Archinect - News

The Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations announces selected firms for worldwide architectural and engineering support services

2021-08-02T17:33:00-04:00

The Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), responsible for providing facilities abroad for the United States Department of State and the U.S government, at large, has selected 12 Architectural and Engineering (A/E) firms for the Worldwide Architectural and Engineering Support Services Indefinite Delivery / Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) from a shortlist of 25.

As detailed by the U.S. Department of State, the firms will provide program-level process and procedure-improvement support and conduct surveys and analyses for existing facilities. They will also assist with master plans, security mitigation studies, site expansion studies, project phasing analysis, and historic structures survey.

The selected firms are:

AECOM Services, Inc.
Buro Happold Engineering
Davis Brody Bond
Arthur Gensler, Jr. & Associates, Inc. (dba Gensler)
HDR KCCT JV
Jacobs Government Services Company
Lake Flato Architects
The Mason & Hanger Group, Inc.
Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners
ODA-Architecture, P.C...

With the Middle East in diplomatic crisis, what will happen to Qatar's building projects?

2017-06-06T12:53:00-04:00

In a stunning move, seven Muslim countries—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Yemen, and the Maldives—have severed ties to Qatar, a small nation of about 2.7 million people on the north-east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. The crisis underscores the deep divisions running even within Sunni Islam that are often overlooked by the West, which tends to view the Muslim world through the dichotomous prism of Sunni and Shia.

These countries accuse Qatar of sponsoring terrorism, which is to say, primarily, Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood held power briefly in Egypt following the 2011 Revolution before being overthrown in a coup led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. They are active in many of the seven aforementioned countries.

Qatar also funds Al Jazeera, the widely-watched news channel known for supporting political Islamism and for critiquing the regimes controlling Saudi Arabia and other countries. And Qatar has been criticized for m...

China furious over US plan to rename street in front of its embassy after dissident

2014-06-25T19:14:00-04:00

Chinese diplomats on Wednesday said Congress’ decision to rename the street in front of Beijing’s embassy in the U.S. capital after a Chinese dissident is "really absurd" [...] On Tuesday the House Appropriations Committee voted to rename the street outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., to “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” — after a Chinese dissident who received the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia and is currently serving an 11-year prison term for subverting the government’s authority.

This is not the first time that place-naming – or toponymy – has provoked a political dispute. Actually, it's pretty likely that as long as people have been naming places, other people have been getting upset about it. For example, as immortalized by Jimmy Kennedy in the classic song, Istanbul has been called Constantinople, Byzantium, and Stamboul among other names. What isn't mentioned in the song is that these name changes signal major political shifts, in particular the waves of (often violent) colonization by the Greeks, the Romans, and the Turks. More recently Russian cities were renamed to commemorate Soviet leaders, then changed back to their older names following the collapse of the USSR. Likewise, after the Arab Spring, squares and streets in Tunis and Cairo were renamed to obliterate mention the deposed dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak, respectively.