Archinect - News

Barcode's new CasaNova residential project seeks a new social synergy in Rotterdam

2023-10-03T13:25:00-04:00

Barcode Architects has shared photos of the firm’s newly completed CasaNova residential tower project in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Defined by its triangular volume and hand-cut red natural stone-paneled facade, the 236,806-square-foot structure rises from a base plinth to a height of 36 stories, preferencing social connectivity throughout and via a 5th-floor outdoor roof garden that’s shared with residents of the firm’s smaller The Muse design from 2020.

Image: © Hans Wilschut, courtesy of Barcode Architects

The plinth also contains co-working spaces, a communal kitchen, a gym, and hotel rooms. Inside the tower, a total of 116 high-end residences offer sweeping 300-degree views of the city’s skyline. Triangular balconies totaling 161 square feet are formed at the corners of the tower, and residents are once again channeled toward a greater social cohesion which takes place on the walk from the parking garage entrance to the towe...

New York City is actually sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers

2023-05-22T13:57:00-04:00

New York City is sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers, new research shows, which could put its population of more than 8 million people at an increased risk of coastal flooding. [...] Researchers estimated the weight of all of New York City’s buildings to be around 842 million tons. But to find the areas more vulnerable to sinking — or, as they call it in more scientific terms, “subsidence” — a key factor to consider was the type of soil beneath the buildings.

A new study authored by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) found the city to be sinking at a rate of between 1 to 2 millimeters per year, while parts of Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are subsiding at a rate of 2.75 millimeters. This comes at a time when planning officials, architects, and building owners are scrambling to adapt to the shrinking office market accelerated by the pandemic.

The increased flood risk, enhanced by construction densification, is particularly dangerous to coastal cities whose clay-rich soil causes “material softness and ability to flow under pressure,” according to the study.

A new proposal for 55 Yonge Street will bring much-needed vertical space to burgeoning downtown Toronto

2021-05-25T12:31:00-04:00

An ambitious proposal for a new 66-story mixed-use tower in downtown Toronto has been released as developers H&R REIT eye an approval looming late next year.

55 Yonge is the product of a collaboration between Canadian groups PARTISANS and Quadrangle, which was acquired by the UK group BDP at the beginning of 2019.

55 Yonge Street, rendering by Norm Li

The tower will have retail spaces and over 180,000 square feet of office space easily accessible by the nearby King Street TTC subway station. The design also features space for nearly 500 one-, two- and three-bedroom residential units for lease at a site that currently hosts a 12-story 1958 building by modernist master Peter Dickinson.

Anchored by a cavernous base, the lattice facade stretches into an elongated high-rise that provides an updated take on podium typology and the mid-century modern style once popular in Canada’s largest city.

55 Yonge Street, rendering by Norm Li

Toronto is changing, in part because of COVID-related vaca...

Inga Saffron on the dueling ideals of urban density

2021-04-06T14:24:00-04:00

Not so long ago, density was promoted as a way to enliven underpopulated cities, particularly their downtowns. Then it became a tool for fighting climate change. Now, density is increasingly seen as an equity issue. [...] Two notorious projects help us understand the difference between density that enhances a neighborhood and projects that big-foot their surroundings.

In her latest column for the Inquirer, architecture critic Inga Saffron dissects two new mid-rise apartment building projects at opposite ends of Philadelphia (the "poop building and the Scrooge building," as she nicknames them) and how their individual approaches toward urban densification can have beneficial or detrimental effects on their surrounding neighborhoods.

"Our challenge is to accommodate new housing while still maintaining our quirky, beloved, lived-in neighborhoods," writes Saffron. "That’s why we need the right density in the right place."

California continues to stumble on housing densification

2020-09-02T15:40:00-04:00

Supporters saw [SB 1122] as a way to ease California’s affordability problems that most economists blame on a lack of supply that has forced people to bid up home prices and rents to find a place to live. [...] But like previous efforts to upend California zoning rules, SB 1120 faced pushback from community groups concerned it would ruin single-family neighborhoods, making them into denser places with too much noise and traffic.

Another attempt to bring statewide housing reforms to California's zoning code has failed after a last-ditch effort to pass a bill that would allow homeowners to build two units per lot fell short. SB 1122 was created as response to the failure of the recent SB 50 densification plan, which would have allowed homeowners to build four units per lot.

Anaheim Ducks to convert stadium parking lots into mixed-use district

2020-06-26T16:56:00-04:00

The owners of the Anaheim Ducks professional hockey team have unveiled OCVibe, a vision that could bring a new concert arena, 825,000 square feet of office spaces, 2,800 residential units, and 30 acres of public open spaces to the areas immediately surrounding Anaheim's Honda Center.

Currently organized as a sea of parking lots designed to serve the stadium, the project site also includes the ARTIC rail station, which is set to receive California High Speed Rail service in 2033. An existing office block will grow to include a new 20-story office tower. The offices will be surrounded by apartment blocks organized around the existing street grid.

The western edge of the site is set to feature open spaces that connect to the adjacent Santa Ana River. Meanwhile, the opposite side of the 115-acre site is wrapped in parking structures containing 5,800 parking stalls that face California State Route 57.

An architect has not been named. The project is slated to take shape in phases follow...

California's SB-50 densification bill is back again

2020-01-08T13:58:00-05:00

Now SB 50 allows cities two years to adopt their own plans to achieve the bill’s central goal, which is to greatly increase the amount of market-rate and affordable housing built near transit and job centers [...] without increasing car travel or concentrating the new homes in low-income areas while leaving more affluent areas untouched.

Writing in The Los Angeles Times, opinion columnist Kerry Cavanaugh highlights some of the recent changes made to proposed legislation from California State Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco.

Wiener's SB 50 measure is a statewide densification initiative that's been a work in progress for several years. The latest iteration of the far-reaching plan is aimed at pacifying local-control advocates, including members of the Los Angeles City Council, who would like more of a say in terms of how they might implement the proposal's mandate to modestly increase residential densities within a quarter-mile of high-frequency transit stops across the state. The bill could help the state reach its ambitious goal of building over 3.5 million new residential units across the state by 2025.

Transit-oriented development thrives ahead of light rail debut in Seattle

2019-10-06T12:00:00-04:00

The Roosevelt neighborhood has the makings of a huge transit-oriented development success story. A building boom is underway, protected bike lanes have recently gone in, and the station site will be home to an affordable housing complex right around the time trains begin operating. Northgate Link, along with an underground station in Roosevelt, will open in 2021, and the neighborhood–like others along the line–are already transforming

The Urbanist takes a look at three neighborhoods in Seattle that have seen a rush in transit-oriented development as a new light rail line heads toward its 2021 completion.

"Sue The Suburbs" group puts apartment-denying Los Altos, California on notice

2019-08-15T09:00:00-04:00

The four-person California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, or CaRLA, has one reason for being — to sue cities that reject housing projects without a valid reason. The litigious nonprofit with YIMBY roots struck again last month, suing Los Altos after the city rejected a developer’s bid to streamline a project of 15 apartments plus ground-floor office space.

CaRLA continues its aggressive efforts to get San Francisco Bay Area cities to stop denying by-right housing developments.

“Something, by hook or by crook, has to make these cities actually build housing,” Sonja Trauss, co-executive director of CaRLA, told The Mercury News.

A case for Brooklyn YIMBYism

2018-09-12T17:09:00-04:00

At its current rate of growth, Brooklyn is about to be more populous than the entire city of Chicago. Saying “we need more housing” is a given, but no one agrees on where, how high, and for whom. And New York has been later to that discussion than San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles: While the city is building housing, technically, it is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of 144,000 new Kings County residents since 2010.

Alexandra Lange takes a closer look at Brooklyn's contested 80 Flatbush mixed-use development and argues why it's good for the borough.

MIT study predicts autonomous vehicles to fuel construction boom

2017-10-24T19:46:00-04:00

It’s 2027 (or 2037) and the age of the self-driving car. City-dwellers have traded in their car keys for ride hails. Street parking has been replaced by wider sidewalks and bike lanes, while developers are busy converting garages into much-needed housing. That’s one vision of how self-driving cars will affect U.S. real estate, laid out in a report by MIT’s Center for Real Estate. But it’s not the only one.

"Even as reclaimed parking spaces fuel a downtown building boom," Bloomberg reports, "autonomous vehicles will encourage builders to push deeper into the exurban fringe, confident that homebuyers will tolerate longer commutes now that they don’t have to drive, according to the report [...]."

Read the full report Real Trends: The Future of Real Estate in the United States here.

Mapping how LA's expanding Metro network fuels gentrification (or not)

2016-09-09T14:01:00-04:00

Researchers from the Urban Displacement project, a joint UCLA and UC Berkeley effort, recently released a gentrification map of Los Angeles. They examined the city from 1990 to 2000 and up to 2015, focusing on neighborhoods near transit stops. The goal was to see if these areas saw higher rents and more displacement than other areas. The answer? Yes — with some exceptions.

Some of the UCLA researchers' key findings for Los Angeles Country (via the project's website, urbandisplacement.org):

Our analysis found that areas around transit stations are changing and that many of the changes are in direction of neighborhood upscaling and gentrification.
Examining the changes from 2000 to 2013, we find that relative to non-transit areas, transit neighborhoods are more associated with higher increases in whites, college educated, higher income households and greater increases in the cost of rent. Conversely, transit neighborhoods are associated with greater losses in disadvantaged populations including individuals with less than a high school diploma and lower income households.
The impacts of changes vary across locations but the biggest impacts seem to be around the Downtown areas where transit-oriented development interacts with other interventions aiming to revitalize the urban form.

Click here for the interactive LA map. — Looking for the SF Bay Area map inste...

D.C.'s war over pop-ups

2014-07-28T15:04:00-04:00

Throughout his neighborhood of Lanier Heights, developers are buying up two-story townhouses and building an extra floor or two, additions that are known as pop-ups. They’re also extending the structures as far back as allowed, to within 15 feet of the property line, obliterating backyards in the process. [...] A few doors down the other way is a deafening construction site, where a single-family home is being turned into eight units, taking full advantage of what was once the backyard.

Cities need Goldilocks housing density – not too high or low, but just right

2014-04-17T13:31:00-04:00

In so-called hot cities [...] battles are raging over height limits and urban density, all on the basis of two premises: 1) that building all these towers will increase the supply of housing and therefore reduce its costs; 2) that increasing density is the green, sustainable thing to do and that towers are the best way to do it. I am not sure that either is true.

Protected bike lanes strengthen city economy, report finds

2014-01-22T13:07:00-05:00

According to a recent report from PeopleForBikes and Alliance for Biking & Walking, protected city bike lanes can actually encourage local business success. As trends show workers moving into U.S. cities (rather than out into suburbs), and businesses catering to a younger workforce that relies less on cars, cycling infrastructure has becomes integral to strengthening local businesses and encouraging long-term economic growth for the entire city.

A lot of what delays cycling infrastructure is the presumption that it only benefits cyclists. It can be hard to justify to citizens who don't cycle that bike lanes and bike-share programs will benefit the city at large, and not just the "cyclist" demographic. But cities have begun to take notice of the positive change that cycling infrastructure can help bring to their local businesses, in very concrete ways.

The report focuses on statistics from cities with expanding networks of protected bike lanes: Austin, TX; San Francisco, CA;...

"Housing Design in the Future Los Angeles" and the politics of micro-units

2013-08-29T21:08:00-04:00

Architects Alice Kimm, FAIA; John Mutlow, FAIA; Lorcan O’Herihy, FAIA; Warren Techentin, AIA; Patrick Tighe, FAIA; and Ed Woll, Ph.D. will present housing projects in development and discuss the potential of micro-housing units, transit oriented development and changing lifestyles to create livable density in LA.

This past Wednesday, I attended a panel discussion of architects at the University of Southern California about the future of housing in Los Angeles -- an exciting and highly debatable topic nowadays, as transit networks expand and neighborhoods densify. Presented in conjunction with two recently-concluded coordinated exhibitions originally sponsored by LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, "BY-Right/BY-Design" and "How Small Is Too Small?", the discussion was a type of send-off by trying to describe what smaller and more efficient housing in Los Angeles may look like in the next twenty years. While it didn't really provide any tangible answers to that prompt, the panel did settle on a necessary focus of residential architecture: empathizing with the specific inhabitant.

Given population growth within the past twenty years, housing is certainly a top priority for developers: since 1990, LA County as a whole has risen from approximately 8.9M to 10M*, and accommodating th...