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Fifteen years ago, a world renowned architect planned to bring the Spire to Chicago a giant luxury condo building with sky high prices. Years later, all that's there is hole in the ground, at a prime spot by the river and the lake. Now, a new project may actually come to life there. — CBS Chicago
Construction is set to start later this year at 400 Lake Shore Drive after more than a decade as an empty plot. The site was originally reserved for the Chicago Spire, a 2,000-foot tall, twisted tower designed by Santiago Calatrava. The project, however, was canceled following the onset of the... View full entry
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), along with real estate investment firms QuadReal and Thor Equities, have announced the completion of 800 Fulton Market, a 326-foot-tall, mixed-use office tower that stands out for its wide range of pandemic-responsive design features. Photo © Dave Burk... View full entry
“It’s not that no one has a car,” said Peter Kindel, an urban design and planning principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who helped create the framework plan for the site that project overseers approved last year. “We’re suggesting it’s more than possible to live with one car to make that big-box [store] trip or go skiing. But for families and young people that are going to be part of the community, they won’t need that on a day-to-day basis.” — Bloomberg
The 600-acre The Point development in Draper, Utah, will replace an aging prison complex and will include some 40,000 parking spaces — a typical figure for a community of its planned size of about 13,000 residents. Previously on Archinect: A '15-minute' planned community is set to... View full entry
Cornell Tech, Cornell University’s urban campus for technology research and education, has announced the completion of the first phase of its Roosevelt Island campus development in New York City. This news comes following the recent completion and opening of the Snøhetta-designed Verizon... View full entry
The latest high-profile architectural addition to the Fort Lauderdale skyline is moving forward this week as the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has announced its approval of SOM's design concept for a new 252,000-square-foot federal courthouse. The development will target LEED Gold and... View full entry
A new planned community in Utah will strive to make it possible for residents to meet all their daily needs within 15 minutes without getting in a car — and to serve as a model for other U.S. developers who want to build basic mobility into the foundations of their designs. — Streetsblog USA
Called The Point, the envisoned community will be located in Draper, Utah, and take up about one square mile of state-owned land. The development, master-planned by SOM, will specifically aim to reduce the need for cars by featuring extensive biking, walking, and transit systems. A... View full entry
The more than $150 million renovation of the Cadet Chapel at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs is going to take months — or perhaps more than a year, longer than originally expected; contractors are contending with more asbestos than they expected, as well as other unforeseen challenges. — Colorado Public Radio
The project began in 2019 and is now expected to be pushed back a yet-to-be-determined amount of time away from its original 2023 completion date owing to an unexpected amount of asbestos in addition to other “unforeseen” challenges. The long-overdue restoration is necessary to fix faulty... View full entry
With COP26 entering its final day in Glasgow, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill have used the event to unveil their vision to transform the built environment into a network for absorbing carbon. Titled 'Urban Sequoia,' the project is centered on the concept of “forests” of buildings which sequester... View full entry
As part of their contribution to the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Skidmore Owings & Merrill has teamed up with the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning on the design of a robotically fabricated timber pavilion. The project is the result of... View full entry
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has once again come together with American artist Janet Echelman for a site-specific sculptural installation in Munich’s historic Odeonsplatz Square. Images courtesy of Studio Echelman The atmospheric sculpture is in constant motion, activating the public space below... View full entry
A new database is tracking the contributions of women to the architecture of Illinois thanks to a yearlong survey project by one of the state’s most important preservation authorities. Landmark Illinois has just released its new Women Who Built Illinois database with an initial list of over... View full entry
If the pandemic has shown us anything, it is that the health of Black and Hispanic communities is being systemically underserved in large part due to an infrastructure gap that has left both urban and rural parts of the country bereft of key resources in a time of crisis. In keeping with this... View full entry
Former SOM veteran Nancy Abshire has been named the winner of this year’s iteration of the Chicago Women in Architecture Foundation’s annual Lifetime Achievement Award. Abshire graduated from Northwestern University before obtaining her B.Arch at the University of Illinois at Chicago and... View full entry
The City of Chicago, Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) and Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) revealed preliminary designs for a renovation of the city’s State/Lake elevated station. Located in the heart of downtown, this is the second busiest station in the CTA network, located at... View full entry
Three years in the making, the renovated Skydeck Chicago is reopening Friday for public tours of the 45,000-square-foot space that has undergone a multimillion-dollar renovation the general manager calls “part Chicago museum, part selfie museum, part architectural river tour and part children’s museum.” — Chicago Tribune
A design collaboration of SOM, Thinc Design, and Chicago Scenic Studios, the re-envisioned Skydeck experience on Willis Tower's 103rd floor (of 110 in total) reopened to the public today. Photo © Dave Burk | SOM "In creating the new Skydeck, we wanted to honor the structural clarity and... View full entry
