A developer looking to erect a hotel tower designed by Frank Gehry on Santa Monica’s iconic Ocean Avenue has reworked its plans and released a new rendering of the project.
Originally proposed five years ago as 22 stories, the hotel has been reduced to 12 stories—or 130 feet—to comply with the city’s new development plan for downtown. It’s just one part of a larger project that would also include a museum, shops, ground-floor open space, and 79 apartments.
— Curbed LA
The newly released rendering shows the Gehry-designed hotel tower as a considerably shortened and reworked version of what was originally proposed in March of 2013 — before the city's new height rules and design guidelines for downtown Santa Monica were implemented. For comparison, check out the... View full entry
In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles. (Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles!)... View full entry
The Longaberger basket building has been sold.
The iconic seven-story office building at 1500 E. Main St. in Newark has been sold to Coon Restoration of Louisville, which is near Canton. The developer has an eye toward converting the building and its 21-acre site to a new use, the company said in a release.
— bizjournals.com
Developer Steve Coon, the landmark building's new owner, hasn't revealed specific details about his redevelopment plans for the property but announced Cleveland-based Sandvick Architects as the designers for the job. View full entry
Galaxia celebrates hope in the unknown, stars, planets, black holes, the movement uniting us in swirling galaxies of dreams. A superior form of Gaia in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Galaxia is the ultimate network, the fabric of the universe connecting living beings into one entity. — Burning Man Journal
Rejoice burners — the design for the 2018 Temple has been unveiled: 'Galaxia' by London-based French architect Arthur Mamou-Mani. "Galaxia is shaped of 20 timber trusses converging as a spiral towards one point in the sky," describes the Burning Man Journal. "The triangular trusses form... View full entry
Located in San Esteban, Chile, the Mountaineer's Refuge was designed by Gonzalo Iturriaga Arquitectos as a small cabin to be a point of arrival and departure for mountaineer treks. The space functions as a shelter and lookout for contemplation and relaxation and requires only the bare... View full entry
New virtual reality tours are giving Muscovites the chance to see the Russian capital as the socialist utopia envisioned by the city’s Soviet architects.
The new project, The Moscow That Never Was, lets visitors glimpse shelved Soviet landmarks as they should have appeared on Moscow’s streets using VR goggles.
— Calvert Journal
The 2-hour virtual/augmented reality tours through central Moscow feature utopian architectural projects that never quite saw the light of day, including the infamous Palace of the Soviets (imagined as the world's tallest building, crowned with a 300-ft Lenin statue), an alternate Lenin... View full entry
The slabs in front of me seemed at once the most and least architectural objects I’d ever seen. They were banal and startling, full and empty of meaning. Here were the techniques of Land Art, medieval construction, marketing and promotion, architectural exhibition and the new nativism rolled uncomfortably if somehow inevitably into one. — Los Angeles Times
LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne takes a trip down to the U.S.-Mexican border in San Diego to attempt the challenge of critiquing Trump's border wall prototypes, "alternating bands of substance and absence, aspiration and impossibility". Image: U.S. Customs and Border Protection. View full entry
Doors recently opened at the new Snøhetta-designed Muttrah Fish Market in Oman. The 4,000-square-meter facility is an upgrade from the city's older 1960s fish market and offers refrigeration, packaging, storage spaces for fish, vegetable, and fruit vendors, as well as offices, coffee shops, and a... View full entry
Plastic building blocks are once again reaching for the sky.
This time, it was the city of Tel Aviv that made an attempt to build the tallest Lego tower — or, officially, the tallest structure built with interlocking plastic bricks, not all of them made by the Danish toy giant.
[...] a joint effort between Tel Aviv City Hall and Young Engineers, an organization that promotes learning with toy bricks. The tower is intended to honor a child who died from cancer.
— The New York Times
"Omer Tower" was built in memory of Omer Sayag, himself an avid fan of the colorful plastic blocks, who lost his battle with cancer in 2014 at the age of 8. Clocking in at a height of 35.85 meters (117 feet and 7 inches), the structure on Tel Aviv's Rabin Square beat previous world records... View full entry
The Bonaventure has become a focal point for the debate on Postmodernism, ever since its discovery as a Postmodern hyperspace by [cultural theorist] Fredric Jameson some years ago…It’s a landscape that’s highly fragmented. It’s a space that de-centers you, makes you feel lost. And in this feeling of being lost and dislocated, you feel that your only recourse is to submit to authority. You’re helpless, you’re made helpless, you’re peripheralized, you’re lost in these spaces. — Ed Soja, eastofborneo.org
In light of John Portman's passing, here is a 6 minute clip with urban theorist Ed Soja discussing the postmodern nature of the infamous architect's Bonaventure Hotel located in downtown Los Angeles. h/t to Orhan from this thread. View full entry
A 156m (511ft) skyscraper in northern Shanxi province has been listed on Taobao, China's largest e-commerce website, by a local court. [...]
Construction on the building first began in 2006 and was due to be completed by 2011, according to Chinese state media outlet Xinhua.
However, the developer ran into funding troubles. The building was eventually seized by the Shanxi Provincial Higher People's Court.
— BBC
Fresh coat of paint, some shiplap here and there, and this puppy can be open for business in no time.If a 511-ft fixer upper in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan has been on your real estate wishlist for some time, and you happen to have at least 553m yuan ($84 million) sitting idly by, then... View full entry
While 2017 saw developer Related Midwest remain tight-lipped on its plans for the site of the defunct 2,000-foot-tall Chicago Spire project, a rendering showing a pair of very tall skyscrapers rising at 400 N. Lake Shore Drive recently reignited speculation regarding the site’s future redevelopment. The rather slender image surfaced online, credited to Britain’s Zaha Hadid Architects. — chicago.curbed.com
Another rendering for the vacant Chicago Spire site recently surfaced online. The image was confirmed as a proposal from Zaha Hadid Architects; however, the developer Related Midwest will not be pursuing the design. While the project will not be built, the organic towers are certainly a... View full entry
Soon after the news, an Indian architect posted an image of [Foster's] design juxtaposed next to a stainless-steel idli maker—the kind used to steam idlis for breakfast in countless households across southern India—on an architecture-focused Facebook group. While some made fun of the resemblance—”How on earth will they cook in this?”—others praised the design for not being derivative of colonial-era architecture. — Quartz
Foster + Partners was invited to design the state assembly building in Amaravati, the new capital of the Indian state Andhra Pradesh. Since it was released, Foster's proposed design has drawn mixed reactions from the public. Some people compared the building's spiked design to an idli maker... View full entry
Harvard University recently celebrated the topping out ceremony of its new John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Designed by Behnisch Architekten's Boston office, the 497,000-square-foot, six-story complex at Harvard’s Allston campus will house teaching and research... View full entry
Architect John Portman, often credited as the father of the massive hotel atrium, has passed away in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. No cause of death has been announced. His firm, John Portman & Associates, has released the following statement, along with a website celebrating his... View full entry
