Archinect - News

John Portman's personal Sea Island retreat for sale for $40 million in Georgia

2024-11-22T10:48:00-05:00

This house from John Portman has hit the market in coastal Georgia for $40 million. The Peachtree Center architect’s vacation home from 1986 until his death in 2017, Entelechy II is a 13,000-square-foot design with seven bedrooms and eight full baths. The Robb Report says it "represents an apotheosis of the innovative (if sometimes underappreciated) architect and developer’s dramatic signature style."

Sotheby's International Realty has the listing with a special video tour. Another beloved architect's home, George Homsey’s Third Bay Tradition style former personal residence in San Francisco's Liberty Hill Historic District, hit the market recently for $2.45 million. Writer Colin Marshall's 2020 dive into the legacies of Portman and fellow neo-futurist Syd Mead can be found here.

Image courtesy Bartolotti Media

The struggle between green design and architectural history hangs over the renovation of one Bangkok icon

2023-08-11T18:40:00-04:00

A Bangkok landmark known as the “robot building” has been stripped of its identity, heritage campaigners have said, as they called for the city’s distinctive architecture to preserved. [...] Campaigners have urged the bank to find a way to improve energy efficiency while maintaining the facade’s unique design. They say the lack of legal protection for the building underlines the broader need for changes to how sites of special importance are identified and preserved.

The Guardian tells the story of the Sumet Jumsai-designed near-iconic "Robot Building" at the heart of Bangok’s bustling commercial district. The 37-year-old structure has been undergoing renovations at the hands of Singapore’s United Overseas Bank (UOB), irking fans and preservationists who feel its character is being taken away with the wholesale removal of its original facade and, possibly, other key architectural elements which have made it so distinctively part of the capital's visual landscape.

The bank contends its work is necessary for the well-being of employees and to reduce energy consumption. What could result from the fray is a possible change in the structure of preservation, which mostly favors ancient monuments in the country. Air rights can still be sold to developers, which are in part the target of reform efforts. The saga also touches on the need for greater architectural education for the public, an issue which aided in the demise of Tokyo's Nakagin Capsule Towe...

Moshe Safdie says he 'paid a price' for antagonizing post-modernism

2022-10-31T12:22:00-04:00

“In the 70s and 80s, my ideas were ignored. I was antagonistic to postmodernism [...] and I paid a price.”

The 84-year-old Habitat 67 mastermind sat down with Rowan Moore to discuss his career and new memoir If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture. Among other topics, he said he had “no idea” that his 2011 Marina Bay Sands design would become “an instant icon” and that the political situation in his native Israel brings him “great frustration” even though he believes supporters of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanction) movement are making a “stupid mistake.”

Safdie then spoke to the chilling reception that met his post-Habitat endeavors in Puerto Rico and New York, which failed to “replicate like mushrooms” as the then 30-something architect had expected. An exhibition of Safdie’s unrealized work is conveniently on display at the Boston Architectural College’s McCormick Gallery from now through January 2nd.

Relate on Archinect: ‘More Than 50 Percent Of My Work Is Unbuilt’ says Moshe Safdie in new Time-Space-Existence video

“As an architect committed to building and impacting the e...

Is Tim Burton's Beetlejuice the best Halloween movie for design students to watch?

2022-10-29T09:00:00-04:00

Every season has its own set of iconic movies, and within that set, there are those that stick out for their portrayal and elevation of architectural issues. Tim Burton’s 1988 classic, Beetlejuice, is perhaps the fall’s best example — an ever-trendy classic Halloween tale that showcases and offers some critique of the period’s salient design trends. Even the scale model of the town has some architectural qualities, and its central star — a shopworn Victorian-style home — has become an inspiration to aspiring designers around the world.

The conceit of Beetlejuice has essential elements that design students would be well-served to evaluate. Two families fighting for the creative control of a structure with radically different agendas. Its conflict is based on a disagreement about preferences in residential architecture: The “good, sturdy country craftsmanship” of a rural Victorian run up against a vacuous amalgam of 80s high design.

Opening title sequence from the film. Image courtes...

Denise Scott Brown remembers John Rauch, long-time partner and influential driver of postmodernism, who passed away aged 91

2022-08-25T12:18:00-04:00

An influential figure in the development of American postmodernism has been lost after news that former Venturi, Scott Brown partner John Rauch passed away in Philadelphia last week.

Rauch was born and raised in the city and educated at Wesleyan University and UPenn before entering the profession following his service in the U.S. Army. He was an early champion of the work of his partner Robert Venturi and would, through their combined efforts under the then-moniker Venturi and Rauch, contribute to formative projects including the influential Vanna Venturi house and Fire Station #4 that defined the scope and trajectory of architecture for another thirty years.

Fire Station #4 in Columbus, Indiana. Image courtesy Library of Congress

The practice continued to evolve after the addition of Denise Scott Brown in 1969 and publication of Learning from Las Vegas in 1972. Rauch would again be instrumental in the selection of major higher-ed commissions for Yale, Princeton, and Ohio State Unive...

Michael Heizer’s land art masterpiece 'City' finally sets an opening date

2022-08-22T10:00:00-04:00

City, a vast complex of outdoor structures and landmasses the Land artist Michael Heizer began constructing in the desert of Nevada in 1970, will finally begin welcoming public visitors next month. The site’s opening on 2 September, more than 50 years after work at the site began, marks the fulfillment of Heizer’s most ambitious and career-defining project.

Get ready to weep (assuming you are among the select art tourists willing to travel to the site-specific installation, as Heizer intended): The 50-year saga surrounding the National Mall-sized sculpture is over, and the Triple Aught Foundation, which manages the site, will begin accepting up to six visitors a day in an outcome that has at times seemed impossible.

Heizer's masterpiece has been the subject of an Obama-era protective designation (a measure first proposed by the late Senator Harry Reid) and later the failed Trump Administration attempt to open up the 740,000-acre tract to mining and development. Plans were originally for the earthwork to be made public in 2020. LACMA director Michael Govan says it is "an artwork aware of our primal impulses to build and organize space."

As the artist, who began the piece in 1970, told the Los Angeles Times in 2012: "The size thing is not some gimmick or attention-getting trick but a genuine undercurrent of the work. Frank Gehry for ins...

Thompson Center may find new life as Google's Chicago office

2022-07-04T09:00:00-04:00

Google is negotiating to buy the spaceship-like James R. Thompson Center in Chicago in a deal that could provide a much-needed boost to the city’s Loop business district. The Mountain View, California-based tech giant is seeking to buy the Helmut Jahn-designed building at 100 W. Randolph St., where it plans to expand its Chicago offices into a large portion of the 17-story building’s soon-to-be-renovated office space, according to people familiar with the deal.

The future for Chicago's James R. Thompson Center, designed by the late Helmut Jahn, may be looking a bit brighter after the National Trust for Historic Preservation added the postmodern gem to its annual “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places” list in 2019.

Last year, the Chicago Architecture Center and Chicago Architectural Club jointly hosted a design ideas competition to promote adaptive-reuse scenarios for the center and save the landmark building from the wrecking ball.

KPF renovation of Roche-Dinkeloo's 60 Wall Street comes under landmarks preservation review

2022-06-27T17:47:00-04:00

A key building feature on one of Kevin Roche’s most ingenious New York City designs is under threat of being erased, according to the preservation group Docomomo US.

The late Pritzker winner’s 60 Wall Street building is undergoing renovation by Kohn Pedersen Fox this summer, and the group says it includes the removal of the facade’s characteristic chamfered design elements and changes to the atrium that will alter its unique lobby space “beyond recognition.”

The atrium of 60 Wall Street. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons user Matthew G. Bisanz (CC BY 3.0)

A rendering of the proposed changes to the atrium. Image courtesy Paramount Group

Completed in 1989, the postmodern office design was included in Docomomo’s list of 11 endangered historical places earlier this year and is, per the air rights transfer agreement that was signed when the property was sold a few years ago, legally required to be redeveloped in “harmonious relationship” to the Greek revival former National City Bank Buildi...

Renowned architect Helmut Jahn dies at 81 from cycling accident

2021-05-10T16:14:00-04:00

Helmut Jahn, the highly respected German-American architect, was tragically killed on Saturday from a vehicular collision while riding his bicycle in the Chicago suburb of Campton Hills.

Born in Germany, near Nuremberg, in 1940, Jahn arrived in Chicago in 1966 to study under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). A year later, he joined architecture firm CF Murphy Associates and worked on several high-profile projects, including the McCormick Place in Chicago and the J Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC. He later took full ownership of the firm, renaming it Murphy/Jahn and then eventually JAHN in 2012.

Jahn’s work is best defined by his postmodern steel and glass structures that combined historical and contextual references with high-tech engineering solutions, both paying homage to and departing from the modernism of Mies. It was in the late 1970s and ‘80s that Jahn made his mark, and, in Chicago, his work propelled him as one America’s most p...

James L. Nagle, 'Chicago Seven' architect, has died

2021-02-15T13:37:00-05:00

James L. "Jim" Nagle, founding member of Chicago-based Sheehan Nagle Hartray Architects and an influential voice of the Chicago Seven, a postmodern group of architects formed around Stanley Tigerman in the late 1970s in opposition to the doctrinal application of Modernism at the time, has passed away at the age of 83.

"It wasn't Mies that got boring," Nagle said during a 2005 panel discussion at the Celebrating 25 Years of the Chicago Seven reunion. "It was the copiers that got boring.... You got off an airplane in the 1970s, and you didn't know where you were."

In remembrance of his influence and contribution, Nagle's partner Don McKay, principal at Sheehan Nagle Hartray Architects, issued this statement:

We are saddened by the passing or our colleague, Jim Nagle, one of the very best architects we have known.

Jim’s success came early as one of a group of architects who claimed design independence from the orthodox Modernism that dominated Chicago architecture at the time. Jim wa...

Major Aldo Rossi retrospective to open at MAXXI

2020-11-30T14:25:00-05:00

The work of architect and designer Aldo Rossi, the first Italian winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1990, will be the star of the new major exhibition Aldo Rossi. The architect and the cities opening on March 10 at MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome.

The retrospective features a selection of more than 800 drawings, sketches, models, letters, notes, photographs, and documents produced during Rossi's career that was cut short when he died following a car accident in 1997 at the age of 66.

Aldo Rossi: Architettura con santo. Image courtesy of MAXXI.

"Together with other architects of his generation, Rossi was an interpreter of the fundamental necessity of cultural reconstruction, taking place during the thrust of post-war responsibilities and owing to his extraordinary ability to 'gather' and attract the best of the international culture of his time," explains the museum's event description.

"Taking place more than 20 years after his death and since the last major mo...

DOCOMOMO prepares for coming decade as 1970s architecture turns 50

2020-08-31T15:23:00-04:00

With the start of another decade comes the opportunity to highlight a new crop of historic architecture. Many who haven taken part over recent years in the sometimes insufferable debates over the merits of Brutalism, or in earlier conversations arguing for the legitimacy of midcentury modern architecture, will perhaps find a new conversation piece: Architecture from the 1970s.

As the 1970s themselves turn 50 years old, the age that is typically allows for buildings to be considered "historic" from a legal and regulatory perspective, architecture from this era is due for a lengthy reconsideration.

Writing for Docomomo US, Flora Chou, a Senior Associate and Cultural Resources Planner for Page & Turnbull's Los Angeles office, explains that "like the previous decades, there will be places from the 1970s that are important and worthy of preservation. Our eyes and personal tastes will gradually adjust to see the beauty in what many now consider to be outdated, ugly, and mundane."

"We are ...

Gerald D. Hines, developer of iconic Houston skyscrapers, has died

2020-08-25T13:37:00-04:00

Real estate magnate Gerald D. Hines, the developer behind many of America's most iconic skyscrapers from the late-20th century, has passed away at age 95.

Hines is perhaps best known as the backer for many of downtown Houston's skyline-altering developments, including SOM's One Shell Plaza, Johnson Burgee's Penzoil Place, and I. M. Pei & Partners's JP Morgan Chase towers, among many others. His projects can be found all over the world, including in New York City, San Francisco, China, Spain, and other locales. Hines's work with the Johnson Burgee firm, however, stands out the most, with many of the firm's most well-known projects coming out of their work for Hines.

Bank of America Center in Houston, one of the many projects developed by Hines. Image courtesy of Anders Lagerås.

Characterized by Paul Goldberger as the "un-Trump" in a 2015 interview with The Houston Chronicle, Hines is remembered as a detail-oriented developer who, by some accounts, helped launch the contemporary idea ...

Mansard roof-topped Johnson / Burgee tower in Dallas is for sale

2020-07-29T14:49:00-04:00

A 1.1 million-square-foot office tower complex designed by Johnson / Burgee is currently for sale in Dallas, Texas.

Organized as a trio of conjoined 19-story towers topped with mansard roofs and connected by arch-topped skywalks, the office complex rises behind a low-rise hotel designed in a matching style by the architects. Only the office portion of the complex is for sale, The Dallas Morning News reports. According to the newspaper, the Crescent office complex, as the development is known, was recently renovated and was the largest development project in Dallas history when it was built during the 1980s.

Estimates for the property, which is owned by JP Morgan Asset Management, indicate that it could be worth more than $700 million.

Jaquelin “Jaque" Taylor Robertson, co-founder of Cooper Robertson, has passed away

2020-05-14T13:39:00-04:00

Jaquelin “Jaque" Taylor Robertson, FAIA, a founding partner of architecture firm Cooper Robertson and the urban designer behind the master plan for Celebration, Florida, has passed away at age 87.

Aerial view of Celebration, Florida. Image by Robert Benson Photography.

A message from Cooper Robertson marking the architect's passing reads as follows:

Over the course of his long, fruitful and rich life, Jaque’s accomplishments were innumerable, extraordinary and widely varied. He had a staggering breadth of life experiences and a seemingly bottomless well of talents; always setting the bar high, holding to the highest of standards and accepting nothing short of excellence, first in himself, and in his partners and colleagues as well.

The Jaque we remember is that of a tall, dashingly handsome figure, in custom tailored suits from London, matching bow tie and pocket-square, with a winning smile and a twinkle in his electric blue eyes; a mirror to a soul that was fundamentally warm, lovi...

Former Longaberger 'The Big Basket' building to reopen as luxury hotel

2019-10-25T15:02:00-04:00

The former Longaberger basket building on the eastern edge of Newark will be open for business again, although it will be a place to spend the night instead of work in an office. In a couple years, the seven-story basket building will open as a luxury hotel with 150 rooms, a restaurant and indoor pool.

Formerly the quirky headquarters of The Longaberger Company in Newark, Ohio, the building has been sitting empty since 2016 and was eventually sold to developers in late 2017 (previously on Archinect).

Cleveland-based Sandvick Architects will be designing the landmark's transformation into a luxury hotel.

Stanley Tigerman Rides Again: Architect's final sketches go on display in Chicago

2019-09-16T20:09:00-04:00

A collection of engrossing sketches created by the late architect Stanley Tigerman are currently on view at Chicago's Volume Gallery. The exhibition, titled Tigerman Rides Again, presents some of the final creative works produced by the iconoclastic architect who passed away in June of 2019.

According to exhibition text, "After a hiatus from his daily drawing practice, Stanley Tigerman picked up his pen and his moleskin notebook in January 2019. He began creating images that harkened back to his early paintings and moved away from the drawings he made to express, explore, and develop ideas on architecture throughout his over five decade-long practice. While he is known for his lively and often colorful collages of buildings and cartoons, these black and white drawings revert to another time. The works produce optical illusions and align with his paintings from the 60’s that reveal influences of his former Yale professor, Josef Albers."

Tigerman Rides Again. Images courtesy of Volum...

Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, co-founder of Superstudio, has passed away

2019-08-01T13:51:00-04:00

Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, co-founder of the radical Italian architecture group Superstudio, has passed away at age 78.

Di Francia, born in 1941, started Superstudio in 1966 with Adolfo Natalini; Eventually, the group grew to include Piero Frassinelli, and Alessandro and Roberto Magris. As one of several influential groups of the Radical Architecture era, Superstudio’s critical, utopian architectural visions helped to reshape the way architects were taught to consider their role in the construction of the world’s built environment. Their experiments using illustrations, collages, and other popular forms of reproducible media to communicate architectural ideas allowed the designers to help explode antiquated notions of what architecture should look like, how it should be consumed, and who, ultimately, was included in the audience architects spoke to.

View of Superstudio’s iconic “Continuous Monument” proposal. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, Howard Gilman Foundation....

Redevelopment plans for L.A.'s Pershing Square shift

2019-06-25T12:13:00-04:00

Plans for the much-touted Pershing Square Renew project in Los Angeles appear to be shifting.

Curbed reports that three years after being selected as the winning entry for an international competition to redesign the five-acre postmodern urban park, a team led by French landscape architects Agence Ter has shifted gears. Pershing Square is the oldest park in Los Angeles and its latest iteration was designed in 1996 by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta. The team's winning "radical flatness"-focused proposal has instead given way to a phased approach that will focus demolishing an existing concessions stand at the park in order to replace the structure with a new set of elevators serving the below-ground parking garage located beneath the park.

Pershing Square's latest iteration was designed in 1994 by Ricardo Legorreta. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user jjron.

The remaining plans involve other small fixes that focus on “taking down as many barriers as we can,” Debra Girod, a partner...

Portland Building is no longer historically significant

2019-06-13T16:58:00-04:00

A new audit conducted by the city of Portland, Oregon presents an alarming view into the contentious renovations currently being undertaken for the Michael Graves-designed Portland Building.

Among a flurry of critiques aimed at the project organizers, the report states that changes performed to the building's outward material configuration have been so transformative as to effectively nullify the iconic postmodern tower's historical significance.

The report warns: "Despite the importance of historic preservation, there was no minimum requirement identified for this project principle. The project team [only] identified an aspirational goal and anticipated benefit to 'maintain the historic and iconic status of the building.'"

The Portland Building in 1982, Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Steve Morgan.

The project, guided by a desire to mitigate water infiltration along the building's concrete facade, will essentially re-skin the 15-story tower with a pressed aluminum rainscreen desi...

Arquitectonica's Babylon in Miami to be demolished

2019-06-13T15:38:00-04:00

Fifteen months ago the Miami City Commission shot down a recommendation to make the Babylon, the first multifamily building designed by renowned Miami firm Arquitectonica (and its second project ever), a historically protected building. As a result, the 37-year-old Babylon [...] will be demolished sometime before July.

Telling the history of the building and Miami's Brickell neighborhood, Biscayne Times senior writer Erik Bojnansky explains that "in 1978, Arquitectonica was still an up-and-coming Coral Gables firm. Babylon was its second building, the first being the 6900-square-foot single-family home known as Pink House, on the Miami Shores waterfront, created for Spear’s parents. Even before Babylon was completed in 1982, Progressive Architecture, a respected architecture and design magazine, bestowed an award on the design renderings, which alluded to the ancient Hanging Gardens of Babylon."

Eight brilliantly playful works of architecture by Stanley Tigerman

2019-06-05T17:50:00-04:00

As we announced earlier this week, Stanley Tigerman passed away at the age of 88. As a full life of work lies behind the Chicago architect, we look back on his uniquely playful and humane architecture, much of which was produced in collaboration with his wife, Margaret McCurry.

1. The Titanic (1978)

The Titanic (1978). Photomontage on paper.

Though he had developed a robust portfolio of built works throughout his 53-year-long career, Tigerman was also lauded as a master communicator through illustration and collage. He owed much of his creative practice to Mies van der Rohe, the modernist architect who dotted the Chicago skyline with perfected black boxes, but he offered this image of Crown Hall, one of Mies' most beloved buildings on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), sinking in Lake Michigan as an opportunity to reevaluate the architect's legacy.

According to the Art Institute of Chicago, the photomontage "meant to provoke architects to contend with the Mies...

Michael Graves drawings acquired by Princeton University Art Museum

2019-05-31T13:59:00-04:00

“We are pleased to be able to preserve and share these important drawings, which document numerous projects and reflect Michael Graves’s manifold interests and talents, here at the museum, where he was known as family, and with our global audiences,”

The Princeton University Art Museum has acquired a collection of nearly 5,000 drawings created by postmodern-era architect Michael Graves.

Graves, who died in 2015, was a prolific artist who sketched out many of his iconic building proposals using his signature yellow-, sienna-, and aqua-hued color pencils. The gifted collection is filled with many examples of Graves's virtuosic output and includes drawings made with ink washes, pen and marker, and pencil, as well.

Drawing of San Pietro church in Frascati, Italy from 1961 by Michael Graves. Image from the Estate of Michael Graves via the Princeton University Art Museum.

Graves started his practice in 1964 at Princeton University, where he taught for 39 years before retiring in 2001. Throughout that long and storied career, Graves drew up designs for an incredible array of boundary-pushing buildings, including the Portland Building in Oregon, the Dolphin and Swan hotels at the Walt Disney World resort in Florida, as well as an unbu...

Postmodern building named to "11 most endangered" list for the first time

2019-05-30T13:59:00-04:00

In a sign of the rising concern over the future of postmodern architecture in the American preservation community, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has named the 34-year-old Helmut Jahn-designed James R. Thompson Center in Chicago to its annual “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places” list.

In making the cut, the 17-story Illinois state government building becomes the first work of postmodern architecture named to the influential list.

Exterior view of the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago, Photo courtesy Landmarks Illinois

The orange and blue-tinted glass and steel building opened in 1985 as a rebuke to a then-dominant modernist architecture ideology that called for austere and aseptic expanses of curtain walled glass for office buildings. Designed with sloped exterior glazing and a base marked by a perimeter arcade accented with alternating colored panels, the building presents a degree of consideration for the public that challenged the conventional notions of...

Plan to redevelop Jon Jerde's Horton Plaza moves forward in San Diego

2019-05-23T13:30:00-04:00

The San Diego City Council voted unanimously to approve “Campus At Horton” on Monday. It's a redevelopment plan that would turn Horton Plaza into a tech hub. Stockdale Capital Partners, an LA-based real estate firm, bought Horton Plaza from Westfield back in August with known intentions of redevelopment. When Stockdale announced the purchase, the firm said their new tech hub plan for Horton was expected to create 4,000 jobs, and generate $1.8 billion each year.

With the iconic Jon Jerde-designed Horton Plaza mall in San Diego poised for transformation, one of Southern California’s key works of postmodern urbanism is soon to be lost.

In designing the superblock mall in 1985, Jerde, who was referred to as the Frank Gehry's “evil" twin in the Rem Koolhaas-produced Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, sought to reintroduce the communal act of shopping back into the city center. Designed as pop-pup historical context, Horton Plaza is organized around a central shopping courtyard framed by classically-inspired, multi-story facades.

Those colorful facades will soon give way to expanses of curtain wall glass and other contemporary finishes. Developer Stockdale Capital Partners aims to start construction later this year.

Bill approving sale and potential redevelopment of the controversial Thompson Center moves forward

2019-02-15T16:06:00-05:00

Illinois governor, J.B. Pritzker, plans on signing a state bill that would authorize the sale of the James R. Thompson Center, paving the way for its potential redevelopment.

The postmodern building designed by Helmut Jahn has housed offices of the Illinois state government since opening in 1985. Due to its polarizing design and its notoriously hard to heat and cool nature, state lawmakers have been pushing to sell the state-owned property, which could bring in a potential $300 million.

First passed in 2017, SB 866—which would move offices across the street into the state-owned Michael A. Bilandic building—has been stuck in legislative limbo for the past two years. Under Prtizker's new governorship, the state has regained interest in the possibility of a sale, from which funds could be used to address pension liabilities and other unpaid bills.

However, the threat of endangering what preservationists see as a unique representation of transparent government and Chicago's architectu...

Snøhetta's updated AT&T Building redesign gets Landmarks Preservation Commission approval

2019-02-13T13:38:00-05:00

The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission paved the way for Snøhetta to partially redesign Philip Johnson’s Postmodern skyscraper at 550 Madison Avenue Tuesday with a vote backing the contested plan. [...] The biggest change to the property, which was granted landmark status in July 2018, is the privately-owned public space (POPS) at the ground level.

Image: Snøhetta

Snøhetta's original proposal to renovate the, now landmark-protected, 1984 icon of Postmodernism at 550 Madison Avenue was met with fierce opposition from architects, preservationists, and critics.

An updated design that incorporated much of the feedback was released a few months later in December 2018.

Image: Snøhetta

Nearly three decades old, Eisenman's (still laser-less) Greater Columbus Convention Center revisited

2019-01-09T14:35:00-05:00

With full theatrical trappings—nu-age Philip Glass music, smoke machines, mood lighting--the Eisenman team unveiled to the crowd a scale model of the building, which produced a light show to rival a Laser Floyd spectacular. These dozen red-hued Death Star beams [...] were to be placed on the building and neighboring structures, flashing, blinking, sweeping across downtown like some insane city-scale laser security system. Three years later, it was opened. Sans lasers.

Nathan Eddy, architecture documentary director and most recently a driving force to save Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building in New York, pens a delightful review of Peter Eisenman's 1990 competition-winning proposal for the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio.

"Forget the Bilbao Effect—today’s clients demand the Instagram Effect, with architects all but forced to include social media experiences into their designs," writes Eddy. "In 2018, a quarter century feels like forever ago, and Eisenman’s building, with its peculiar colors, slanted walls and cocky posturing, is still somehow both out of and ahead of its time, a futuristic anachronism."

Save, renovate or demolish: Postmodernism's midlife crisis

2018-12-27T21:51:00-05:00

Heading into their fourth and fifth decades, deep into midlife architectural crises, needing face-lifts, they’re now vulnerable and back again in the public eye, eliciting concern and attracting a second look — and sympathy — even from people who never liked them. But will these loved-hated structures be saved, and should they?

Joseph Giovannini writes about the historic vulnerability buildings entering their fourth or fifth decade encounter and how the public distaste may, potentially, turn into a sudden nostalgia for certain veterans of a not-so-distant architectural era.

Citing recent controversial efforts to demolish or renovate PoMo landmarks, like Johnson & Burgee's AT&T Building, Graves’s Portland Building, or Venturi Scott Brown's Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Giovannini writes: "The irony of purposely ironic buildings that joked with history is that they are themselves verging on history, and history more than beauty is proving their strongest defense."

Check out Snøhetta's updated AT&T Building renovation proposal

2018-12-13T13:53:00-05:00

A year after Snøhetta’s first attempt at renovating Olayan America and Chelsfield’s office tower at 550 Madison Avenue ended in controversy and eventual landmarking, the architects are hoping their second attempt will be smoother.

"The new proposal unveiled Tuesday features three stories of retail at the ground level and a new opening in the rear facade to allow sight lines from Madison Avenue into a new open-air garden that will replace the currently enclosed galleria," reports The Real Deal about Snøhetta's reworked approach after last year's initial proposal to renovate the Philip Johnson and John Burgee-designed 550 Madison Avenue tower—formerly known as the AT&T Building, a 1984 icon of Postmodernism—ignited a passionate debate among architects, preservationists, and critics. The building was ultimately granted landmark protection in July 2018.

Image: Snøhetta

"Snøhetta’s design for the rear of the building (west side) would provide the community with a vibrant green space that will be 50% larger than the current public space," reads a project statement on the architects' website.

Image: Snøhetta

"Snøhetta’s updated design will preserve and revitalize the landmark tower, undo past renovations that compromi...