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Mayor Eric Adams opened a new window into his vision for building New York City out of the current housing crisis, with a riff on “dormitory” style accommodations [...]
During a conversation on Monday at the Greene Space, New York Public Radio's live events venue, Adams said he wants to 'do a real examination' of the laws that require windows in bedrooms — a major tweak that could make it easier for developers to convert empty offices into apartments.
— Gothamist
The Mayor’s comments in favor of window features found in Dormzilla-like residential design caught the ire of critics, who were quick to illustrate its potential fire hazards and physiological impacts. Adams’ suggestion seems a bit at odds with the city’s push to deliver better... View full entry
That simple recipe for pandemic lemonade—offices people no longer use, combining with central urban locations where people want to live—is blissfully ignorant of a wide range of architectural and economic factors that make the vast majority of office buildings simply unsuitable as housing. — Fast Company
Labeled by Fast Company as “Goldilocks” zones, the sweet spot for office buildings with the potential to become residential are ones that are mid-rise, built pre-WWII, with at least two sides facing open areas or streets near, but not within, a city’s financial core. According to San... View full entry
A transformational new adaptive reuse project for Harvard Law School’s Lewis International Law Center has been completed recently by Deborah Berke Partners. Meant to “holistically” meet the demands posed by modern legal education, the project remade the original 1957 Shepley, Bulfinch... View full entry
Copenhagen-based 3XN has been included in Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies 2023 list. The 50-company-strong list is described by Fast Company as the “definitive chronicle of the novel ideas transforming business and society,” ranging from ChatGPT creator OpenAI to the art collective... View full entry
The City of Boston has announced its financial support for a mixed-use, mixed-income development in the Upham’s Corner neighborhood. Called Columbia Crossing, the project will repurpose the historic Dorchester Savings Bank building and adjacent parking lot into an approximately... View full entry
In this case, architecture is the issue and the engine of renewal. With its triple-height library and exalting, barrel-vaulted classrooms with huge punched windows overlooking Manhattan, the redesigned ice plant becomes one of the most spectacular school buildings in the city.
[...] the historical arc of 20 Bruckner, as the building is called, is instructive and tells a larger tale about the Bronx, change and renewal.
— The New York Times
The NY Times critic gets off the sixth train to explore Adjaye Associates' first American K-12 project in Mott Haven, The Bronx. Kimmelman mentioned his two best-known New York projects – 130 William Street and Sugar Hill Mixed-Use Development – in addition to D.C’s National... View full entry
Snøhetta has been chosen to design a new National Court of Asylum and Administrative Court in Montreuil, France. The proposed scheme sees the two courts arranged on one site around large green areas, offering what the team calls “a place of calm during what can be a time of intense turmoil.”... View full entry
The city of Philadelphia is prepared to release a report detailing a months-long community engagement effort officials say will inform the fate of the Roundhouse, the unusual concrete building that served as police headquarters for more than six decades.
Many of the residents who participated in that process said they want to see the shuttered building at 7th and Race streets repurposed as a community hub that recognizes the site’s long history of police abuse.
— WHYY
Philadelphia has a long-frayed relationship between its police department and the community, including most notably the 1985 MOVE Bombing that claimed the lives of 11 activists while displacing another 250 people and destroying 61 homes. The Roundhouse has a central role in this fraught... View full entry
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has unveiled an ambitious plan to help convert the city’s unused office spaces into apartment dwellings in an effort to bring online 40,000 new units of housing in the next decade. The plan, which includes a new study and 11 “concrete recommendations” made by... View full entry
Now the algorithm he spearheaded collapses the survey process — which must be conducted to determine whether a commercial building can be turned into apartments — from months to hours. His work will help these conversions to be enacted on a mass scale. which is important given the urgency created by America's rising office-vacancy rates due to the pandemic's reshuffling of where and how we work. It could help bring people back to downtowns across North America as renters or homeowners — Business Insider
Gensler estimates that only 3 out of 10 office buildings are eligible for conversion. The pitfalls of mass-scale conversions remain impediments even as architecture firms are earning more from renovations than new buildings for the first time. In the last two years alone, office conversions have... View full entry
A beloved monument returned to the Brooklyn skyline without pomp or circumstance last night when the Domino Sugar sign was quietly relit atop the Thomas Havemeyer building’s new barrel vaulted glass roof, illuminating the Williamsburg waterfront for the first time in eight years. It also marked one last milestone in 2022 for redevelopment at the former refinery, which was last open to the public in 2014 — Artnet News
Meanwhile, PAU’s portion of the $250 million Domino Sugar Factor project is nearing completion with the placement of the structural steelwork required to support the 27,000-square-foot glass addition slotted into its 140-year-old interior. Image © Wes Tarca New York YIMBY also... View full entry
“The aim is for the building to last, and to do that it needs to be suited to the context,” he says. “But we also want the visitor to feel reflected and interpreted by this building. I want to capture this society’s sensibility and sense of pride. This will be a calm building.” — The Art Newspaper
The Art Mill Museum project represents 21-year-old ELEMENTAL’s first-ever museum commission and will be joined by designs from Herzog & de Meuron and OMA upon its completion towards the end of the decade. Aravena said he wants to “create something reversible,” looking to the existing silo... View full entry
Shanghai-based firm Neri&Hu has completed a café within a historic, 19th-century public garden noted for its Shikumen typology residences. Named Zhang Yuan, the site has recently reopened after a complete rehabilitation of its historic buildings. As part of the revamp, coffee roaster... View full entry
Copenhagen-based studio 3XN has completed Quay Quarter Tower in Sydney, Australia, described by the firm as the “world’s most comprehensive upcycling of an existing tower.” The scheme, which sees the retention and transformation of an existing 1970s tower near the city’s waterfront, was... View full entry
In the last two years, apartment conversions jumped by 25% compared to two years prior. More precisely, this increasingly popular real estate niche brought a total of 28,000 new rentals in 2020-2021, well above the pre-pandemic years of 2018-2019 when 22,300 apartments were brought to life through adaptive reuse. — RentCafe.com
The new data set from real estate researchers Yardi Matrix gives some additional context to the information in yesterday’s 2022 AIA Firm Survey, which said that almost half (48%) of all projects currently being pursued by U.S. firms involve the renovation, rehabilitation, extension, or... View full entry
