Archinect - News

Are ‘work resorts’ an answer to rising office vacancy rates?

2024-09-17T07:00:00-04:00

In an Archinect feature article published last month, we unpacked the residual impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on office design. As our recent business survey found, a decline in demand for new office space post-pandemic is one of several factors currently feeding a turbulent economic landscape for architects, alongside headline forces such as interest rates and inflation.

As our feature article noted, 20% of U.S. workers are believed to be currently working on either a remote or hybrid work schedule. Meanwhile, industry studies posit that 50% of large international firms expect to reduce their existing office space over the next three years, while U.S. office vacancy rates sit at 20% and approximately 2 billion square feet of U.S. office space is underutilized.

Related on Archinect: The Pandemic Is History, but for Architects, Its Impact on Office Design Remains. Image: Aaron Thompson

Amid the warning signs for architects specializing in the design and delivery of new office space, ...

In the face of post-pandemic habits, U.S. cities turn to vernacular design traditions for answers

2024-09-12T07:00:00-04:00

Gone are the days when the easiest way to make an architectural splash was with a shimmering and photogenic stand-alone building, fancy forms torquing this way and that. Along with exploring new takes on regional or vernacular design traditions, the field’s top talents are taking on projects that reimagine existing institutions or public spaces — or forge new links among them.

In a new piece for The New York Times, Yale School of Architecture senior critic Christopher Hawthorne explores how architects are striving to rejuvenate downtown areas across the U.S., where hybrid work schedules and negative perceptions have led to reduced vibrancy.

While converting commercial buildings into residential spaces is a popular strategy, it's not always feasible due to structural constraints, Hawthorne argues. Architects are therefore exploring strategies to entice activity downtown by reimagining existing structures and incorporating regional aesthetics.

Related on Archinect: Foster + Partners' Three Transamerica redesign wins approval in San Francisco. Image credit: dbox, courtesy of Foster + Partners/SHVO

Throughout the New York Times piece, Hawthorne cites examples such as the Seattle Aquarium's Ocean Pavilion by LMN Architects which reconnects the city to its waterfront, the revitalized Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco by Foster + Partners aimed at attracting ...

MoMA exhibition on 20th-century Latin American design is a 'gem' says Michael Kimmelman

2024-04-05T13:31:00-04:00

The show is a gem. It focuses on domestic design from six countries (Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela), produced between 1940 and 1980. Latin America had entered a period of transformation, industrial expansion and creativity. Across the region, design was becoming institutionalized as a profession, opening up new avenues, especially for women.

Critic Michael Kimmelman has heaped praise on the 'Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980' MoMA exhibition in a new piece for The New York Times. As we reported in December of last year, the show looks at the growth of modernism through an industrial and entrepreneurial lens, using a selection of examples from well-known and revered architects and designers such as Joaquim Tenreiro, Lina Bo Bardi, and Oscar Niemeyer.

"The role that women and immigrants played in shaping professional design and developing a national design vocabulary in Latin America will be emphasized, including the work of designers such as Clara Porset in Mexico, Cornelis Zitman in Venezuela, and Susi Aczel in Argentina," MoMA said about their exhibition at the time.

The political reason behind London’s ‘weird’ skyline

2024-02-15T11:30:00-05:00

The dominance of starchitect-led high rises in London is the result of the UK’s subjective planning system, according to a new opinion piece in The New York Times. Taking aim at the city’s “weird” skyline, business and economics columnist Peter Coy argues that “developers hire star architects because doing so gives them a better chance of winning approval for taller, more profitable buildings.”

Related on Archinect: The City of London skyline is expected to add these eleven towers by 2030. Image credit: City of London Corporation

“London has a jarring profusion of odd skyscrapers with funny names or nicknames,” Coy explains. “There are the Shard and the Scalpel, which are pretty elegant. The (mostly) well-liked Gherkin, which looks like a glass pickle. The wedge-shaped Cheese Grater. And the widely loathed Walkie-Talkie, a bulbous cartoon of a building that “looms thuggishly over its low-rise neighbors like a broad-shouldered banker in a cheap pinstriped suit,” to quote The Guardian....

The New York Times is seeking architectural skills to help with high-profile investigations

2024-02-07T13:51:00-05:00

Following last week’s look at an opening for a Construction Contract Administrator at EskewDumezRipple, we are using this week’s edition of our Job Highlights series to explore an open role on Archinect Jobs for a Graphics/Multimedia Editor at The New York Times.

The role, based in New York, calls for a “creative and versatile 3D specialist who can build, animate, style and render models for breaking news, enterprise and investigative projects.” Among the responsibilities for the role will be creating and building detailed and accurate 3D models, interviewing experts, and executing camera movements for 3D scenes. Qualifications required for the role include 3+ years of 3D modeling experience and expertise in at least one major 3D application.

Related on Archinect: The New York Times uses neural network to map every building in the U.S. Image credit: The New York Times

Why the role interests us

The open role at The New York Times offers us the opportunity to explore how a prominent na...

PAU founder Vishaan Chakrabarti unveils a housing plan for 1.3 million New Yorkers

2024-01-05T16:59:00-05:00

Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of PAU, has unveiled his firm's analysis, courtesy of The New York Times, which suggests that enough housing could be created for one million New Yorkers.

The PAU founder says there is space for up to 520,245 homes in the city on roughly 1,700 acres of unused land. Most of it would be enacted above existing single-story commercial spaces. The idea of adding density has been debated, though he points out correctly that it does present a viable alternative to the mass-scale conversion of office buildings that have been proven costly and largely unfeasible in structures built before 1980.

His team's analysis follows previous streetscape and rail infrastructure proposals and was conducted using available data on vacant lots, flood-prone areas, and the location of subway stations and other mass transit options. Current estimates have placed the need for over 500,000 new homes, a figure Mayor Eric Adams's official plan put forth in December 2022 used as a ben...

U.S. colleges eye unused office buildings for academic adaptive reuse

2023-10-06T14:09:00-04:00

U.S. colleges are taking advantage of a post-pandemic increase in affordable, unused offices by purchasing such properties for educational use, according to reporting by The New York Times. Since 2018, numerous higher education institutions in the U.S. have been acquiring office buildings, with 49 private and 16 public institutions making such purchases, as per data from real estate services company JLL.

“For schools seeking to expand, or just beef up their real estate portfolios, the purchases can be a bonanza,” The Times explains. “With the office market in a slump, they have bought buildings at bargain prices. Renovations are usually needed, but a makeover is typically not as expensive or as time-consuming as building from scratch."

Related on Archinect: AIA announces $20 billion in grant funding made available for adaptive reuse and decarbonization projects. Image credit: Brian Ferry

Examples cited by The Times include the 1928 Title and Trust Building in Los Angeles purchased b...

UNM architecture chair Chris Cornelius offers NYT an insight into how his Indigenous heritage informed his career

2023-03-10T14:42:00-05:00

Just over one year since Chris Cornelius took up his role as the Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of New Mexico, the architect and educator has spoken to The New York Times on how his career was informed by his upbringing and his Oneida heritage.

An enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, Cornelius is also the founding principal of studio:indigenous, a design practice that serves American Indian clients. Back in 2017, to mark Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Archinect included Cornelius’s firm in a list of our favorite contemporary practices led by Indigenous architects.

“In our neighborhood, there were no trees or sidewalks,” Cornelius told The Times about his childhood in a federal public housing project on the Oneida Indian reservation. “When I saw how different life was off the reservation, I began to think about how I could make an impact on my environment.”

Food for thought on circular design and who should own the built environment

2022-10-11T12:43:00-04:00

Back in June, we covered news of research set to be undertaken at Penn State on the subject of embodied carbon in cities. The research, one of many stories this year focusing on embodied carbon, signals a growing awareness in academic and professional circles of the need to include whole-life perspectives on buildings when calculating their environmental impact: from conception and construction to demolition and reuse.

Given the sizeable 40% impact of the AEC sector on global carbon emissions, it is no surprise that conversations on embodied carbon, life-cycle analyses, and our attitude towards waste in buildings have also garnered mainstream attention.

This week, The New York Times published an article by freelance writer Jessica Camille Aguirre titled ‘How to Recycle a 14-Story Office Tower.’ While the title may evoke ideas of an IKEA-s...

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien on their Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park refresh

2022-06-09T13:11:00-04:00

Garden officials said Fred Meijer insisted on surpassing accessibility standards, as demonstrated by a miniature version of Nina Akamu’s 1999 bronze 'The American Horse' that allows the visually impaired to feel the sculpture. Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien designed the landscape without significant grade changes, eliminating the need for landings and handrails, as well as stairs or steep ramps between buildings. The subtle slopes allow every visitor to use the same paths for the same experience.

As part of the Times’ new dedicated series for Milan Design Week, Matt Shaw previewed Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA)’s renovation of the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan ahead of its opening on July 1st.

The preview noted the project's deliberate focus on improved accessibility and the incorporation of local materials, as well as the introduction of new sculptural elements, and an interior inspired by the Pantheon in Rome.

The level of personal involvement for both architects was hand-designed wall tapestries and rugs scattered throughout the new welcome center's visitor and administrative areas. It is the extension of a vision first initiated by the West Michigan Horticultural Society in the early 1980s. As Tsien describes it, the 69,000-square-foot result “is a place both of the spirit and for people to gather."

San Diego's suburbs are becoming the new frontline in the state's battle over ADUs

2021-10-11T15:57:00-04:00

The pressure to remake neighborhoods like Clairemont is due not to some sudden shift in what people want out of a home but rather to the sweeping social changes that have already played out inside them. As the Columbia University historian Kenneth Jackson wrote in “Crabgrass Frontier,” his seminal history of America’s suburbs: “No society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members.”

Applications for ADUs in San Diego have skyrocketed since 2018, part of a nationwide trend that is changing the way some cities are tackling the affordability crisis which has gotten out of hand as a direct result of antiquated housing policy that insisted on the type of single-family developments that, for some, forms the basis of the American Dream.

The state recently passed two laws effectively banning single-family zoning in an effort to create some of the anticipated 1.8 million units of housing needed by 2025 to match demands. San Diego recently surpassed Los Angeles on a list of least affordable metro areas in the United States. Home prices averaging north of $800,000 have far outpaced the city's median income. The New York Times has a look at some of the real faces of California’s housing crisis here.

The New York Times goes inside the Empire State Building's post-pandemic finances

2021-09-20T14:46:00-04:00

Most of the Empire State Building is dedicated to office space. With its mix of big and small businesses, the building is perhaps a better barometer of the state of office space in New York and the city’s economy than the towers dominated by global firms.

The building’s tourist and retail income has been essentially shut out for over 18 months because of the pandemic. As a result, tenants are being offered sharp discounts despite increasing signs that the remote work trend is here to stay.

“We’ve found ourselves being able to work in ways that we couldn’t imagine were possible before,” one tenant told the Times. “We just thought for so long we needed an office to be efficient, and that’s not true.”

An expansive $165 million renovation of the Empire State Building Observatory authored by Thinc was completed just before the pandemic. The New York Times has a visualization of the Art Deco landmark’s future here.

How the New York Times' 3D model of the Surfside condo collapse came together

2021-09-09T12:23:00-04:00

But, it was a challenge, Ms. Singhvi said, to understand the architectural drawings without interviewing the original designers. So she and Mr. Baker spoke with experts including structural engineers, architects, geotechnical specialists, professors, lawyers and contractors, who answered questions about what the journalists were discovering and helped confirm they were reading the plans accurately.

The Times' 3D reconstruction of the collapse was very popular online as journalists and investigators dig over records of the original 1981 building by the now infamous William Friedman, who died in 2018.

"Being able to read the design drawings helps enormously,” graphics editor Mika Grondal, who trained as an architect, said. June 24th's collapse killed 98 people in total. The site is already being listed for sale, although a local judge has insisted the proceeds should go exclusively to the victims' families.

Digitizing old architectural plans into BIM or CAD software can be fairly time-consuming. The Times has more on its innovative new tool here.

The New York Times R+D team dives into photogrammetry

2020-07-28T19:50:00-04:00

Visual journalists are always searching for new technologies to help them capture more detail and get the news out faster. But they’ve operated within the constraints of a camera lens, a two-hundred-year-old technology that gives readers a single, 2D representation of an event. What if we could break free of the rectangle and let readers experience a setting the same way the journalist did? Instead of just looking at a photo of a space, what if we could move through it?

The New York Times shares its research using photogrammetry for journalistic purposes. Dovetailing on the sophisticated and exacting approaches employed by investigative groups like Forensic Architecture to reconstruct contested and often tragic events, the NYT team instead harnesses the power of 3D-scanning to convey the spatial qualities of their stories, in this case, the destruction left in the wake of Hurricane Dorian and the interiors of an artist's residence, among other examples.

Do shipping containers really make for great architecture?

2019-09-16T08:00:00-04:00

A month ago, Dr. Richard J. Williams of the University of Edinburgh expressed his views of the over-hyped shipping container design fad in The New York Times. Describing the fatal flaw in logic widely used to promote the use of shipping containers in recent architectural proposals, Williams writes, "They’re great for doing what they were designed to do, which is transporting stuff. A simple technology, they have helped facilitate global trade like no other. But they’re designed for things, not people."

Throughout the article, Williams, who is a professor of contemporary visual cultures, art, and history, expressed his dislike for the containers and the effort it takes to turn these large transport boxes into habitable structures suitable for human occupation.

Without missing a beat, Williams also dives into the underlying brutality these containers evoke when he writes, "They’re not even particularly cheap. It is often said that they are sustainable, as they adapt an abundant, read...

New York Times' latest Op-Doc takes a dive into the sewage systems of Mexico City

2019-01-07T16:17:00-05:00

The New York Times' latest Op-Doc—part of their series of short, interactive, and virtual reality documentaries—profiles Julio César Cú Cámara, whose job it is to dive into the sewers and water treatment plants of Mexico City. For the past 36 years, Cámara has been a sewage diver, maintaining the sewage system's pipes and pumps, clearing them of blockages and reducing the risk of floods. Directed by Mexican filmmaker Esteban Arrangoiz, the film shows, as Arrangoiz writes, "how through his work, a human being is capable of finding beauty, pleasure and the essence of his humanity inside the detritus." Check out the film below.

The New York Times uses neural network to map every building in the U.S.

2018-10-12T13:25:00-04:00

The New York Times has made a map of every building in the United States. Using a neural network to analyze satellite imagery, the team's program then traced the shape of buildings across the country. Users can enter a city, zip code, or address, and explore these areas in detail.

It's pretty fun to play with, but the tool also helps illuminate the underlying patterns of cities and places that make them feel the way they do. Looking at these different patterns, we can detect the imprints of geology, the effects of suburbanization, the intentional designs of cities, and the traces of culture embedded within. By looking at the physical infrastructure, the maps tell us so much more about people’s connections, stories, and experiences relating to a specific environment.

Take a look here.

Meet British architects Chan + Eayrs, who inhabit their projects as they renovate them

2018-09-17T18:13:00-04:00

By collapsing the roles of architect, developer and interior designer, they make spaces with an unparalleled intimacy and a highly refined sense of place. “When we choose a project, it’s not just a project,” says Chan Eayrs. “It’s where we choose to spend two to three years of our life, every day, touching and feeling it, living it.”

The New York Times profiles British architect couple Zoe Chan Eayrs and Merlin Eayrs, whose highly dedicated design process — in which they live in whatever project they are currently renovating through completion — has resulted in a refreshing portfolio of unique living spaces that “feel as soulful as they do sophisticated”, The New York Times writes.

Want to read about more emerging firms? Check out Archinect's latest Small Studio Snapshots features!

The opposite job of an architect is a slaughterer and meat packer

2017-12-12T16:22:00-05:00

What if you could start over and take the career path most different from the one you’re on? Let us help you. The Labor Department keeps detailed and at times delightfully odd records on the skills and tasks required for each job. Some of them are physical: trunk strength, speed of limb movement, the ability to stay upright. Others are more knowledge-based: economics and accounting, physics, programming. Together, they capture the essence of what makes a job distinctive.

The New York Times has used job-specific records to find the polar opposite of each job. Determining skills used either the most or the least, this tool has helped in understanding more clearly what it is people actually do at their job beyond the initial understanding of the title or position.

Type in any job here and find the opposite.

Architects use these skills the most (matching most closely with the skills Slaughterers and Meat Packers use least):

Visualization
Deductive reasoning
Far vision
Management of financial resources
Ability to organize groups in different ways
Near vision
Operations analysis
Fluency of ideas
Management of material resources
Number facility

Climb Heatherwick's $150 Million Stairway in the Times' Daily 360

2017-12-12T15:32:00-05:00

Everyday, The New York Times brings its readers a new 360-degree video with their series, The Daily 360. In one of their recent videos for the project, Times journalists give us a behind the scenes look at Thomas Heatherwick's ongoing public project in New York City’s Hudson Yards development, the Vessel. Slated to open early 2019, get an early experience of the $150 million stairway with this immersive video—VR headset not necessary.

The New York Times compiles a glossary of climate change-adaptive building strategies

2017-04-05T12:46:00-04:00

Communities across the country are confronting the mounting evidence of climate change and developing means of fortifying buildings and infrastructure against rising sea levels and ever-more-intense storms, even as the Trump administration reverses policies premised on climate change. “We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters in Washington recently. “We consider that to be a waste of your money.”

"People who live, work or build in flood plains like West Chelsea and elsewhere say they cannot be so dismissive. They are spending money."

The New York Times has compiled case studies as well as an associated glossary of steps taken in New York City and its environs to help shore up the built environment against the encroachment of high waters, winds, and heavy rains. For example, the glossary features technical terms like a "500-year flood plain", or an area with a 0.2 percent chance of flooding any given year, as well as strategies, like "dry flood-proofing", or the use of impermeable materials and barriers to keep buildings dry.

Check it out this useful glossary here.

Christopher Gray, wry architecture author/researcher, dies at age 66

2017-03-14T12:48:00-04:00

Rooting himself less in a strictly academic tradition and more in an observed, on-the-street context, architecture author and researcher Christopher Gray catalogued what he considered to be beautiful and surprising for The New York Times from 1987 to 2014 in his "Streetscapes" column. He also started a kind of architectural detective business known as the Office for Metropolitan History in 1975, which would research the history, deeds, old photographs and any other paperwork connected with a particular building in the days before the instant compendium of the internet. His work was often used to add depth and context to the work of other architects/critics including Robert A.M. Stern, who The New York Times quoted as saying about Gray that he "was generous with his time and always willing to share what seemed like his almost infinite knowledge of the city’s architectural and social history.” Gray, who died Friday at age 66 from complications due to pneumonia, leaves behind over 1,40...

Architects Alejandro Aravena and Trix & Robert Haussmann included on NYT's 2016 Creative Geniuses list

2016-12-28T18:14:00-05:00

From their studios, ateliers, film sets and kitchens — and even the White House — these are the people whose inventive spirits shaped the conversation this year.

It certainly was an eventful career year for Alejandro Aravena (Pritzker Prize, Venice Biennale, et al.), and the ambitious Chilean's cultural footprint can be traced throughout a handful of our Archinect 2016 Year In Review posts:

Oana Stanescu, the architect behind Kanye's volcano, talks to NY Times about pushing design boundaries via pop culture

2015-08-06T18:45:00-04:00

For a serious architect who has designed public housing in Dallas and a bridge in Slovenia, it may come as a surprise that Oana Stanescu’s best-known work is a 50-foot-high volcano that Kanye West ascended onstage during his grandiose Yeezus tour...Along with Dong-Ping Wong, her partner in the West Village architectural firm Family, Ms. Stanescu is making a name for herself in design circles for her ability to merge pop culture with utilitarian design.

For more Family on Archinect, you can check out Oana's archived Archinect School Blog, the +POOL, and the firm's other cool projects.

Archinect's critical round-up: the week's best architectural critiques so far

2015-08-06T17:48:00-04:00

Over at the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Hawthorne eloquently pans the new addition to the 405 freeway, noting that "The expanded 405 might be the first L.A. freeway project to look haggard and disjointed the day it opened." His review comes at a time when infrastructure, especially in California, is starting to (violently) show signs of its age: last year, the University of California Los Angeles briefly flooded thanks to an aged water main breaking, and in July a freak thunderstorm collapsed a portion of interstate 10. Hawthorne's displeasure is focused primarily on the 405's haphazard design to please multiple neighborhoods, its tacky soil-nail construction retaining walls ("This technique is something like the comb-over of freeway design"), and its simple underwhelming-ness as a public works project.

Meanwhile, James S. Russell's thoughtful examination of Thomas Heatherwick in the New York Times delves into one of the perennially feisty debates of the architectural realm: just ...

The New York Times reviews MoMA exhibit, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980

2015-05-01T11:12:00-04:00

The exhibition recalls an earlier era when architects there believed that social challenges should be tackled by design, that humane societies deserved beautiful new forms, and progressive development put faith in art, nature and the resilience of ordinary people.

Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times wrote a review on the recent MoMA exhibit, ‘Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980’. The exhibit highlights the work of Oscar Niemeyer, Lina Bo Bardi, Eladio Dieste, Rogelio Salmona and others who helped define Latin American modern architecture. On display are photographs, videos, drawings, blueprints and models. Some models shown in Kimmelman's article feature the work of University of Miami students who collaborated with MoMA on this exhibit.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Preserving a Site and a Ghastly Inventory

2015-04-15T21:06:00-04:00

The strategy, she said, is “minimum intervention.” The point is to preserve the objects and buildings, not beautify them. Every year, as more survivors die, the work becomes more important. “Within 20 years, there will be only these objects speaking for this place,” she said.

NY exhibitions reflect on Latin American midcentury architecture + design

2015-03-30T16:01:00-04:00

Until the advent of cable television and then the Internet, Latin Americans, creators and consumers alike, were often more aware of trends in Europe and the United States than in nations neighboring theirs: Whatever similarities in style that emerged regionally were largely the result of discrete, parallel responses to the challenges of urbanization, poverty and the need to somehow integrate modernity and tradition.

Midcentury architecture and design from the Latin America region seems to be a trend in recent exhibitions in MoMA, MAD, and Americas Society in New York. New York Times writer Larry Rohter compares and contrasts the exhibitions, which shed light on the all-too-familiar tension of integrating globalized innovation with local traditions and techniques that was present throughout Latin American architecture and design.

How to Rebuild Architecture: Another "Back to the Drawing Board" Op-Ed

2014-12-16T12:24:00-05:00

Architecture, of the capital “A” variety, is exceptionally capable of creating signature pieces, glorious one-offs. We’re brilliant at devising sublime (or bombastic) structures for a global elite who share our values. We seem increasingly incapable, however, of creating artful, harmonious work that resonates with a broad swath of the general population [...] We’ve taught generations of architects to speak out as artists, but we haven’t taught them how to listen.

Why local architects do it better, and the case against franchised architecture

2014-06-12T16:16:00-04:00

Architecture, however, is a social art, rather than a personal one, a reflection of a society and its values rather than a medium of individual expression. So it’s a problem when the prevailing trend is one of franchises, particularly those of the globe-trotters: Renzo, Rem, Zaha and Frank. It’s exciting to bring high-powered architects in from outside... But in the long run it’s wiser to nurture local talent; instead of starchitects, locatects.