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Bohlin Cywinski Jackson designs new CoorsTek science and engineering center at Colorado School of Mines

2019-01-30T11:33:00-05:00

Widely known for designing many of Apple's iconic retail stores, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson teamed up with Denver-based Anderson Mason Dale Architects to design the CoorsTek Center for Applied Science and Engineering, a new 95,000 square-foot education and research facility that just opened at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado.

The $50 million four-story campus building houses the College of Applied Science and Engineering and Department of Physics, and will support partnerships among the college's three other departments and two interdisciplinary science programs. The new building also marks a milestone in a multi-generational partnership between Mines, the Coors family, and CoorsTek, a leading technical ceramics manufacturer.

Photo: Nic Lehoux.

Photo: Ron Pollard.

The Center's design draws from the site's historic context and the surrounding Front Range landscape. Its metal and glass facade is vertically punctuated by service cores clad in dark masonry...

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson announces death of retired principal Jon Jackson

2018-08-24T14:25:00-04:00

In the words of the late Dick Rittelmann (1938-2015), friend and collaborator, and cofounder of Burt Hill Kosar Rittelmann: “The breadth and complexity of BCJ’s work over the years is a testimony to the skills of Jon Jackson as not only a great individual architect, but of a manager, mentor, motivator, and collaborator. Jon has matured from one who creates great architecture to one who creates the environment in which great architecture can occur.”

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson announced today in a press release that retired principal Jon Jackson passed away last Friday, August 17. A Pittsburgh-area native and a highly respected figure in Western Pennsylvania and national design communities, Jackson and his work — which focused on large, technically complex projects and also helped define the interactive workplace seen in today's leading tech companies — played an integral role in bringing BCJ to national and global prominence.

“Jon C. Jackson hired me in 1997 to join Bohlin Cywinski Jackson,” tweeted SmithGroup Principal Rosa Sheng, who was also a founding member of BCJ's San Francisco office in 1999. “He was not only just and fair, but a true champion for my career development and instrumental in supporting what became the San Francisco Office where I spent 20 years of my career. Rest In Peace Jon, you are missed.”

Correction: This post previously stated that Jackson was survived by his wife Roxanne Sherbeck, FAIA — with whom he c...

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson Receives Two AIA Housing Awards

2017-05-03T13:23:00-04:00

The 2017 National Conference on Architecture put on by the AIA over the weekend came with a parade of honors and awards including the Housing Awards program. Now in its 17th year, the AIA Housing Awards were established to honor the best in residential architecture and promote the importance of good housing as a necessity of life. Bohlin Cywinski Jackson was one of firms to be recognized by the program for their exception design, receiving multiple accolades.

Their Los Altos Residence was honored in the "One/Two Family Custom Residences" category. The home is a modernist reinterpretation of the Northern California ranch. With a simple layout and detailing, the firm has created a home that is both calm and restful.

The second accolade was awarded to the Stellar Residence and Townhomes at Mountainside Northstar, falling in the "One/Two Family Production Homes" category. The Residence is a challenging update on the traditional mountain chalet while using familiar materials common to the...

Fallingwater Institute gains 4 spartan yet beautiful dwellings by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson

2017-02-09T18:46:00-05:00

The Fallingwater Institute, which is located on the High Meadow farm next to the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright home, is adding four new "modest wood portals" to its 1960s era teaching facilities. The new dwellings, designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, are created both to extend from the existing High Meadow structure while giving the Institute's summer residency students a spare, yet beautiful place, to work and live.

"The building's main entry welcomes visitors into a central screened porch, which joins the new architecture to an existing cabin and serves as the outdoor gathering and dining space," Bill James, project architect from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson's Pittsburgh office, notes in a press release. "A horizontal screen, made of Norway Spruce harvested and milled on site, extends from the main cabin and continues along the walkway leading to the dwellings."

Steve Jobs, Architect?

2013-03-18T19:24:00-04:00

Yet another treatise on Steve Jobs? As an “architect” — really? And with Apple seemingly waning, aren't we behind the curve on this? Suffice it to say that my interest is not solely in Jobs himself, but rather in the challenge he poses to the methods and purpose of an architectural historian.... But since architectural stories are surprising rare here on the edge of the continent, I need a shtick; no matter my connoisseur-ish personal tastes and leftist political dispositions.

What is revealed when we contemplate the late Steve Jobs not only as a technologist extraordinaire but also as a sort of architect? And if we then compare Jobs with another complicated virtuoso, Rem Koolhaas? On Places, architectural historian Simon Sadler argues "Jobs and Koolhaas both seem to have been driven by the possibility that they can act inside, or around, a postmodern world resistant to purpose. Both share an attraction toward design as a type of hermeneutics — a will to learn about the world through the attempt to change it."

From glass stairways to great market halls

2011-10-16T23:44:00-04:00

This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century. Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It’s an interesting challenge, how to marry the two.”

The Sunday NYT Business section published A Genius of the Storefront, Too, a piece which explores a collaboration, that extended from Pixar’s headquarters completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, between Peter Bohlin and his firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson — and Mr. Jobs himself. James B Stewart argues in the process, that the idiosyncratic design aesthetic(s) for which Steve Jobs was known professionally, "left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession."

Bernard Cywinski passes at 70

2011-03-07T13:49:00-05:00

Bernard Cywinski, founding principal of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, passed away on March 2 from cancer.

Because he never got the hang of drawing on a computer, he would sit with young designers and "essentially do backseat driving," recalled Kelly Vresilovic, who sat next to him at BCJ's South Broad Street office.

The irony is that the firm, which has offices in five cities, is best known today for creating the prototype for the Apple stores, including the glass cube on New York's Fifth Avenue, and for designing a massive Seattle home for Microsoft chief Bill Gates. - Philly.com