The High Line, New York City’s most exciting and innovative linear park, just opened its second section to the public – and Inhabitat was on the scene to bring you exclusive photos of the new extension! We finally experienced the Falcone Flyover, Viewing Spur, Chelsea Thicket and other exciting new features, and we descended from the experienced with our heads still in the clouds – read on for our exclusive first look at The High Line, Section 2. — Inhabitat
Inhabitat has exclusive photos of the opening day of New York's high line park - hit the jump to see the new park in its entirety - from the Chelsea Thicket to the Falcone Flyover and beyond. View full entry
[Legorreta and Legorreta] caught Salesforce founder Marc Benioff's eye with its UCSF community center, a red stucco cube enlivened by an oversized purple-walled courtyard and, at one corner, a steep sculptural tower. It's the only campus building that brings a smile; it also typifies the firm's knack for spirited buildings that strive to catch the eye. — sfgate.com
Chipperfield... says creating the gallery was like “a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle” and there’s certainly a lot of geometry involved.
More important, though, there’s an uplifting sense of space, height and – exactly what you don’t expect from the exterior – light. The rooms are flooded with light reflected off white walls, from skylights and from floor-to-ceiling windows that counterpoint the sculptures with the urban reality of Wakefield outside.
— yorkshirepost.co.uk
Gapyong Space Invader is a recent competition win for a housing project in Gapyong, northeast of Seoul, South Korea, by Dutch NL Architects in collaboration with Yo2, who had also developed the master plan, and MSA (Marina Stankovic and Tobias Jortzick), CAT (Kazuhiro Kojima), Unsangdong (Joon Gyo Jang), and FOA (Alejandro Zaera-Polo). — bustler.net
A few blocks east of Detroit’s downtown, just across Interstate 375, sits Lafayette Park, an enclave of single- and two-story modernist townhouses set amid a forest of locust trees. Like hundreds of developments nationwide, they were the result of postwar urban renewal; unlike almost all of them, it had a trio of world-class designers behind it: Ludwig Hilbersheimer as urban planner, Alfred Caldwell as landscape designer and Mies van der Rohe as architect. — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
The new Ravensbourne campus, a university sector college innovating in digital media and design, at London's Greenwich Peninsula was just recently one of the winners in the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Awards 2011 (previously on Bustler). From a shortlist of 55 schemes, Ravensbourne’s building, designed by Foreign Office Architects, won through in the education and community category. — bustler.net
On an old thread about saving a series of Walter Gropius buildings from the chopping block in Chicago, trendzetter notifies us that Northwestern University is gearing up to tear down the old Prentice Women's Hospital, designed by Bertrand Goldberg.
News Orhan Ayyüce presented ARCHITECTURE JURY, A Factual and Fictional Manual. In it Orhan subjectively stereotypes "the people who sit in front of the presentations and say 'wise' things about student projects. I hope this will help spectators and students to put a person... View full entry
"It might have been easier to completely rebuild it," Rogers tells me. "It was a very weak structure with very thin walls. We had to shore the facade, then almost completely rebuild it inside. But the thing they insisted on, and I think they were proven right, was keeping the circular form, the historic form. It's not just a building – it's a piece of Barcelona." — Guardian
Steve Rose reviews Las Arenas, Barcelona's former bullring and its newest shopping mall completed in March by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. He finds that the people of Barcelona are now flocking back to this once cherished second bullring. View full entry
In San Francisco, you feel like you’re always leaving and going, you go up and down, up and down. You’re always provided with a new view of the city. So we felt we could use that idea to allow people to experience the museum and the city in different ways. We’re creating a lot of variation within the design. So even though the building is relatively compact, you’ll always be able to step into a space and look down or across or up into another space. — Simon Ewings, via fastcodesign.com
Whether or not the Whitney was wise to migrate, the design suggests that it has misperceived its future neighborhood, a formerly run-down area where mottled brick, painted iron, and salvaged wood are still pleasingly rough. The district’s architecture of the past decade has put a sophisticated gloss on this neighborhood’s industrial past. — New York
In a essay entitled An Out-of-Tune Piano, Justin Davidson argues that the plans for the Renzo Piano designed, new downtown Whitney is a monumental lost opportunity. He believes that the current proposed design is too uptight and does not fit the spirit of the neighborhood. Davidson... View full entry
Steven Holl Architects in collaboration with BCWH Architects has won the commission for the new Institute for Contemporary Art for Virginia Commonwealth University. The building will create a new forum for the arts on campus and forge new connections to the arts community of the region. — stevenholl.com
The new visitor center is the first park project to be completed as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Design and Construction Excellence Initiative. By making it easier to get talented architects on the job, the program aims at bringing good design to even the humblest city-funded projects. The Poe Center was designed by Toshiko Mori, an award-winning architect and a former chairman of the department of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. — online.wsj.com
Archinect's Building of the Day series is brought to you by our friends at OpenBuildings.com, the web's most comprehensive directory of buildings. The nursing home in Alcácer do Sal, Portugal, designed by Aires Mateus Arquitectos, aggregates into a unique volume and harmoniously... View full entry
The citizens living off the Han River in Seoul, South Korea inaugurated the world’s largest floating island just last week. The stunning structure includes a 700 seat convention hall, restaurants and arcades — all powered by solar energy. When the development is completed, a trio of islands will be linked together by twenty-three weather-proof chains. — Inhabitat
Despite the reassuring rivets in the 1,500-pound glass panels, the calm stillness of the air at the Windy City’s pinnacle and the security of a 10,000-pound weight capacity for each of the four 4.3-foot-deep glass boxes that protrude past the sheer edge of the Western Hemisphere’s tallest building — despite all that, you still feel twinges of queasiness. — nytimes.com