Archinect - News

Closed school buildings offer a silver lining through adaptive reuse nationwide

2023-10-12T11:56:00-04:00

Amid the backdrop of a national trend of tumbling enrollments, brutal pandemic-era learning losses and an ongoing flight of young families from urban centers, the dilemma of how to repurpose empty schools is that many cities face. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 2,200 public schools closed from 2019 to 2022. Chicago’s experiences offer some insights into what can happen to these spaces, and the communities around them, after the students get sent home.

Lamar Johnson Collaborative Associate Principal Max Komnenich tells Bloomberg the other side to the growing problem of school closings can offer a “beacon for reinvestment” given the proper incentives.

His firm’s Aspire Center conversion took advantage of a $12.5 million TIF that’s included in the larger Community Development Grant program overseen by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. Projects geared towards workforce development are another popular solution besides the obvious need for residential conversions. According to the website Yardi Matrix, 2.9% of all newly converted housing units were created from former school buildings nationwide in the last year alone.

India is taxing cryptocurrencies to finance its push for new infrastructure

2022-02-01T19:12:00-05:00

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has included hefty spending on infrastructure projects in its annual budget, looking to spur growth and improve its popularity just ahead of key state elections. The budget also includes a proposed 30% tax on income from cryptocurrencies.

India also introduced a new digital rupee (after previously attempting a ban on cryptocurrencies) and plans to declare data centers and large energy storage systems as infrastructure in an effort to increase access to institutional funding. Hopes are that the investment in building projects will create employment opportunities which will thus pour money back into the economy. Current forecasts have India’s GDP growing at an 8% rate for the fiscal year.

The country’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the package includes $2.68 billion in allocations for highway expansions and funding for 400 new trains that will be manufactured in the next three years. The money constitutes a major shift as about $4 billion less is being spent on healthcare delivery than was included in last year’s budget. Prime Minister Modi has said very publicly that he feels it is his responsibility to make infrastructure development a top priority for the world’s second-most populous country.

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Goldman Sachs invests in affordable housing initiatives

2022-01-14T16:02:00-05:00

The Urban Investment Group within Goldman Sachs Asset Management announced that it closed a $75 million investment with the National Affordable Housing Trust (NAHT) to establish the Black Developers Initiative Affordable Housing Fund, which will finance high-quality affordable housing across the country sponsored by Black-led developers

Six organizations in San Francisco, Georgia, New York and Dallas received the capital grants for community and affordable housing projects. Two of the projects work to address housing disparities, while the rest touch on topics surrounding the issues at the core of the $130 billion financial institution’s initiative, which is aimed at improving the lives of one million Black women.

“A lot of people don’t know that Black women are a third more likely to live in unsafe housing,” Goldman Sachs Foundation president Asahi Pompey told theGrio. “You’ve got to, one, have a place to call home, and two, that’s got to be a safe environment for not only Black women, but Black girls that are growing up in those houses.”

Foster + Partners sells “significant” shares to Canadian family private investment firm

2021-10-11T10:39:00-04:00

Foster + Partners, the largest architecture firm based in the United Kingdom, has announced a new partnership with a Canadian private family investment firm. The partnership with the Canadian firm, named Hennick & Company, sees the Hennick family now become the largest shareholder of Foster + Partners, followed by Norman Foster and his family.

The financial sum paid for the shares, and the size of the stakes, remains undisclosed according to the UK outlet Building Design, who first reported the story. Going forward, the practice’s existing partners will remain as long-term shareholders, retaining the balance of the equity between the Foster family and Hennick. Norman Foster will continue to serve in his current role as Executive Chairman, while all present partners will remain in their roles. The firm’s existing leadership team will also retain day-to-day operational responsibility.

Coalition of design and construction organizations seek support for more resilient built environment in letter to Congress

2021-05-27T17:58:00-04:00

A coalition of leading design and construction organizations have called on Congress to include funding in any new infrastructure proposal that would significantly improve the resilience and performance of buildings across the country, The American Institute of Architects announces.

In a letter issued to Congress earlier this week, signatories addressed the increasing threat that natural and manmade hazards pose on the safety of the public and strength of the country. As stated in the letter, “The combination of aging infrastructure and worsening natural disasters has resulted in the unacceptable, yet preventable, loss of human life and costly property damage.” According to the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, between 2014 and 2019, the United States experienced 77 weather and climate-related disasters that resulted in over $550 billion in damage and nearly 4,000 lives lost.

Are global investment firms going green?

2020-01-15T18:59:00-05:00

BlackRock, the world's largest asset management firm, has announced that it will use climate risk assessments and environmental sustainability as guiding metrics for how it makes investment decisions moving forward. The impact of this shift could have profound changes for the architecture and construction industries.

The announcement comes from BlackRock CEO Laurence D. Fink via an annual investment forecasting letter sent out to customers at the start of the year. In the letter, Fink writes "Even if only a fraction of the projected impacts [of climate change are] realized, this is a much more structural, long-term crisis. Companies, investors, and governments must prepare for a significant reallocation of capital."

Fink adds, "The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance." And as a result, the firm will seek to prioritize investments in that divorce themselves from fossil fuel industries, provide public transparency to the ...

Autonomous crane technology receives investment boost

2018-09-27T14:52:00-04:00

With industrial robotics forecast to be worth $71.72 billion by 2023, it’s no wonder entrepreneurs are turning their attention to increasingly lucrative sectors, like warehouse automation, order fulfillment, and manufacturing. Tel Aviv-based Intsite is one of the latest examples. The startup today announced a $1.35 million pre-seed round led by Terra Venture Partners and the Israel Innovation Authority to fund what it claims is the world’s first autonomous crane technology.

Image: Intsite

AI-powered autonomous construction technology is poised to see enormous growth in the coming years, promising to significantly increase efficiency, cut costs & realization time, and reduce human errors as well as workplace-related injuries.

"According to McKinsey, about 98 percent of construction mega-projects go significantly over budget, in part as a result of heavy equipment inefficiencies," reports Venture Beat.

Amazon buys into the (Alexa-powered) prefab housing market

2018-09-26T13:32:00-04:00

Amazon has made clear that it wants to own the smart home space. Now the company's going a step further, taking a stake in a start-up that's building actual homes. On Tuesday, Amazon said its Alexa Fund invested in Plant Prefab, a Southern California company that says it uses sustainable construction processes and materials to build prefabricated custom single- and multifamily houses. The start-up is aiming to use automation to build homes faster and bring down costs.

With this recent investment in eco-friendly prefabricated home factory Plant Prefab, Amazon uses its mighty financial leverage and dominance in the market for voice-controlled connected devices to make the brand just as synonymous with smart homes as it already is with online retail.

Plant Prefab, headquartered in Rialto, California, offers standard and custom prefab homes in collaboration with established design partners, including Ray Kappe, KieranTimberlake, and LivingHomes.

Is a decline in U.S. government spending hurting infrastructure?

2018-09-10T16:14:00-04:00

In the second quarter of this year, investment spending by the federal government dropped below 1.4 percent of gross domestic product for the first time since the 1940s, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. OK, at 1.397 percent, it wasn’t much below, and federal government investment as a share of GDP isn’t exactly a closely watched economic indicator. But the decline through the decades is still pretty striking...

Justin Fox tracks the decline in U.S. government spending over the years, noting infrastructure investments have largely been replaced with spending on social insurance programs. With private investors taking the lead, Fox argues U.S. infrastructure suffers as there are many vital projects which private investors will never touch.

Lifting poor neighborhoods out of poverty with alternative investment models

2017-12-06T14:08:00-05:00

How do you raise the standard of living in the poorest neighborhoods in the country? That’s what community developers, typically nonprofits that build and finance affordable housing, have tried to do over the last few decades. And yet [...] many of these communities remain stuck in poverty. [...] This problem has stumped community developers for decades. But two local nonprofits think they’ve hit on something: They’ve created a private equity fund.

China leads world in investing in Africa, especially in Egyptian building projects

2017-05-30T13:25:00-04:00

How will China's $36.1 billion dollar investment shape the future of Africa? While China only has 66 projects over the continent compared to the United States' 91 projects, it has pledged about ten times the total amount of money, and the lion's share of that cash is earmarked for Egypt. As Global Construction Review notes:

The largest recipient of Chinese money is Egypt, which accounts for 25% of its African FDI. Here, China’s involvement is overwhelmingly in the construction and infrastructure sector, and it has plans to spend $15b on 15 electricity, infrastructure and transport projects. This would have been higher still if it had not in February pulled out of a $20bn plan to build a new capital city.

Transit hubs increasingly designed to serve as desirable (and profitable) public spaces

2017-02-28T17:36:00-05:00

The notion of spending time at a subway stop or other major transit center for pleasure may strike you as odd, but many cities and transportation companies are investing heavily in building up this part of their infrastructure to create desirable public spaces (it adds a whole new dimension to "mixed-use"). In this feature by Kim Slowey for Construction Dive, the shift in investment is explored:

Architecture firm HOK designed the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodel Center (ARTIC) in California, a 21st century take on the massive transit halls of the past. Finished in 2014, using steel and ethylene tetrafluoroethylene "pillows," designers created a hangar-like, light-filled area that makes room for dining and shopping, as well as for additional future commercial development.

Skanska also completed an ultra-modern, $4 billion World Trade Center Transportation Hub last year, which connects city subway lines and PATH trains to New Jersey, to replace the one destroyed in the Sept. ...

Cheezburger founder/CEO joins YCombinator's 'New Cities' project

2016-10-28T13:44:00-04:00

YCombinator, the Silicon Vallley start-up accelerator and investment firm behind Airbnb and Dropbox, announced its entrepreneurial reach into city-building this past summer, with the goal to develop "a city for humans" with reduced housing expenses and a simplified planning code.

Some SV investor-speak aside, YC's so-called "New Cities Project" doesn't sound particularly controversial to anyone who likes cities and wants them to support better lives. But there is a bit of learned defensiveness in YC's blog post announcing the venture: "We’re not interested in building 'crazy libertarian utopias for techies.'"

Now, they might have a bit more explaining to do. Ben Huh—founder and CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger?, the meme-generating website that birthed lolcats—has joined the urban utopian pursuit as an "Explorer", as Huh announced on Medium earlier this week:

For the next 6-months, I am joining YCombinator Research’s New Cities project as an Explorer. My goal? Create an open, repeatable sy...

Is Vancouver's 15% tax on overseas buyers helping to cool the housing market?

2016-10-12T14:22:00-04:00

There is a city which is suffering a worse property bubble than Sydney, whose residents are more priced-out than Londoners, and where there is a greater divide between the housing haves and have-nots than even San Francisco. That city is Vancouver, and in response to these mounting challenges, the west-coast Canadian metropolis recently imposed an extraordinary new tax on foreign buyers – whose impact is now being watched closely by other cities grappling with bloated property markets.

Cutting out the (real estate) middle man: a closer look at Self-Builds

2016-07-15T13:46:00-04:00

It’s not a new argument to say that cities are increasingly morphing from social configurations to investment vehicles. [...] “Self-builds”, “Baugruppen”, and “zelfbouw” are just a few ways to define variations of building-it-yourself (BIY), whether done individually or as a collective. The end users (who are the commissioners), together with architects, decide on the design of their homes, and then take care of the construction themselves or have contractors do it.

Now is the time to invest in mid-century Scandinavian furniture, experts say

2016-02-01T19:58:00-05:00

Prices of chairs, tables, sofas and other pieces, particularly those of Scandinavian origin, from the late 1940s through the early 1960s have increased dramatically in recent years and show no sign of falling soon...[It] reflects an increase in overall real-estate activity, which in turn has driven a demand for furniture. The economy has been strong enough to drive the auction market for high-end furnishings and artwork to new highs...

February is furniture month here on Archinect! Send us your furniture musings, interviews, reviews, designs, projects and investigations for review to be featured on our site. The open call for submissions is effective immediately.

More details here.

Private money attracts big-name architects to design new museums in Beirut

2015-10-09T15:01:00-04:00

A raft of museums, most backed by private money, are springing up in what is, for many, an unlikely cultural hub: Beirut, the capital of Lebanon [...] The design competition launched on 1 October; the architect Zaha Hadid is on the jury along with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones of London's Serpentine Galleries. Salamé, who founded the Aïshti fashion chain, invested $100m in funding a contemporary art museum, designed by the British architect David Adjaye, in Jal El Dib [...].

Are English universities picking up "American habits" as campus construction booms?

2015-05-06T14:26:00-04:00

The cranes are going up all over universities. A new student village here, an extension to the business school there, airy atria everywhere, even a scattering of 'iconic' or 'signature' buildings aspiring to be on shortlists for architectural awards. Higher education is investing unprecedented amounts in infrastructure – for good and necessary reasons but maybe for bad ones too.

UCL Institute of Education professor Peter Scott comments on the rising trend of English universities leaning toward what he describes as "American habits" at a time when universities are investing greatly in campus construction. Scott lists promising reasons like the upgrading and preservation of historic buildings but also the questionable prestige- and business-driven motives that are already familiar in U.S. institutions.

Norman Foster buys back architecture firm stake from private equity group 3i

2014-06-30T15:29:00-04:00

Founder Norman Foster... sold a 40pc stake in the firm for £84m in 2007 when commercial property valuations were soaring. The private equity group is selling its stake back to Foster & Partners for £108m, plus a further £40m interest payment. Foster & Partners faced a challenging environment during the recession and while estimates valued the business at £300m in 2007, it had amassed a debt burden of £340m by the year ending April 2009.

Autodesk Foundation established to further support impact-design organizations

2014-03-07T18:16:00-05:00

Major 3D design software company Autodesk recently announced the launch of the Autodesk Foundation to further invest in influential individuals and non-profit organizations who use impactful design to find solutions for various pressing global issues. And to increase contribution to the Foundation's goals, Autodesk will encourage their more than 7,000 employees worldwide to volunteer with or donate to their organizations of choice.

Through the Impact Design Program, the Foundation will collaborate and provide select design-oriented non-profit groups with software, training, and funding to support the group's causes. Some of the Foundation's first grantees include initiatives like KickStart International, MASS Design Group, D-Rev, and the 20K House project from Auburn University's Rural Studio.

The Foundation will also incorporate Autodesk's Technology Impact program. Established during the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative, the Technology Impact program committed to donating $7.5 million...

The Games Are A Great Party, But Not A Great Investment

2014-02-03T14:01:00-05:00

The Winter Olympics in Sochi are just a few days away. Russia has spent $50 billion on everything from construction to security, making these the most expensive games in history. [...] "I think one of the knee-jerk reactions has been ... 'will we be left with a load of white elephants?' " he adds. The answer from most economists who study the Olympics is: Yes, you will.

Crowdfunding for investors may soon get easier

2014-01-21T13:11:00-05:00

[...] developer Ben Miller says, until now, it’s been impossible for local people to invest in development right across the street. “Who owns your environment? You don’t know,” he says. “Who’s building your environment, who’s building your city? Not you.” Miller is co-founder of the group Fundrise, which has started selling shares of private real estate projects to the public online. [...] First they bought 1351 H Street with private capital, then crowdfunded about a third of it.