Suzhou is like many Chinese cities. It has a historic core, including nine Unesco world heritage sites, as well as many beautiful gardens, waterways and temples. [...]
But Suzhou has also embarked on another fascinating project: urban mimicry. From Venetian-style “water town” districts to Dutch-style suburban living, Suzhou hosts what journalist Bianca Bosker calls “original copies”: simulations of western landmarks. The city is fast becoming China’s city of clones.
— theguardian.com
Previously:Colossal Bavarian Castle Set To Open In Dalian, ChinaChinese secretly copy Austrian town View full entry
Alex de Stampa makes tricky and delightful animations of famous contemporary structures, remixing the stale static-images circulated on architectural blogospheres. The animations are part of his "1 Week 1 Project", which you can read more about on Visual News.Mirador Building by MVRDV and Blanca... View full entry
In an effort to remediate a large patch of heavily contaminated soil in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, engineers managed to unleash a smell so pungent that, last week, owners of the site took a new tactic: a giant tent to contain it all. [...]
Though the 20,000-square-meter polyester tent contains an area roughly the size of three football fields and rises 36 meters near downtown, it only covers less than half of the contaminated area.
— motherboard.vice.com
Previously: Giant bubbles could be 'built over Beijing parks to save residents from smog danger' View full entry
The new library at Dalarna University, Dalarna Media Library, is now officially open to the public. The building that reinterprets the library in a multi functional design is laid out as an approximately 3.000 m2 ’spiral of knowledge’ that naturally integrates into the surrounding landscape at... View full entry
As a result of the violence, the local real estate market has bottomed out. Those who flee the city usually can’t sell their homes and businesses, so more and more buildings, including some of Tampico’s largest and most impressive ones, lie abandoned. Buildings that could easily survive for another century are mere empty shells, with huge trees growing through the roofs and out of the windows. Such levels of abandonment are rarely seen in the centre of a major city. — theguardian.com
The New York Public Library’s revised renovation plan — to upgrade the Mid-Manhattan Library and create more public space in its flagship Fifth Avenue building — is expected to cost about $300 million, according to library officials who outlined new details of the project in interviews. [...]
But officials, for the first time, revealed that the original plan, mostly scrapped last month in large part because of questions about the price tag, would actually have cost more than $500 million [...].
— nytimes.com
Previously View full entry
Daniel Libeskind is at it again with the recent unveiling and groundbreaking of Century Spire, a 60-story tower that will be built in the city of Makati in Manila, Philippines. Showrooms officially opened on May 28, and Libeskind joined Century Properties and Armani/Casa officials at 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... View full entry
Over in The Hague in The Netherlands, the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) celebrated the groundbreaking of the new U.S. Embassy earlier this week. Located on a 10-acre site in the Wassenaar municipality, some features of the $206 million project will include a chancery office building, a U.S. Marine Corps residence, a utility building, and multiple access pavilions. — bustler.net
Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners of Santa Monica, CA will be project architect with Caddell Construction Company of Montgomery, AL for construction.Find more about the project on Bustler. View full entry
Despite its distance from the center of New York City, Co-op City’s site and scale make it prominent on the landscape [...]. Critics, historians, and even the Supreme Court have noticed as well, weighing in since construction began in 1966 on what the complex signifies for housing finance, site planning, cooperative ownership, ethnic and racial diversity, and tenants’ rights. [...] But it is far from prototypical. — urbanomnibus.net
[The American shopping mall] has its own traceable lineage, from the earliest planned shopping centers to the first regional hubs for shoppers traveling by car, to the novel post-war enclosed malls of Victor Gruen [...]
Malls, in short, have spread across the American landscape -- and defined it -- with remarkable success, adapting to our changing tastes along the way.
— washingtonpost.com
The below animation shows the spread of shopping malls across the U.S. throughout the twentieth century, and was created by Sravani Vadlamani, a doctoral student in transportation engineering at Arizona State University. Including numbers of strip, outlet, indoor and outdoor malls, growth really... View full entry
The GSA said that retrieving the archives and collections from inside the building was its “first priority”. [...]
Firefighters were able to save around 70 per cent of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed building’s contents during the blaze.
But the famed Mackintosh library, which contained hundreds of rare periodicals and collections, was destroyed, along with countless works of art and the roof of the west wing.
— express.co.uk
Previously:Glasgow School of Art on fire....UPDATE: Glasgow School of Art fire View full entry
In what could have been a nightmare come true, part of the glass floor in a viewing box high above Chicago cracked right below a group of California tourists. [...]
Alejandro Garibay and his family were taking in the sights at Chicago's Willis Tower on Wednesday night. The tower's Skydeck, which opened in 2009, is on the 103rd floor, about 1,353 feet above Chicago's downtown. [...]
While on the glass, Garibay heard cracking.
— mashable.com
It's no surprise that the stakes are high to design the Gothenburg tower in Sweden, a mixed-use tower that will be the tallest building in the Nordic region. Swedish construction company SERNEKE initiated the idea of the skyscraper. Each team submitted their proposal under anonymity to the jury... View full entry
The owners of the tallest tower at the World Trade Center are cutting office rents just months before it opens because of slow leasing activity.
Only one private tenant has signed a lease at One World Trade Center in nearly three years: a one-floor deal with advertising firm Kids Creative that was signed last week. The 3.1-million-square-foot skyscraper, formerly named the Freedom Tower, is 55% leased.
— online.wsj.com