Archinect - News

Meow Wolf opens new 95,000-square-foot installation space in small plot surrounded by three highways in Denver

2022-04-01T19:35:00-04:00

Let’s start with a little exercise. I would like you to input “Meow Wolf Denver” on Google Maps (here, I did it for you) and look at where the red pin falls on the map. Do you see it yet, the small, somewhat tear-shaped building tucked inside an interwoven web of highways? That, my friends, is Denver’s newest arts destination—and it sits on a tiny, triangular plot of land at the intersection of three highways.

Meow Wolf, the Sante Fe-based arts and entertainment company that specializes in hosting large-scale immersive experiences, has set up shop in Denver, with a new, uniquely-positioned space that opened to the public in September 2021.

The building, spanning 5 stories and 95,000 square feet, was designed to fill the void between a stretch of I-25 and two off-ramps. Its façade is clad with specialty matte panels to ensure the building doesn’t create a glare for drivers.

Before settling on this location, Meow Wolf had two other potential locations in mind, both located in Denver’s River North Art District. The team decided against these locations because building would have required the displacement of existing organizations in an area that was already experiencing gentrification. Meow Wolf, thus, called upon Denver-based architecture firm Shears Adkins Rockmore (SAR +) and boutique real estate firm Revesco Properties.

The key to utilizing such a constrained space was building the st...

Los Angeles honors President Obama with renaming of two roads

2018-09-05T16:13:00-04:00

Rodeo Road will be renamed after President Barack Obama, city leaders decided this week. But it’s not the first roadway in LA that lawmakers agreed to name after the 44th president. In 2017, the state legislature approved a resolution to designate the stretch of the 134 freeway that runs between Pasadena and Eagle Rock as the President Barack H. Obama Highway. A year later, however, there’s little evidence of that decision.

A 3.7 mile stretch of road in Los Angeles, now called Rodeo Road, will be renamed Obama Boulevard honoring the country’s first African American president. Located in the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw neighborhood, the road was chosen for its significance in the black community and its relation to a 2007 rally site Obama held at the beginning of his campaign.

Obama Boulevard is not scheduled to be fully renamed until Presidents Day in 2019. Another Obama named stretch of road in Los Angeles is also awaiting new signage. A stretch of the 134 freeway running between Pasadena and Eagle Rock has been approved to be named the President Barack H. Obama Highway, however the money for new signage has yet to be raised.

Unbuilt highway schemes — and the traces they left behind

2018-01-08T15:00:00-05:00

The postwar passion for highway construction saw cities around the world carved up in the name of progress. But as communities fought back many schemes were abandoned – their half-built traces showing what might have been

Michael Maltzan proposes greening L.A.'s 134 freeway

2016-07-07T14:13:00-04:00

Christopher Hawthorne, in keeping with his exploration of the ever evolving urban identity of Los Angeles, reached out via the L.A. Times to Michael Maltzan to see if the architect had any ideas about transforming L.A.'s freeways from noisy polluting agents into civic amenities. Maltzan has responded pro bono with an idea to place a 3/4 mile stretch of the 134 freeway into a tunnel which would not only reduce noise and annually absorb 516,000 tons of carbon dioxide, but double as a site for rooftop solar panels and vegetation walls.

Drivers in the tunnel would still be able to see their Pasadena surroundings through the lattice-like exterior, although residents near the just south of the Rose Bowl portion of the freeway would experience a significant traffic noise reduction thanks to the tunnel's acoustically insulated walls. As the L.A. Times notes, Michael Maltzan "describes the proposal, produced in collaboration with the Los Angeles office of the engineering firm Arup, as 'an env...

U.S. Transportation Secretary Foxx on the troubled relationship between infrastructure and race: "We ought to do it better than we did it the last time"

2016-04-28T13:53:00-04:00

As a child, Anthony Foxx knew he couldn’t ride his bike far from home without being blocked by a freeway. By the time he became U.S. transportation secretary he understood why. “We now know — overwhelmingly — that our urban freeways were almost always routed through low-income and minority neighborhoods, creating disconnections from opportunity that exist to this day,” [...] “I really believe that this is an issue that has been on the shelf collecting dust for a long time,” Foxx said.

LA mayor Eric Garcetti slow-jams 101 freeway closure announcement

2016-02-08T15:41:00-05:00

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti summoned his inner crooner and released a music video Thursday to warn drivers of an impending 40-hour traffic headache -- the #101SlowJam. Flanked by the Theodore Roosevelt High School Jazz Band, Garcetti sings a tune reminiscent of the "Slow Jam the News" segment on "The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon."

"See we're bringing down the 6th Street Bridge, making way for something new and the demolition will cause delays," Garcetti says in the video. "But sometimes, just sometimes, you have to get your hands dirty to build something beautiful." – Infrastructure never felt so sexy.

LA's freeway system is becoming an increasingly crowded 'neighborhood' for the city's homeless

2015-12-28T13:00:00-05:00

The freeway system, which Southern Californians once saw as a ticket to freedom, an emblem of L.A.'s love of individuality and movement, increasingly serves as a landscape of hard luck and a desperate sort of community — a place to hunker down. [...] As the homeless population grows in a city whose public realm is the haggard product of several decades of neglect, the freeway has taken on a crucial, if often dispiriting, neighborhood role despite itself.

"The ranks of the chronically homeless in Los Angeles County have grown by more than 50% in the last two years, to more than 12,000 people, according to one study. If you count all the people who are homeless at least part of the time, the figure rises to an estimated 44,000."

The Pulaski Skyway tells the tale of America's aging highway system

2015-06-16T13:49:00-04:00

Just north of Newark, New Jersey, the Pulaski Skyway became the country’s first so-called “superhighway” — a 3.5-mile raised roadway running over the top of some of the most heavily industrialized property in the country. [...] In infrastructure terms, the Pulaski is what’s called “functionally obsolete,” meaning it doesn’t meet modern design standards —and the money being spent to fix it up won’t change that.

Ode to the Stack, Los Angeles's iconic infrastructure

2015-04-15T15:40:00-04:00

The Four Level, or Stack as it’s sometimes known, was the first interchange of its kind when it fully opened in 1953. [...] It may seem a cliche to simply associate LA with its freeways, but the connection between the infrastructure and the city’s image is strong. It’s not just about driving, it’s about a new form of urban living in the postwar era [...] “LA kind of emerged at the forefront of that development and it became recognised as a freeway metropolis”

OMA and OLIN Studio to design new 11th Street Bridge Park in D.C.

2014-10-16T12:37:00-04:00

OMA and OLIN Studio have been selected to design the new 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington D.C. The competition was held as part of the 11th Street Bridge Park project initiative, which will transform an old freeway bridge into D.C.'s first elevated park. From the six shortlisted teams in phase one of the nationwide competition, and down to four finalists, OMA + OLIN won with their proposal, "Anacostia Crossing."

Dig into the details over at Bustler.

Weekly News Round-Up for July 28, 2014: Exploding pipelines and contentious museums

2014-08-04T14:58:00-04:00

Friday, August 1

Gas Pipelines Explode in Taiwan City Killing 24: The cause of the propene pipeline explosion is still unknown, but officials noticed irregularities in the pipe's flow hours beforehand, without investigating further.
Jacko's Neverland Ranch is up for sale at $50-75M: Michael Jackson's Disneyland-esque compound in Santa Barbara was handed back to Tom Barrack's Colony Capital in 2008, when Jackson was heavily in debt. With $5M in annual upkeep, Colony Capital is now selling the property.
Plans approved for Damien Hirst's village on the British coast: Hirst will collaborate with Architects Rundell Associates on the 75-home city. Renderings are surprisingly conventional when compared to Hirst's work.

Thursday, July 31

New Renderings of What Will Replace Grafitti Art Mecca 5Pointz Emerge: Unsurprisingly, it's two residential towers: with some mixed-use space on the ground floor, and 20% affordable housing. Designed by HTO Architect, the buildings will have some space set as...