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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
NBBJ has been selected by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to lead the redevelopment of Paul Rudolph’s iconic Charles F. Hurley Building at the Boston Government Service Center. The move was announced last week after years of speculation as to the fate of Rudolph’s endangered Brutalist... View full entry
Soloviov’s virtual tours, which he announces on his Instagram page, have also become a way of coping with present circumstances. He says that during the pandemic and now the war, he has missed meeting visiting foreigners, some of whom were his most inquisitive tour participants. Now, he’s meeting them in their living rooms. — The Washington Post
Dmytro Soloviov is unlike the many Ukrainian citizen journalists using social media to inform the non-traditional, non-television-connected audience about their war-torn home. Evacuated at the outset to the western Carpathian Mountains region, he began offering in-person and then (upon his return... View full entry
“Given the dire shortage of affordable housing in London and the valuable real estate occupied by the Trellick, it is almost certain that someone will build on the site in the future. But residents would like their say. [...] Many fear the build would only attract more developers to the surrounding neighborhood, spoiling the character of the site.” — The New York Times
This fall, residents were able to halt a Haworth Tompkins scheme for a new 16-story tower block in the place of its demolished nursing home that would have obstructed sightlines, a graffiti wall, and exterior views of the Grade II* listed structure. Some units have already been converted into... View full entry
Almost 60 years later, Balfron’s streets have been scrubbed up and the residents’ facilities turbo-charged, but the kind of community that Goldfinger imagined has long since been evicted [...]
Where once Balfron looked out over declining docks, it now winks across the Thames at the towers of Canary Wharf, whose bankers are a target audience for the new flats, which went on sale this weekend.
— The Guardian
A spokesperson for the developer told the Guardian critic that the prospective buyers have mostly been well-to-do architects and design-hip young professionals thus far. Up for grabs is the famed Bond villain namesake Goldfinger’s personal apartment on the top floor, along with the five other... View full entry
What do you do with a building that was built to glorify an oppressive Communist system but, ravaged by rain and snow and stripped bare by thieves, is now a wreck? Should it be torn down in the spirit of reckoning with history — just as the statues of Confederate generals have been toppled in the United States and monuments to Soviet hegemony have been demolished across Ukraine, particularly since Russia invaded in February? — The New York Times
After receiving two rounds of funding totaling $245,000 from the Getty Foundation in back-to-back years, the ever-popular photographer’s subject is struggling to raise the millions needed to restore it to the former 'glory' seen in what its designer Georgi Stoilov called “morally and... View full entry
Dedicated in 1972, plans are underway to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Paul Rudolph’s design for the First Church in Boston.
In 1967, a fire destroyed most of the original 1867 gothic revival church by William Ware and Henry Van Brunt. The congregation considered proposals from Marcel Breuer, Joseph Schiffer, Joseph Eldridge, and Paul Rudolph. They voted in favor of Rudolph’s design [...]
— Docomomo US
In celebration of the anniversary, several events are scheduled at the church building for this weekend, April 30th and May 1st, including an Architects Panel on Sunday from 2–4 pm. View this post on Instagram A post shared by @docomomous View full entry
In an effort to bring the organization closer to its own self-stated goals on sustainability, equity, and collaboration, the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has today unveiled plans for a comprehensive new upgrade to its aging Washington, D.C. National... View full entry
Despite an illustrious history, the prized structure on Virginia Key has sat vacant since Hurricane Andrew swept through the city in 1992. It now faces an uncertain future as city commissioners will soon decide whether to allocate $61.2 million in revenue-bond financing for the building’s restoration. — Surface Mag
The Miami City Commission has since moved to defer the planned February 24th vote until late May after Commissioner Joe Carollo urged City Manager Art Noriega to reconsider the mounting financial impacts caused by increasingly costly restoration, which centers around reestablishing its original... View full entry
The result was a beguiling cocktail – part bastion, part brutalist hanging gardens of Babylon – and it stood as the ultimate expression of the modern movement’s search for a monument.
The complexity of incorporating so many venues on so many levels across a 40-acre site has always made the place an infuriating labyrinth for the uninitiated, with successive decades of signage and way-finding strategies deployed in an attempt to ease the maze-like passageways.
— The Guardian
The Barbican’s important birthday comes ahead of next month’s revealing of the winner of the City of London Corporation-sponsored redevelopment contest. The Centre is celebrating with a weekend of special programming including a guest DJ’d after party. Previously on Archinect: City of London... View full entry
One of the most important renewal projects in recent memory is a step closer to being realized in central London. The city’s development corporation has officially revealed its competition shortlist of design partners for the highly-publicized Barbican Centre revamp. Five teams were... View full entry
The development of a huge office campus in downtown San Jose can proceed and an old bank building can be demolished, a Santa Clara County judge has decided in a new ruling on the controversial building. A proposed development that would replace downtown San Jose’s decades-old CityView Plaza with a modern tech campus that could bring 14,000 jobs to the city’s urban core is at the heart of a legal action whose goal was to preserve a bank building designed in a “brutalist” architectural style. — The Mercury News
The ruling denies a petition filed by the Preservation Action Council of San Jose filed seeking to preserve the 1973 Bank of California building and alter the construction of the new office campus being developed by real estate company Jay Paul Co. The petition by the preservationist group claimed... View full entry
Sad news today as multiple outlets are reporting the death of Brutalist icon and former RIBA president Owen Luder in England at the age of 93. Luder held a number of different titles throughout his six-decade career and was a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) at the time of his... View full entry
The Breuer building, an architectural icon and the former longtime home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, could soon have a new owner. The Whitney is considering the sale of the building and brokers are compiling lists of potential buyers, according to sources in the art world and real estate.
Now the multi-million-dollar question is: If the building is sold, can it be developed?
— Artnet
The brutalist masterpiece know colloquially for its architect Marcel Breuer opened as the new home of the Whitney Museum in 1966. The building exchanged hands in 2015 as the Met expanded past Fifth Avenue for the first time to make room for the collection of billionaire cosmetics heir Leonard A... View full entry
Pang, of AaaM Architects, set out to locate Hong Kong’s Brutalist past with other local design professionals, who formed a team of architectural sleuths. They identified more than 70 buildings, 15 of which now feature in an exhibition showing how the architectural style made its mark on Hong Kong’s educational, industrial and religious building — The South China Morning Post
The St. Stephen’s building was designed by Tao Ho, who died in 2019. Ho was also responsible for Hong Kong’s Bauhinia flower flag design, as well as its still-standing Arts Center, which opened in 1977. The exhibition came together with the help of an AaaM intern named Alison Chan Lok-yan, who... View full entry
