

Image: © MVRDV

The comprehensive master plan will repurpose two of the site’s existing 20th-century structures into a center for social justice activism surrounded by a radically re-greened campus courtesy of British landscape designers Harris Bugg.

Image: © MVRDV

Studio 1, a 100-year-old building that has served as the set for several different important films, including Bob Fosse’s Oscar-winning 1972 classic Cabaret, will get a colorful curtain-clad makeover in addition to a new skylight and other “sensitive” interventions making the 7,000-square-foot facility a vibrant space for film screening, meetings, an...

Work begins on Gehry-designed Warner Bros. 'Floating Icebergs' expansion

2019-10-09T13:47:00-04:00

A large dirt pit has emerged at the back of The Burbank Studios lot, as work begins for a Frank Gehry-designed office complex which will be occupied by Warner Bros. [...] Two mid-rise buildings -standing seven and nine stories in height- will overlook the 134 Freeway, providing 800,000 square feet of office space.

Called Second Century Project, the large-scale office development in Burbank, California first appeared on Archinect in April this year.

The complex of buildings, designed to appear as "icebergs floating along the freeway," is scheduled to be fully functional in 2023 to coincide with Warner Bros.'s 100th anniversary.

Rendering: Sora, image courtesy of Gehry Partners, LLP.

Robert de Niro taps Bjarke Ingels to design $400M ‘vertical village for film’ in Astoria

2019-09-20T11:14:00-04:00

The star power involved with Robert de Niro’s planned production studio in Astoria, Queens continues to grow. The development group has just revealed a first look at the 650,000-square-foot facility designed by Bjarke Ingels Group. The $400 million project, called Wildflower Studios, will establish a hub for the creation of film, television, and other forms of entertainment, including augmented reality and virtual reality. The facility is expected to create more than 1,000 daily union jobs.

Renderings courtesy of Bjarke Ingels Group and Wildflower Ltd.

Frank Gehry to design new Warner Bros. HQ towers

2019-04-26T14:21:00-04:00

Warner Bros. has sweeping plans to expand its Burbank headquarters by acquiring a nearby studio complex and moving into two Frank Gehry-designed office towers fashioned to look like icebergs floating alongside the 134 Freeway.

Rendering: Sora, image courtesy of Gehry Partners, LLP.

"Once upon a time, Hollywood Studios had an important architectural presence in the city—they were like monuments to the movie-making process," the LA Times quotes Frank Gehry saying. "With this project, I was trying to recapture that feeling of old Hollywood splendor."

Rendering: Sora, image courtesy of Gehry Partners, LLP.

The new office towers are scheduled to break ground later this year.