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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 Factory 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
Design projects involving the renovation, rehabilitation, extension, or preservation of existing buildings account for 48% of billings at U.S. architecture firms according to an AIA survey. The findings, which form part of the 2022 AIA Firm Survey: The Business of Architecture, continues a trend... View full entry
A long-closed Los Angeles County courthouse in Sawtelle that was once a popular draw for skateboarders may soon be redeveloped for affordable housing. The County Board of Supervisors voted to buy the former West Los Angeles Courthouse at 1633 Purdue Avenue for a mixed-use, affordable housing development, City News Service reported via KFI AM 640. — The Real Deal
As detailed by The Real Deal, a motion to buy the courthouse, which has been vacant since June 2013, was proposed, asking Los Angeles County to source funds to acquire the space from the Judicial Council. The County has reportedly, so far, paid more than $3.5 million to the Council to incentivize... View full entry
It’s the first time in the 20 years the AIA has collected this data that renovations have breached 50%. In 2005, toward the end of a pre-recession building boom, renovations made up approximately one-third of billings. That share has been increasing steadily since 2017, when it was 44.4%, up to 52% this year. Kermit Baker, the AIA’s chief economist, says that the last time the market for design services was so heavily weighted toward renovations was likely during the Great Depression. — Bloomberg
According to Baker, about 25% of renovation projects constitute interior remodels, while adaptive reuse schemes make up another quarter of those registered with the AIA. Just 3.8% are done in the interest of improved building energy performance, with a scant 1.6% being resiliency projects. The... View full entry
The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts is nearing completion ahead of a predicted April 2023 opening. Designed by Studio Gang and Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects following their selection for the commission in 2016, the project has seen the unification of several existing structures on the museum grounds... View full entry
Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects (EYRC) has completed their adaptive re-use of an abandoned Los Angeles Times print facility in Costa Mesa, Orange County. The 430,000-square-foot scheme titled ‘The Press’ saw the three-story complex converted into flexible office spaces. Photo credit... View full entry
Los Angeles and Portland-based architecture firm West of West is currently working on a new creative office community in Hollywood, California. The studio's 6344 Fountain project integrates hybrid cross-laminated timber (CLT) construction within an adaptive reuse development. According... View full entry
SOM just completed a major design project for the Wellesley College Science Complex after a five-year construction period. The redesigned 97,000-square-foot structure is comprised of mass timber with recycled zinc elements and involved the consolidation of several smaller academic buildings... View full entry
