Archinect - News

Indonesia begins construction on new Nusantara capital city in Borneo

2023-01-24T17:54:00-05:00

Indonesia expects to begin construction in the second quarter on apartments worth $2.7 billion for thousands of civil servants due to move to its new capital city on Borneo island, an official said late on Tuesday. Authorities have already started building basic infrastructure in the area, with an aim to start relocating some government administration and civil servants in 2024.

The 450,000-acre starter city’s initial residential program will include 184 apartment towers for a total of 14,500 government employees. AECOM and Nikken Sekkei are leading the development of its master plan towards an expected inauguration date to coincide with the country’s Independence Day on the 17th of August next year. Officials previously decided that the seat of power’s future in Jakarta is untenable owing to increased flood risk, rising sea levels, and a rapid rate of sinking that has been recorded up to 11 inches per year in certain areas.

AECOM is moving its headquarters to Dallas, Texas

2021-08-19T14:31:00-04:00

Multinational engineering firm AECOM announced Tuesday that it is relocating its global headquarters from Los Angeles to Dallas, effective October 1, 2021.

AECOM CEO Troy Rudd and select corporate leaders will move to the company’s existing Dallas office, joining the more than 1,200 employees based at the location. The company’s 2,500 employees based in California, across its Los Angeles office and other offices across the state, will remain. As stated in AECOM’s announcement, the move will provide the firm “additional benefits as a corporate hub and talent magnet for the engineering and consulting industry.”

In recent years, the Dallas-Fort Worth area has been an attractive landing spot for businesses and workers. As reported by Construction Dive, since 2010, 140 companies have moved their headquarters to Northern Texas, according to an op-ed by JLL Dallas Managing Director Jeremy McGown. He notes that the metropolitan region has grown faster than any other major city, with nearly ...

Disney is building a new regional campus in Orlando, relocating 2,000 employees from California

2021-07-20T09:21:00-04:00

The Walt Disney Co. said Thursday it planned to build a new regional campus in central Florida to house at least 2,000 professional employees who will be relocating from Southern California to work in digital technology, finance and product development.

Chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products, Josh D’Armaro, in a letter to employees, said the move would allow creative and business teams to be better integrated. The new campus will be located about 20 miles to the east of Disney World in a master-planned community called Lake Nona.

“Florida is known for its rich culture of hospitality and active lifestyle as well as a lower cost of living with no state income tax,” said D’Amaro in the employee letter.

It is set to be built over the next 18 months. Its exact location, size, and architect have yet to be announced.

Thailand considers moving capital to ease overcrowding in Bangkok

2019-09-23T14:39:00-04:00

Citing overcrowded conditions in Bangkok, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has said moving the capital is a possibility. [...] “There are two possible approaches to moving the capital,” Prayut said. “The first is finding a city that’s neither too far nor too expensive to move to. The second is to decentralise the urban area to outer Bangkok to reduce crowding.”

In August, another Southeast Asian nation, Indonesia, announced that it had picked a site for an as-yet-unnamed new capital — away from the sinking and increasingly congested current capital Jakarta.

Egypt has also been working to move its capital out of the wildly sprawling 'old' Cairo.

As Jakarta sinks, Indonesia picks jungle site in Borneo for its new capital city

2019-08-26T18:30:00-04:00

President Joko Widodo announced Monday that officials had chosen an area in East Kalimantan province, on the island of Borneo, for the as-yet-unnamed capital. Construction on the 450,000-acre site would start next year, and people would move in beginning in 2024. [...] Critics of the plan have warned that the cost of moving the capital could be untenable. [...] What’s more, shifting civil servants and their families to a new city in Borneo will not stop Jakarta from sinking, they say.

With some areas of Jakarta sinking as much as 10 inches a year, caused by the digging of underground aquifers and worsened by climate change, the need to relocate the capital has become more pressing in recent years.

The effort will cost an estimated $33 billion, President Widodo said during his Monday announcement, The Washington Post reports.

'Deep adaptation' in the face of planetary climate catastrophe

2018-10-02T18:36:00-04:00

In the language of climate change, “adaptation” refers to ways to blunt the immediate effects of extreme weather, such as building seawalls, conserving drinking water, updating building codes, and helping more people get disaster insurance. [...] But some researchers are going further, calling for what some call the “deep adaptation agenda.”

Bloomberg's Climate & Environment Reporter, Christopher Flavelle, lays out a range of climate change projections—from the general consensus to the more pessimistic—and how an array of 'deep adaptation' measures could help to mitigate the damage. "Rather than simply asking people to water their lawns less often [...]," Flavelle writes, "governments need to consider large-scale, decades-long infrastructure projects, such as transporting water to increasingly arid regions and moving cities away from the ocean."

As mining threatens Kiruna, the city plans for possible demolition and relocation two miles east

2015-08-03T19:57:00-04:00

In a highly unusual case of urbanism, the whole town centre and its surrounding neighbourhoods are to be demolished...The 3,050 homes that would be affected by the impact of the mining – in addition to shops, offices, schools, the city hall and the hospital – will all be bought by [the LKAB mining company], knocked down and relocated. The process of moving the city will happen in phases, with the majority estimated to be completed by 2040.

Rapid mining activity in Kiruna is already posing a serious threat to the city, to the point that the mining company LKAB plans to relocate the entire municipality two miles eastward to prevent buildings from collapsing into the mine. The Guardian gives an overview on how locals are reacting to the relocation proposal, and how those two miles could completely change everything.

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

The Aluminaire House to relocate to Palm Springs

2015-03-13T14:27:00-04:00

When it was unveiled in New York City in April 1931, the starkly modern Aluminaire House was an overnight sensation that emboldened an architectural movement. Designed as a case study by architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, the three-story house, which was built in 10 days, became the first all-metal prefabricated house in the U.S.

After Sunnyside Gardens was a no-go, it looks like the Aluminaire House will be heading to sunny Palm Springs, California, according to an announcement by Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet during a fundraising event at Palm Springs Modernism Week last month. The Aluminaire House Foundation plans on placing the all-metal prefab house right across the Palm Springs Art Museum to become another modernist attraction in the city -- where Frey lived and practiced from 1935 to his death in 1998.

Previously: The Aluminaire House looks to Sunnyside Gardens as its possible new home

Germany Plans to Raze Towns for Brown Coal and Cheap Energy

2014-02-13T16:55:00-05:00

Atterwasch is tiny, its single street lined with sturdy brick and stone houses. The village has a single church whose bells peal out at noon each day, a small volunteer fire department, and a cemetery with a special section devoted to German soldiers who died nearby in the closing months of WWII. Atterwasch may soon be gone. Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, hopes to relocate the village and its residents in order to strip-mine the ground underneath for lignite, or "brown coal."

Hip Cities That Think About How They Work

2011-11-23T11:46:07-05:00

This survey is not based solely on quality of life, number of trees or the cost of a month’s rent. Instead, we examine some cities that aim to be both smart and well managed, yet have an undeniably hip vibe. Our pick of cities that are, in a phrase, both great and good...

The NYT selects Auckland, Berlin, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Curitiba, Santiago, Shanghai and Vilnius as the hippest cities for young professionals.