Development group Tishman Speyer has announced the creation of a new "affordable housing platform" within its organization designed to spur the development of new affordable housing projects across the New York City area. Real Estate Weekly reports that Tishman Speyer has hired real estate... View full entry
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has published its latest AIA Consensus Construction Forecast Panel, a metric that collects the perspectives of "leading economic forecasters" to help project potential near-term demand for construction services. AIA's latest report signals that the... View full entry
The Clippers’ plans for a billion-dollar arena complex moved closer to reality Tuesday after Inglewood’s City Council voted unanimously to approve the environmental impact report for the project.
The approval came seven months after the release of the report, which spanned thousands of pages and required nearly two years to complete [...].
— Los Angeles Times
Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Clippers According to the Los Angeles Times, concerns over gentrification brought forward by local groups opposing the 18,000-seat Clippers Arena and nearby NFL SoFi Stadium development were ruled out by the report.AECOM is the architect of the $1.2 billion arena... View full entry
A new report from Turner Construction Company highlights an unexpected trend that has taken shape in recent months: lower construction costs for non-residential projects. According to Turner's quarterly Building Cost Index, construction costs decreased during the second quarter of 2020 by 1.01%... View full entry
You can’t overstate the importance of City of Quartz...it remains the best socio-political critique of modern L.A, the first book you’d recommend to someone seeking to understand the dark nativist currents and unyielding avarice that still shape a city so easily stereotyped but rarely understood. It is noir to the core...Even Vince Staples insisted that I read City of Quartz had I not already. — the LAnd
On the 30th anniversary of the dystopian L.A. touchstone, Jeff Weiss talks to the prophetic author and oft-misunderstood activist about political uprisings, the pandemic, and what gives him hope for the future. In related news, back in 2015 Julia Ingalls reported on the third installment of The... View full entry
New York City-based firm CetraRuddy Architecture and a project team that includes the office of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects, and nonprofit housing developer CAMBA Housing Ventures have announced a plan to bring a 291-unit affordable housing complex to... View full entry
The 2020 AJ100 survey found that post-occupancy evaluation is ‘always’ done by just 4 percent of AJ100 practices and ‘frequently’ done by 22 percent, while a quarter of firms never do so and around half (48 percent) only seek to evaluate the performance of their projects ‘occasionally’. — Architects' Journal
Philip Watson, director at HLM Architects, reflected on the survey, writing, "Too often it seems, architects want to design a building, take pictures prior to its occupation – without the messy inconvenience of having people and their clutter in them – and move on to the next... View full entry
There is an end in sight for a pair of years-long federal reviews of the Obama Presidential Center, and based on a Thursday briefing we now know City Hall will not insist on replacement land outside of Jackson Park to make up for the 19.3 acres the complex will occupy. — Chicago Sun Times
President Obama chose to build his presidential center in Jackson Park, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was designed by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. This is what sparked the series of reviews around the project. Lyn Sweet... View full entry
Take the next step forward in your job search with our latest weekly highlight of architectural employers. Selected from Archinect's active community of architecture students and professionals, firms, and schools, these five practices stand out with impressive work... View full entry
The Harvard University Graduate School of Design's Design Nexus group has launched a new podcast, The Nexus, meant to highlight the work and roles of Black architects and designers. Created in collaboration between the school's African American Student Union and the Frances Loeb Library, the... View full entry
Thirty years on, the A.D.A. has reshaped American architecture and the way designers and the public have come to think about civil rights and the built world. We take for granted the ubiquity of entry ramps, Braille signage, push buttons at front doors, lever handles in lieu of doorknobs, widened public toilets, and warning tiles on street corners and subway platforms. [...] The A.D.A. has baked a more egalitarian aesthetic of forms and spaces into the civic DNA. — The New York Times
Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times highlights how public discourse surrounding designing for people with disabilities has changed in the three decades that have passed since the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Highlighting the tensions that exist... View full entry
Students of the Princeton University School of Architecture have published a letter advocating for widespread changes to how the school operates in order to pursue an anti-racist agenda. The open letter, published as an Op-Ed in The Daily Princetonian, offers a nine point plan for beginning... View full entry
A budget shortfall has dealt a setback to OMA- and Studio-MLA-designed First and Broadway (FAB) Park in Downtown Los Angeles. The project will occupy the site of a former state office building and provide around two acres of public park space, including new pathways, seating areas, and a... View full entry
While it is assumed that many of the people who work in architecture firms are designers, there are, of course, a significant number of vital supporting and administrative roles that are crucial to the functioning and success of any architectural practice. International architecture firm... View full entry
Advocates for the preservation of modernist landscapes in Washington have taken on another fight. After beating back the National Geographic Society’s plan to demolish “Marabar,” the 1984 sculptural installation by Elyn Zimmerman on its campus, they are now battling the Hirshhorn Museum’s proposal to redo its sunken sculpture garden by the architect Gordon Bunshaft and the landscape architect Lester Collins. — The New York Times
As the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. gears up to restore its existing Gordon Bunshaft-designed facilities, landscape preservation advocates have voiced concerns over parallel plans to alter and reconfigure a series of Lester Collins-designed gardens that surround the iconic circular... View full entry
