The developers of the 450-meter high Zifeng Tower in Nanjing have been found guilty of robbing the surrounding neighborhood of precious sunshine, and will have to compensate residents accordingly. [...]
The 89-story Zifeng Tower was designed by American architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. It is the tallest building in Nanjing, fourth tallest in China and 12 tallest in the world.
— shanghaiist.com
Related news on Archinect:Crowded skies: Sunlight as the new amenity for the super richAs Manhattan grows supertaller, its shadows are getting superlongerWelcome to the permanent dusk: Sunlight in cities is an endangered species View full entry
Building upon imagery of flight and aviation, the sleek form resembles a bird with its wings extended as it hovers above the public plaza, framing and ascending the acclaimed tents of the Jeppesen Terminal — Westword
A new Gensler designed Westin Hotel at Denver International Airport opened last month. While some (like Mayor Hancock) are talking how a quality hotel and Transit Center (opening in 2016) with train connection to downtown, will help the airport and city compete "on an international... View full entry
The first permanent publicly-viewable artwork by Refik Anadol, a media artist known for his immersive, site-specific light installations, was recently unveiled in San Francisco. Virtual Depictions: San Francisco, a series of "data sculptures" based on a publicly-available dataset, occupies a... View full entry
Architectural photography is supposed to be different from the airbrushed images of nude women that are about to disappear from the centerfold of Playboy magazine. But what if an edited photograph of a building doesn't just crop out visual clutter like street lights but alters the contours of the building itself? What should we think about an architectural award that was bestowed on the basis of such a doctored image? — Blair Kamin | Chicago Tribune
In his column, Kamin scrutinizes the recent awarding of an honor award to El Centro, a building designed by Juan Moreno, by the Chicago branch of the AIA. Apparently, the architects provided the jurors with a photoshopped image of the building, notably erasing the clunky air circulation machines... 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... View full entry
But overall the Broad is a disappointment, and the ways in which it fails are more than a little concerning. Its incoherence, its poor urbanism and its unoriginality suggest that the transition from critics to makers may have DS + R stumped...The Broad’s failures of urban design are its biggest and most disappointing surprise. — Art in America
Sarah Williams Goldhagen pens a critique of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's The Broad. View full entry
The digital production studio Visualhouse has released film and renderings of how SL Green’s One Vanderbilt will meet the street, and also remind us just how gargantuan the tower will be. According to the tower’s architects Kohn Pedersen Fox, the tower will rise 1,501 feet to its spire, making it the third tallest building in the city upon completion. — 6sqft.com
A new housing complex planned in Astana, Kazakhstan's capital, is set to include a 1,000ft ski slope, running from the roof to the ground.
The proposed project was devised by a group of architects, led by Shokhan Mataibekov, who were inspired by Kazakhstan's exceedingly long, cold winter. [...]
Enter House Slalom, a multi-purpose, 21-storey building comprised of shops on the ground floor, 421 flats on the upper floors, and an outdoor ski slope running alongside the building.
— telegraph.co.uk
The idea looks strangely familiar... View full entry
SANAA ultimately won the commission to design the new National Gallery and Ludwig Museum in Budapest, currently scheduled to open in summer 2019. The redesigned museum building is part of the larger ambitious Liget Budapest Project that will revamp and expand the city's 200-year-old City Park, or... View full entry
The new museum won’t be defined by architectural glamour or by a market-vetted collection, though it may have these. Structurally porous and perpetually in progress...where walls are dissolvable, access is open, and art is invited to tell us who we are as an arrogant, exclusionary but possibly teachable culture — is still awaited — NYT
15 years into the new millennium, Holland Cotter outlines the need for a new version, for the 21st century, museum. She begins by criticizing the Bilbao era, and the entities resulting from a "love of gigantism in architecture and art". Then goes on to outline the possibilities of... View full entry
Rem Koolhaas/OMA will design The Factory, the proposed £110 million (approx. US$166.3 million) Manchester Arts Centre in England. Koolhaas won the commission ... over fellow starchitects including Zaha Hadid, Mecanoo, Grimshaw Architects, Rafael Viñoly, DS+R, and Haworth Tompkins. [...]
Named after the Manchester-based record label, The Factory is described as a cutting-edge, flexible cultural institution that ... will also be a major component in the cultural redevelopment of the city.
— bustler.net
The developer behind the Kingdom Tower, set to become the world’s tallest building, has secured new funding to complete its construction. [...]
The company said that 26 of the planned 252 floors of the tower had been completed by contractor Saudi Binladin Group (SBL).
The tower would overtake the 828-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai as the world’s tallest building when it is expected to be completed in 2018.
— thenational.ae
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more of them were built in the former Czechoslovakia — in a boom that stretched from 1959 to 1995 — than any place else on what was once Soviet earth. Today, about a third of all Czechs and Slovaks, from all income brackets, still call their panelaks home — NYT
Lisa Schwarzbaum traveled to Bratislava to explore its ubiquitous panelaks (aka "panel house"), Soviet era concrete high-rise housing units. The city is also the home of monuments to new capitalism, such as the Aupark shopping center and corporate complexes like Digital Park.On a related... View full entry
There’s the legacy of Brutalism being such a negative term. It begins the conversation with negativity about these buildings, and this falls into the misreading of them as harsh, Stalinist, or some other kind of monstrous, mean architecture. The name plays into that mischaracterization that’s grown around a lot of them. I think “Heroic’” is a better title for what their actual aspirations were. The architects had a real sense of optimism. They were developing architecture for the civic realm. — citylab.com
Related news on Archinect:Brutalism: the great architectural polarizerArt college professor suggests makeover for brutalist Boston City HallFuture of Paul Rudolph's brutalist Orange County building still uncertain View full entry
Here’s our first peek at Simon Baron Development, Quadrum Global and CRE Development’s three-tower Long Island City development slated to rise alongside the former Paragon Paint factory building at 45-40 Vernon Boulevard. Permits for the first tower were filed with the DOB back in June and detail a 28-story, 296-unit rental tower designed by SHoP Architects. — 6sqft.com
