Archinect - News

Architects Bruce Becker and William J. Lenihan appointed to U.S. Commission of Fine Arts

2024-06-17T14:47:00-04:00

Earlier last month, President Biden’s appointment of architects Bruce Redman Becker and William J. Lenihan to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) was announced in Washington, D.C. The new appointments serve as replacements for James McCrery and Duncan Stroik following the culmination of their service to the 114-year-old body, which provides important design guidance for all new federal government projects in the capital.

Becker is the President of Westport, Connecticut's Becker + Becker, a 74-year-old firm known most recently for their award-winning redesign of Marcel Breuer's famous Pirelli Tire Building in New Haven. Lenihan is a principal at the Delaware/Philadelphia-based Tevebaugh Architecture. The pair join Billie Tsien, Justin Garrett Moore, HGA principal Peter Cook, and Lisa E. Delplace as other serving CFA members.

Biden administration issues mandate to make federal vehicles and buildings run on renewable energy by 2050

2021-12-14T13:46:00-05:00

President Biden on Wednesday set in motion a plan to make the federal government carbon neutral, ordering federal agencies to buy electric vehicles, to power facilities with wind, solar and nuclear energy, and to use sustainable building materials.

Biden called for the transformation of 300,000 government buildings, 600,000 cars and trucks, and the use of its annual $650 billion budget for goods and services to meet his goal for a carbon-neutral federal government by 2050.

Detailed by The New York Times, his timetable for the transition is as follows: By 2030, Biden wants the federal government to purchase electricity only from sources that do not emit carbon dioxide. By 2032, the administration wants the emissions from building operations, such as heating, halved. And by 2035, all new federal car and truck purchases would also be zero-emissions.

There’s uncertainty over whether Biden’s climate goals will come into fruition as Congress has yet to approve a $1.7 trillion spending bill that would help achieve his targets and the expected limitations posed by the Supreme Court.

NYC to receive $176 million in federal funds for flood-protection proposal

2016-01-22T15:25:00-05:00

[Through a national competition by the Department of Housing and Urban Development,] The money would be used to help fortify a stretch of shoreline from Montgomery Street on the Lower East Side to the northern tip of Battery Park City. Specific measures have not yet been determined, but could include adding sea walls and temporary flood walls that could be deployed before a storm, and building grass berms that could double as recreational areas.

Not to be confused with the Rebuild By Design competition-winning proposal, "The BIG U", from 2014.

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien presented with National Medal of Arts by President Obama

2014-07-30T21:04:00-04:00

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien were honored with the prestigious National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). As the highest award bestowed to artists and arts patrons by the U.S. federal government, the medal specially recognizes individuals or groups for their outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth, support, and availability of the arts in the country.

President Barack Obama individually presented the medals to Williams, Tsien, and all the recipients during the recent awards ceremony at the White House in Washington D.C.

Read on for more info:

"Billie Tsien and Tod Williams [were acknowledged] for their contributions to architecture and arts education. Whether public or private, their deliberate and inspired designs have a profound effect on the lives of those who interact with them, and their teaching and spirit of service have inspired young people to pursue their passions"

The list of notable medal recipients also included:

Julia Alvarez, Noveli...

American frontier's first 'starchitecture?'

2011-04-26T01:40:47-04:00

"It is interesting here in the frontier: Who were they trying to impress?"

Warren Gerds, of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, shares with us a building that might otherwise be relatively insignificant if it was elsewhere in America. The Fort Howard Hospital is a Late-Federal-styled building in Allouez, Green Bay, Wisconsin. The story is what makes the building particularly interesting.

"Starchitecture" is usually defined as buildings and follies wrought-to-being by a computer-scripted composition littered with fantastical shapes from cathartic fractals to abstracted crystalline shards to yet-to-be-named distended-and-distorted spherical blobs. But, "starchitecture," as another concept seems to transcend both style and time if one were to define "starchitecture" purely in terms of architecture that embodies emotion, speculation and alienation; architectural objects that essentially should not or could not exist referentially to their neighbors and time periods.

Fort Howard Hospital is one of those objects. The hospital was built in 1834-1835 at the...