Archinect - News

KieranTimberlake completes three-year Folger Shakespeare Library revamp

2023-04-26T16:40:00-04:00

Washington, D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library has set an opening date following a three-year $80 million renovation led by KieranTimberlake.

November 17th will mark the public reopening of the collecting institution, which was founded in 1932 by Standard Oil executive Henry Clay Folger. The project seeks to revamp the library’s aging Capitol Hill facilities while constructing a new, 12,000-square-foot underground wing that will supplement the overhauled original Paul Cret design with two large exhibition spaces, a learning lab, and a new gift store.

Image courtesy Studio Joseph

Landscaping design by OLIN will complete the program with a set of surrounding gardens to the site’s east and west orientations. Native plants and vegetation inspired by the bard’s long oeuvre welcome visitors into the revamped existing space, which now features the learning lab, a set of new study rooms, and exhibition designs by Studio Joseph and Studio A.

Image courtesy Studio Joseph

Retained bas-reliefs hav...

Center for Architecture and Design to honor KieranTimberlake with its 35th Louis I. Kahn Award

2021-10-07T13:52:00-04:00

Philadelphia’s Center for Architecture and Design will honor Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake with the 2021 Louis I. Khan Award.

The duo and founders of eponymous KieranTimberlake will join David Adjaye and Jeanne Gang as recent winners of the annual award now in its 35th year.

The award is meant to recognize the influence of its namesake, a Philadelphia native and icon of modernism, that Timberlake referred to as an “architect’s architect.”

“We are humbled and grateful for this award,” the architect said in a statement. “As for Steve and me, and the firm at-large, it is recognition of the diligence, effort, and hard work that we give to each and every commission and an acknowledgment to our clients that they made the right choice.”

Related on Archinect: How To Get A Job At: KieranTimberlake

KieranTimberlake’s practice was first established in the city in 1984 and has since gone on to establish itself as an international leader in the industry, with multiple AIA awards and a 2010...

The U.S. Embassy in London receives a 2020 Award of Excellence from Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat

2021-01-21T17:19:00-05:00

The U.S. Embassy in London, designed by Philadelphia-based KieranTimberlake has been awarded a 2020 Award of Excellence by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in the Best Tall Building Under 100 Meters category.

Previously on Archinect: Rachel Whiteread brings American Suburbia to London. Photo by Mike Bruce.

According to the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Overseas Building Operations (OBO), the building incorporates a number of suitable features including daylight-responsive lighting and shade controls, passive and active chilled beams, efficient mechanical systems, and combined heat and power generation. Photovoltaics and ground source heat pumps provide a means of renewable energy for the structure.

The building opened in December of 2017.

KieranTimberlake's transformative addition to Washington University of St. Louis Sam Fox School to debut this fall

2019-09-09T19:04:00-04:00

Transformative additions to the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts campus designed by architects KieranTimberlake are set to make their public debut this fall.

Located on the Washington University in St. Louis Danforth Campus, the project includes the addition of a new academic building, Weil Hall, as well as extensive expansions and renovations to the existing Fumihiko Maki-designed Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. These projects represent part of a much larger $280 million effort to rework the university's East End, and include replacing a series of disjointed surface parking lots and lawns with a grassy expanse dotted with trees. Master planning for the East End was led by landscape architect Michael Vergason.

Work on the remaining structures included in the larger East End plan is set to continue into 2021.

The new architecture building is marked a central commons containing seating areas and a multi-story grow wall. Image courtesy of ©KieranTimberlake/studioAMD

The newly c...

"Calm and reasonable and a bit boring": Rowan Moore reviews London's new U.S. embassy

2018-01-12T19:36:00-05:00

London’s new US embassy may be just a glass cube with disguised fortifications, but it is also restrained, efficient, green… the antithesis of Donald Trump [...] It’s a fortress, of course it is. As the embassy of the Great Satan to the Little Satan – as the unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini would have put it – it couldn’t not be a target and defended accordingly. The architects therefore decided to make it as nice a fortress as possible [...].

The new embassy in Battersea Nine Elms seen from across the river Thames. Image via Wikipedia.

Only a few more days until the U.S. Embassy & Consulates in the United Kingdom move into the new digs (designed by KieranTimberlake) in Nine Elms on January 16. Sans Trump.

The new billion-dollar U.S. embassy in London doesn't want to look like a fortress

2017-12-14T14:26:00-05:00

At $1 billion, it is the most expensive embassy ever constructed. But its designers say the new American chancery on the Thames River marks a paradigm shift: The U.S. Embassy here will exude openness while hiding all the clever ways it defends itself from attack. After decades of building American embassies that look brutalist or bland, like obvious fortresses, the soon-to-be-opened chancery in London is a crystalline cube, plopped down in the middle of a public park, without visible walls.

Image via the U.S. Embassy in London's Twitter

The KieranTimberlake-designed U.S. Embassy in London is preparing for its grand opening on January 16, and the building pleasantly departs from the increasingly common drab 'fortress' chic that American chanceries in cities with heightened risk of terror attacks have adopted.

Image via the U.S. Embassy in London's Twitter

Pulling off a seemingly transparent and welcoming look while still employing state-of-the-art defensive strategies and gadgetry (it even has a pseudo-moat) isn't cheap though — the crystalline 'sugar cube' comes with a hefty $1-billion price tag and takes the title of the most expensive embassy ever built.

The Ugly Pet: On Sustainability and Architectural Form

2017-09-21T17:53:00-04:00

I’m particularly interested in how sustainable buildings might affect the experience of landscape differently — actually better, differently — because, as a human being, I’m hoping for more sustainable architecture, and, as an academic (and as an architect), I’m thinking the consequences should be revolutionary to architecture.

Unlike earlier technological revolutions — the development of the steel frame, or the invention of concrete — sustainability in architecture has not yet had any significant, self-identifying formal consequences. Instead, the experience of sustainable space has to be hyper-mediated.

In his latest article, Places columnist David Heymann vents his frustrations about environmentally-sensitive design and examines how architects including Kieran Timberlake and Glenn Murcutt are feeling the way forward for the field.

Debated relocation of U.S. Embassy in London is "inevitably painful" for locals

2015-06-10T15:58:00-04:00

The United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square, a Modernist concrete building in the heart of Mayfair, London’s most exclusive neighborhood, has been a potential terrorist target for years, creating anxiety for both employees and neighbors...So a new embassy [by KieranTimberlake] is under construction for a move by 2017, and the residents of Mayfair are relieved. But this being Britain, the new embassy has become the object of debate and, in some quarters, ridicule.

KieranTimberlake’s U.S. Embassy in London celebrates groundbreaking

2013-11-13T20:35:00-05:00

The U.S. Department of State - Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations announced the groundbreaking of the KieranTimberlake-designed U.S. Embassy in London on Nov. 13. KieranTimberlake of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was named as the project architect after winning the Department of State competition back in 2010.

To see previous news posts about the U.S. Embassy in London project, click here.

All the glamour of a corporate office block

2010-02-24T12:55:00-05:00

So says Nicolai Ouroussoff in his review of the recently released winning design, by the Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake, for the State Department’s new embassy in London. NYT Previously

Christopher Hawthorne reviews the new US Embassy in London

2010-02-23T15:27:00-05:00

Even as the design itself, for all its airiness and crisp confidence, is hardly radical from a formal point of view -- it consists of a cube sheathed in a shimmering polymer scrim and resting on a ground-floor colonnade of concrete pillars -- it represents a major shift in how we think about the role of U.S. government architecture, both at home and abroad. It suggests putting an emphasis on action instead of values, measurable behavior rather than symbolic gestures.

The LA Times' Christopher Hawthorne reviews the new U.S. Embassy in London, designed by KieranTimberlake.