Archinect - News

Field Operations will lead new Fifth Avenue pedestrian corridor redesign in Manhattan

2023-10-13T17:18:00-04:00

Field Operations has announced its participation as the design lead for a new public space and pedestrianization project that will affect a large swath of Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.

The new “Future of Fifth” project, announced by New York Mayor Eric Adams this week, will permanently reimagine the area between Bryant Park and Central Park South based on an 11-block pilot that last year added $3 million in revenue to local businesses, according to a study performed by Mastercard.

Field Operations will be joined on the project by Arcadis, Sam Schwartz, Public Works Partners, and a number of other design and engineering firms, seven of which are either minority- or women-owned business enterprises. It is seen as an extension of the city’s Open Streets program that was targeted at local businesses’ recoveries after the pandemic and builds on a larger $375 million investment in public space outlined in Adams’ “Working People's Agenda” from earlier this year.

Together, the firms wi...

Four design teams shortlisted for former KKK site reclamation project in Texas

2023-10-11T17:51:00-04:00

A four-finalist shortlist for Transform 1012 N. Main Street’s adaptive reuse and racial equity project has been announced as part of a multiphase selection process that will eventually deliver the new Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing to Fort Worth, Texas.

The chance at redesigning what was once the Ku Klux Klan Klavern No. 101 Auditorium will fall on a proposal that best expresses and reflects the group’s reclamatory mission while “[prioritizing] community, equity, and collective healing in the design of the space” above all other considerations of site and material.

“The exceptional quality of the submissions prompted us to expand the initially envisioned shortlist from three to four teams and to extend our selection deadline for a few days,” Ben Crawford, the Chair of Transform 1012’s Design Architect Selection Committee, added. “We are thrilled to welcome these architects to Fort Worth to see how they could be a partner in reimagining the processes for enacting th...

Is your city running out of space? Hong Kong says: Just build more land

2019-07-25T07:23:00-04:00

Under the ambitious “Lantau Tomorrow” plan, Hong Kong will first build a roughly 2,500-acre island—roughly the size of 1,000 football fields—around the uninhabited Kau Yi Chau Island to the northeast of Lantau. This may be followed by an additional 1,700 additional acres of land reclamation around the island Hei Ling Chau, which is roughly two miles from Mui Wo and visible from its shoreline.

CityLab reports that under a new aggressive urban growth plan, Hong Kong will create a pair of new islands totaling over 3,200 acres in area in order to create new high-density urban neighborhoods.

Record-breaking affordability issues on the island have pushed wait times for public housing passed the half-decade mark, while by certain estimates, CityLab reports, the average Hong Konger must wait 25 years to be able to afford to purchase an apartment in what is currently the world's most expensive real estate market.

Under the Lantau Tomorrow plan, CityLab reports, the city could provide between 150,000 and 260,000 new housing units with up to 70-percent of those homes earmarked as public housing.

As Singapore grows from the sea, its heritage continues to shrink

2018-03-12T14:38:00-04:00

Short on space, the city-state has since its independence been reclaiming land to build the nation and to rewrite 'unhygienic' episodes of its history.

In his essay for Failed Architecture, William Jamieson, a PhD candidate in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, takes a look at Singapore's monumental land reclamation efforts since 1965, the ecological, urban, and cultural implications, and the inevitable erasing of heritage.

"Singapore sees itself as chronically undersized," Jamieson writes. "It imagines itself as a larger country, and works backwards: materialising the necessary geographical puzzle pieces to suit the demands of the global economy as much as to satiate its own needs. Space is not merely flexible, but hypothetical."

Sand/geo-politics, land reclamation, "sand wars" and secular(ism)

2015-01-26T19:30:00-05:00

To make matters more turbid, the nightmare of coastal reclamation occupies an imaginary and regulatory space created by several misunderstandings about territory itself. These become urgent against both the backdrop of our “oceanic” moment and the apparent dissolution of that idyll of 19th- and 20th-century geopolitical thought, the grounded state.

Joshua Comaroff writes about contemporary sand/geo-politics, land reclamation, "sand wars" and secular(ism).

Flaunting foam and function in An Insulation Installation at Makeshift Society Brooklyn

2014-07-18T18:40:00-04:00

From preventing drafts and keeping moisture out of walls, to being used as inexpensive material for crafting 3D models, rigid insulation foam is a familiar friend to many architects and designers during the creative process. But what to do with all those scraps?

Designers Elisa Werbler and Lucy Knops of The Foam Agency (TFA) are inviting architects and designers around the Brooklyn community to send their foam scraps to be permanently showcased in An Insulation Installation at the Makeshift Society's newest location in Brooklyn.

The installation reclaims the foam back to their original place in a transparent wall, while also sharing the back-stories of the collected foam pieces that'll add a collaborative vibe to the Makeshift space.

Werbler and Knops -- who are both product design grad students at New York's School of Visual Arts and are doing their summer residency at Makeshift -- established The Foam Agency this year to celebrate the foam and its purpose in the creative process.

TFA'...

Twitter installs 19th century log cabins in San Francisco HQ

2014-03-03T15:12:00-05:00

In keeping with the designer's forest-themed interior motif, a pair of homesteader cabins from the late 1800s are being installed in Twitter's new digs in the historic Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, a 1937 art deco landmark on Market Street. [...] In this spirit of reuse and reclamation, Lundberg saw the cabins as a novel way of breaking up the wide open spaces of a gutted floor in the old furniture mart that will become a casual dining area.

Taking architectural anachronism to a whole new level, Twitter turns the open-plan office on its head by installing original one-room wood cabins from Montana as lunching spaces. Designers for Twitter's offices feel the choice is coherent with the company values of reuse and reclamation, while also strengthening the brand's bird imagery as related to the forest/nature.

What's left behind is the sour sense of irony coating such a move. In a city fuming with affordable housing and gentrification disputes, it's a bit hilarious for Twitter to insert original homesteading-iconography into its own HQ.

Editor's Picks #291

2012-11-27T01:06:00-05:00

In the latest edition of the Showcase series, Archinect highlighted House in Moreira, by Phyd Arquitectura. The house has "Patios that enable continuity between different spaces of the house and interior/exterior which behave like a sun clock, alternating solid and diffuse light". Thayer-D questioned "What's with conceptual purity at the expense of function and maybe joy?" but Vile Child chimed in "seems SupraJoyful to me"

With the latest edition of the Showcase series, Archinect highlighted House in Moreira, by Phyd Arquitectura. The house has "Patios that enable continuity between different spaces of the house and interior/exterior which behave like a sun clock, alternating solid and diffuse light".

Thayer-D questioned "What's with conceptual purity at the expense of function and maybe joy?" but Vile Child chimed in "seems SupraJoyful to me. But I like form and space and mass and light and how the colors outside reflect on the white walls. Shit like that".

Plus, Jaakko van ‘t Spijker reported in from the first findings of a studio in the Harvard GSD program, dealing with ‘the Elements of Architecture’. Which were publicly presented in a packed Dependance at the Schieblock in Rotterdam on Friday night, November 16th. The feature led glass to comment "I find OMA creates some of today's most compelling architecture using standard off-the-shelf parts in unique and exhilarating ways.... Do...