The road to a Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial has been anything but smooth. Frank Gehry’s original plans for the project were nixed by critics—most notably, the Eisenhower family. But, finally, all parties reached an agreement last fall and the project is going forward. Now, Gehry and Partners... View full entry
Faraday Future’s future is looking bleaker.
After the electric car start-up failed to pay millions of dollars in bills, its contractor Monday halted work on Faraday’s $1-billion North Las Vegas, Nev., car factory. [...] The contractor is Aecom, the Los Angeles-based engineering giant. [...]
Faraday failed to pay $21 million due to Aecom in September and owed $25 million in October and $12 million in November, according to Aecom.
— latimes.com
Faraday Future previously in the Archinect news:Faraday Future holds groundbreaking ceremony for $1B Nevada factoryAECOM to build $1B electric vehicle plant in VegasThe "Impossible" Car – Faraday Future's lead designer, Richard Kim, on One-to-One #17 View full entry
Aecom, America’s largest design engineer, will have its skills tested with a contract to build a high-tech factory for Chinese electric vehicle start-up Faraday Future (FF) in Las Vegas.
The work will have a construction value of $500m, signed on a guaranteed maximum price basis, but FF has said in the past it wants the factory built in half the normal time.
In all, FF is reported to be investing $1bn in its new plant.
— Global Construction Review
Related:The Netherlands considers a ban on gasoline-powered vehiclesFaraday Future holds groundbreaking ceremony for $1B Nevada factoryThe "Impossible" Car – Faraday Future's lead designer, Richard Kim, on One-to-One #17Wired takes a look inside Tesla's car factory of the future View full entry
The Elizabeth line will link London and the South East from Reading to Heathrow with 10 new stations and upgrades to 30 existing stations. Currently Europe's largest infrastructure project the £14.8 billion scheme began in Canary Wharf in 2009 and is now 75% complete. Services will begin in... View full entry
Not content to merely redefine skyscrapers, football stadiums, and the agency of the architect, Bjarke Ingels Group is now leaping into the realm of transportation, joining up with Hyperloop to "transform the future of public infrastructure." Bjarke explained it thusly: "Traditionally, the work... View full entry
LA has few corners as prominent as First and Broadway. Directly adjacent to the art deco City Hall and across from the LA Times building, the nearly-2 acre lot stands at the center of an increasingly well-trafficked pedestrian area. Now, some of the biggest names in town are competing to transform... View full entry
SpaceX has selected Aecom ... to build its Hyperloop test track later this year [...]
The nearly one-mile-long test track will be built adjacent to SpaceX's Hawthorne, California, headquarters [...]
The test track's six-foot diameter steel tube will include a non-magnetic sub-track ... Cradled in place above ground, it will serve as a vacuum-sealed, high-speed proving ground for transport pod prototypes being developed as part of a SpaceX design competition.
— theverge.com
Aecom is also reportedly not committing to any one Hyperloop company by partnering with SpaceX for the test track – they're also linked to Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, one of the two hyperloop-happy startups based in L.A. (the other, Hyperloop Tech, is sponsoring the competition).And... View full entry
This week on the podcast: Gehry's design for the Eisenhower memorial is finally approved, Zaha Hadid's Olympic Stadium in Tokyo gets cut-and-pasted into some very Japanese situations, and Peter Zellner, Principal and Design Lead of AECOM's Los Angeles architecture division, and founder of... View full entry
Gensler surpassed $1 billion in architectural revenue in 2014, setting a record and maintaining its leading status for the fourth consecutive year on RECORD’s annual Top 300 Architecture Firms list, which ranks companies based on earnings from the prior year. — archrecord.construction.com
According to Architectural Record, Gensler definitely crushed it in 2014. The firm tallied $1.04B in architectural revenue last year, $778.5M of which was earned domestically. This jives with overall gains in the domestic architectural market, where firms' revenue grew approximately 6% from... View full entry
“They have taken what could have been a barren rooftop and turned it into much needed public space for the community...Because it’s elevated, it’s out of the flow of the street...There’ll be a sense of calm". - Catherine McVay Hughes, chairwoman of Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan — NYT
David W Dunlap reports that although plans for Liberty Park have been mostly unknown till now, last month images of St. Nicholas Church and Liberty Park appeared on the website of the architect Santiago Calatrava, who is designing the church. The park was rendered in sufficient detail that... View full entry
Atlanta and Rio are but two chapters in the long history of displacement that has accompanied mega-events like the Olympics. Similar dynamics reshaped London’s Clays Lane Estate, Beijing’s hutongs, the Marousi Roma settlement in Athens, Barcelona’s Poblenou and Seoul’s hanoks. . . . Today the people of Vila Autódromo are struggling for what housing scholar-activist Chester Hartman has aptly called “the right to stay put.” — Places Journal
As plans unfold for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, MIT's Lawrence Vale and Annemarie Gray consider the case of Vila Autódromo, a former fishing colony on the Olympic site whose residents have organized to resist displacement. They compare ongoing events in Rio to the... View full entry
The NYT reported that Pedro E. Guerrero, a former art school dropout , died on Thursday at his home in Florence, Ariz. w. wynne A.I.A. offered up the following "Pedro has a wonderful book about his photographic work, and I am sadden to hear of his death. Mr. Wright called him ‘Peter’, but the story of his life with FLW is very nice and interesting account of the middle career of Mr. Wright."
News The NYT reported that Pedro E. Guerrero, a former art school dropout who showed up in the dusty Arizona driveway of Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939, boldly declared himself a photographer and then spent the next half-century working closely with him, capturing his modernist architecture on... View full entry
“Snøhetta’s extensive experience with ambitious waterfront projects and its world-class architects’ familiarity with San Francisco through their work on the SFMOMA expansion was a huge factor in our decision,” said Joe Lacob, Co-Executive Chairman and CEO of the Warriors. “All you have to do is look at what they’ve done for the new National Opera House in Oslo and the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt to see what is possible at Piers 30-32.” — nba.com
In London's case the practicality of the architecture is a reaction to the economic rather than the political excesses of the recent past. The 2012 Games are shaping up, in fact, as one of the clearest signs yet that the architectural boom years of the last decade or so in the West have definitively ended. — latimes.com
