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 Real Deal
"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... View full entry
A new report by real estate agency Knight Frank finds that 153 properties in six cities’ “ultra-prime” category sold for a combined total of $6.6 billion in the last year, or an average of $43 million per house.
Hong Kong led the world in sales over $25 million, followed by New York, then London.
— Bloomberg
Market slowdown? What market slowdown? While the real estate sector in the U.S. and certain global regions (looking at you, Brexit-y London) is seeing signs of cooling, including the upper-scale segment, there has been no significant impact on the uppest-scale cream slice of the industry with... View full entry
He designed the Shard in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, but for his latest project, Italian architect Renzo Piano has taken his impressive legacy to the unsuspecting city of San Ramon in order to build a suburban shopping center. Completed for a reported cost of $300 million, City... View full entry
On Monday, the giant claw of a large piece of machinery tore away at one of the walls of Parker Center, the former headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. Vacant since 2013, [Parker Center Tower] will be cleared out and a 27-story high-rise will take its place, holding offices for city employees and services that are now spread across multiple buildings. — LA Curbed
Los Angeles has an unfortunate history of erasing its not too-distant past, and it continues to show no mercy to the era of hard-edged modernism. Parker Center Tower, one such building the Downtown Los Angeles, is the most recent to suffer from the city's need to tear itself down and reimagine its... View full entry
Metro CEO Phil Washington announced Thursday that the agency had signed a letter of intent with a company called Aerial Rapid Transit Technologies that plans to build an aerial tram running between Union Station and the stadium.
The letter will allow the agency to begin negotiations with the company in order to allow the proposal to move forward.
— Curbed LA
That crazy-sounding plan to shuttle thousands of baseball fans from Los Angeles Union Station to Dodger Stadium on game days has become slightly less crazy with Metro's decision to take a closer look at the lofty transportation scheme proposed earlier this year by Aerial Rapid Transit... View full entry
Unfortunately, we have since forgotten this soulful approach to architecture and design, following instead the prevailing planning model of big budgets, large-scale structures and isolated behaviors. Consequently, our habitations have become fragmented and we fail to see the city’s infrastructure and life in an integrated way. — The New York Times
Celebrated Indian architect and 2018 Pritzker Prize laureate, Balkrishna Doshi, pens a passionate NYT opinion piece in which he calls for a renewed harmony of human settlements with nature rather than pursuing more resource-consuming megastructures. The Balkrishna Doshi-designed Indian Institute... View full entry
Construction cranes filled the skyline, but much of the best work in Chicago and the Midwest in 2018 was tucked away in settings far from the high-rise commercial maelstrom. — Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune architecture critic, Blair Kamin, takes a look back and lists 2018's most notable architecture moments in the Windy City and the greater Midwest region, including the transformation of Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch landmark in St. Louis, the anticipated new home of the Chicago... View full entry
British artist Anish Kapoor has reached a settlement with the NRA for using his reflective Bean sculpture in one of their promotional videos. The ad, titled The Violence of Laws, had used images of modern architectural landmarks, such a Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, Piano's New York... View full entry
All sides in the Millennium Tower debacle appear to be nearing an agreement on a $100 million-plus fix to stop the 58-story high-rise from sinking further [...]
The latest plan calls for drilling piles into bedrock from the sidewalk on the building’s southwest corner. The proposal would be less extensive and intrusive than the plan floated in April, which called for drilling as many as 300 micro-piles to bedrock through the building’s concrete foundation.
— San Francisco Chronicle
At this year's World Architecture Festival, David Adjaye spoke towards the festival's theme:identity. Recognized as a prominent force in the architecture community, Adjaye's own design style and focus has played towards architecture's social responsibility. During the 45-minute lecture in... View full entry
In the main axis of the new multimodal hub in the French city of Nice, for the first time in Europe, a large expanse of urban cooling paving is being installed. It corresponds to the areas of most intense pedestrian presence (bus stops, pavements, etc.) and represents an attempt to improve the... View full entry
Miami’s newest wave of designs could be its most ambitious yet.
Fitting for a place that cherishes A-listers, virtually every celebrity architect in the world, and many rising stars, have built there in the last decade. The big names include Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & De Meuron, Grimshaw, César Pelli, Richard Meier, Arquitectonica, Rafael Moneo, Jean Nouvel and Bjarke Ingels. The impressive results are scattered citywide, from Miami Beach to the thriving Design District.
— The New York Times
Sam Lubell takes a stroll from Downtown Miami to the Design District to Miami Beach for a NYT roundup of (fairly) recent additions to the city's impressive portfolio of landmark buildings by noteworthy architects, including Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road parking garage, OMA's Faena Forum... View full entry
Gondalas designed to move up and down the top of the Tulip tower are at risk of confusing air traffic control systems, according to technical experts at London City airport.
Construction on the 305-metre (1,000ft) tower must not go ahead until an assessment has been carried out into its potential impact on radar systems at the airport six miles to the east, officials told the authority considering whether to grant planning permission.
— The Guardian
After its big reveal in November, planning for the 1,000-foot-tall The Tulip observation tower by Foster + Partners has been halted by officials to study the impact the attraction's moving glass spheres high up in the sky will have on radar systems at the nearby London City airport, pointing out... View full entry
First with a white cover, then black, then grey, then red and then finally pink, Log Journal has carried itself as a unique voice in the architectural community for an astounding 15 years. Log Journal logoEdited by Cynthia Davidson, the magazine has been published three times a year, often as... View full entry
Thanks so much to everyone that braved the LA rush hour traffic to attend our book launch & signing with Neil Denari last night at Archinect Outpost. As predicted, all of the copies of MASSX we secured were quickly sold. We have heard from many of you out there who wanted to buy a copy, but... View full entry
