from Inhabitat

” Nestled in Noe Valley, a San Francisco neighborhood known for its contradictions, rests the Choy Residence, a newly remodeled 1960’s home turned modern dwelling. Terry & Terry Architecture took a decidedly “less is more” approach to the project, literally carving out the 1960’s home’s front entry and center core, straight through to the rear facade. The results of their carefully crafted subtractions is an exterior deck with a view and an entry that allows tremendous amounts of natural daylight to flood the interior spaces while increasing natural ventilation and circulation.

The bands of wood running along the home’s interior and exterior contribute more than visual appeal - they’re part of a double-wall system that allows the exterior panels to breathe and avoid heat build-up. The wood itself is IPE, a sustainably harvested Brazilian Hardwood that has the natural ability to resist mold, rot, and insects without the application of any chemicals.

During the rainy season, the roof of the Choy Residence collects all the runoff and drops it into storage tanks in the basement to be used to irrigate the landscape during the dry season. Provisions have been provided on the north end of the roof, for a soon-to-come solar array that will capture energy whenever the sun shines down on the home.

The residence will be open to the public Saturday, September 13, 2008 through the AIA San Francisco for this year’s annual Architecture and the City Festival. Tickets can be purchased here.”
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Popularity: 83% [?]

from Wallpaper

Carlo Scarpa’s Brion-Vega cemetery, San Vito d’Altivole, Italy
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” Scarpa (1906-1978) designed the Brion-Vega in San Vito d’Altivole, near Italy’s Treviso, as an extension to the family’s existing cemetery. The architect developed the geometrical concrete composition over a 10-year period, with works finally reaching completion in 1978.
The L-shaped plot includes a complex of five buildings; a small chapel, the entrance hall, a small steel-and-wood pavilion on an island in the site’s water pond, the main tomb, and an open-air structure covering the graves.

Carlo Scarpa’s Brion-Vega cemetery, San Vito d’Altivole, Italy
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Aiming to create a poetic resting place as much as a sculptural memorial in a green, calming garden, Scarpa used well-thought-out design features; for example, the cemetery walls are not higher than the surrounding field’s plants, discreetly merging the structure into the landscape. Within the site, there is also a small island with no apparent access for visitors, which perhaps works as a metaphor for the afterlife.

Scarpa also designed a pond for the L-shaped site
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The open-air structure that covers the graves
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Reflection of the main tomb in the cemetery’s pond
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Detail of the geometric concrete masonry
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Detail of the geometric concrete masonry
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Detail of the geometric concrete masonry
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The architect himself rests, vertically, in the cemetery walls, after passing away in 1978 during a trip to Japan - the same year that his last masterpiece was finished.

The architect himself is buried within his masterpiece
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The main tomb
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Inside the small chapel
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More photos and details here
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Popularity: 6% [?]

from The Architectural League

Buckminster Fuller Symposium
Friday, September 12 - Saturday, September 13
The Great Hall of the Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street, at Astor Place

Participants include: Carol Bove, Peter Galison, K. Michael Hays, Chuck Hoberman, Sanford Kwinter, Dana Miller, Pedro Reyes, Allegra Fuller Snyder, Felicity Scott, Elizabeth A.T. Smith, Michael Sorkin, Victoria Vesna, Anthony Vidler

Visionary designer, philosopher, poet, inventor, engineer, and advocate of sustainability, Buckminster Fuller was one of the great transdisciplinary thinkers of the last century with a legacy that extends to nearly every field of the arts and sciences. This symposium takes its cue from Fuller’s dictum, “I always say to myself, what is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment,” and explores the diverse ways in which contemporary scholars and practitioners are pushing Fuller’s ideas and projects into the 21st century. For more information, click here.

Admission to the Buckminster Fuller Symposium is free for Whitney Museum members, Architectural League members and Cooper Union faculty, students, and staff. Member guests do not receive free admission. General admission to the Buckminster Fuller Symposium is $8; students and seniors with valid I.D. pay $6. For Architectural League member reservations please e-mail rsvp@archleague.org. For general admission tickets, click here. For additional ticketing information, email info@archleague.org.

Co-sponsored by Whitney Museum of American Art and The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.”
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Popularity: 5% [?]

from Bustler

” The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, together with The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd., announce sixty-six (66) new distinguished buildings selected this year in the Museum’s prestigious “American Architecture Awards®” program for 2008.

Established over 10 years ago, the awards program honors and celebrates the most outstanding new accomplishments for new architecture designed and built in the United States by leading American and international architecture firms practicing in the USA.

CAMINO NUEVO HIGH SCHOOL - Los Angeles, California, Architects: Daly Genik
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THE NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART - Kansas City, Missouri, Architects: Steven Holl Architects, Associate Architects: Berkebile Nelson Immenschuh McDowell
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156 WEST SUPERIOR CONDOMINIUMS - Chicago, Illinois, Architects: The Miller|Hull Partnership, Associate Architects: Studio Dwell Inc.
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“The American Architecture Awards” have become the foremost, prestigious awards program for public recognition for Excellence in Architecture in the United States both nationally and internationally. The Awards identify the new cutting-edge design direction, urban philosophy, design approach, style, and intellectual substance in American Architecture today.

The Chicago Athenaeum, founded in the historic city where modern architecture was first realized by Louis H. Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe, is the only Museum of Architecture and Design in the United States and functions internationally as one of the foremost museums dedicated to both architecture and industrial design.

MEDEU SPORTS CENTER - Almaty, Kazakhstan, Architects: Audrey Matlock Architect
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THE NEW YORK AQUARIUM - New York, New York, Architects: Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects LLP.
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ALEXANDRIA EGYPT MASTER PLAN - Alexandria, Egypt, Architects: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP.
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For “The American Architecture Awards” 2008, the Museum received hundreds of submissions from the best and most renowned design firms in the United States and international firms working in the US.

The submissions ranged from new corporate headquarters, skyscrapers, institutions, sports and transportation facilities, airports, urban planning projects, retail stores, hospitals, sacred spaces, and private residences and multi-family housing designed by architects in their countries of origin or abroad for both built and unbuilt projects alike, as of January 1, 2006.
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TYROL TOWER - Wörgl, Austria, Architects: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP.
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THE NEW BEIJING POLY PLAZA Beijing, China, Architects: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP.
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SALT POINT HOUSE Salt Point, New York, Architects: Thomas Pfifer & Partners
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The Awards Program is also open to all international architecture offices and U.S. firms with projects outside the United States, as well as international architecture firms building in the US.

This year’s jury for awards took place in Athens, Greece with the participation of noted Greek architectural practitioners, educators, government leaders, and architecture journalists serving as jury members including:

* Maro Kardamitsi-Adami, Architect, and Curator, Neohellenic Archives, Benaki Museum, Athens
* Pavlos Doukas, Architect, Pavlos Doukas Architect, Athens and Former Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago
* The Honorable Christophe Farnaud, Ambassador, Embassy of France, Athens
* Argyro Konstantinidou, Sculptor/Architectural Consultant, Greece
* Manolis Anastasakis, Architect and Editor, greekarchitects.gr., Athens

The “American Architecture Awards” is curated and organized by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine, Director/President, The Chicago Athenaeum and assisted by Lary L. Sommers, Director of Administration/Marketing, The Chicago Athenaeum, and Kieran Conlon, Director/COO, The European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies, Dublin.

PERFORMING ARTS CENTER CITY COLLEGE OF SAN FRANCISCO San Francisco, California, Architects: LMN Architects
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MONTECITO RESIDENCE Santa Barbara, California, Architects: Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN MUSEUM OF ART Ann Arbor, Michigan, Architects: Allied Works Architecture, Associate Architects: I.D.S.
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Sixty-six (66) buildings in Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Washington, DC., Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Additionally, the jury selected skyscrapers and large-planning projects in Austria, Egypt, France, Kazakhstan, Korea, Kuwait, The People’s Republic of China, and the United Arab Emirates.

Projects selected include new corporate headquarters, schools and universities, government buildings, memorials, libraries, art museums, foundation headquarters, transit projects, retail facilities, hospitals, residences, and single-family homes.

TRANSBAY TRANSIT CENTER: TERMINAL AND TOWER San Francisco, California, Architects: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP.
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SANTA MONICA CIVIC CENTER PARKING STRUCTURE Santa Monica, California, Architects: Moore Ruble Yudell Architects and Planners Associate Architects: International Parking Design
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UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS CASE MEDICAL CENTER CANCER HOSPITAL Cleveland, Ohio, Architects: Canon Design
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Skyscrapers and office buildings were selected this year by the Greek jury, signaling an ever-growing European concern for smaller more intimate building types, an awareness of energy conservation and sustainability, and profound respect for the built and human environments as well as abstract shapes that twist, bend, spin, and defy gravity.

All awarded projects can be found on-line at The Chicago Athenaeum’s website at http://www.chi-athenaeum.org.

“Now in its second decade as perhaps the most significant awards from for new distinguished buildings in the United States, The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd., together with The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, have organized this annual Museum program, “The American Architecture Awards,” as a way in which to draw significant world attention to new buildings and urban planning projects being built and designed globally by the best and most prestigious American architecture offices and design firms,” states Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine.

“The wide geographic distribution of these awards attests to the importance of the program,” Mr. Narkiewicz-Laine adds. “There is no one, single program that brings together the latest cutting-edge international architecture today as one cohesive universal representation or platform for American design. Our Museum is honored to provide a focus that allows an exploration and analysis for current stylistic directions and philosophical thinking that is apparent in contemporary design today.”

BEIJING FINANCE STREET Beijing, PRC, Architects: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP.
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TREE HOUSE Wilmington, Delaware, Architects: Sander Architects, LLC.
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NASHVILLE PUBLIC SQUARE Nashville, Tennessee, Architects: Tuck-Hinton Architects, Associate Architects: WRT, LLC., Landscape Architects: Hawkins Partners, Inc.
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“The program has a unique educational mission and public profile with the intent of promoting and celebrating the latest, most cutting-edge international design to a national and international audience,” Mr. Narkiewicz-Laine continues.

The awarded projects for 2008 and other selected works will form an exhibition, “New American Architecture” to open at SESV Santa Verdiana (piazza Lorenzo Ghiberti 27) in Florence, Italy in November, 2008. The exhibition and awards presentation is organized by the Municipality of Florence and the Faculty of Architecture in Florence. After, the exhibition travels to The European Centre’s new Contemporary Art + Architecture Centre in Athens.

In 2009, the exhibition will start a national tour in the United States.

The 2009 deadline for submissions for “The American Architecture Awards” is FEBRUARY 1, 2009. Get more information on this competition here. ” Bustler
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Popularity: 52% [?]

from A Daily Dose of Architecture

” It seems like New York firms have a thing for bay windows, but not the usual symmetrical bays prevalent in residential architecture. I’m talking about angled bays that project from facades asymmetrically to orient views and jazz up building exteriors.

The most well known recent example of this architectural element is the Switch Building in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The design by nARCHITECTS alternates these angled bays to give the building its name. A small building that would have most likely been overshadowed by Blue next door, the maneuver holds its own, while offering its occupants captured views up or down Suffolk Street. Bays typically provide seating space for residents, and these are no different. The projections give a public face to an intimate space of the domestic realm.
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photographs of Switch Building by Frank Oudeman
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Further uptown, near Madison Square Park is M127 in NYC by SHoP Architects. The condo project is a renovation of seven floors of an existing building, with five floors added on top. Steel bay windows project from the brick facade on Madison Avenue, creating a distinction between old and new.

M127-image source
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As the developer’s website points out, “The boxes pop from the street, and communicate from the inside, where a two-foot-deep ledge offers room to sit, look out, and engage the street.”

M127-image source
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The below view clearly illustrates the benefits of the angled bay: the integral seating space created and the captured view down the street.

M127-image source
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Located far from New York but designed by local architects LOT-EK is Sanlitun North in Beijing, China. Working within a predetermined massing from the project’s mixed-use masterplan (by Kengo Kuma), the architects were given a 3-meter (10-foot) zone of extension at the front and back of the mass, from which they extended “duct-like metal extrusions with glass fronts…functioning as entrance and display windows for the hi-end retail stores at the lower floors and as large bay windows for the offices located on the upper floors.”

Sanlitun North by LOT-EK-image source
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Set off against the blue metal mesh wrap, these angled bays are an extreme example of the architectural element. Their composition across the facade makes the bays appear abritrary, as if the relationship between outside expression and inside function does not jibe like the other two examples above. But with much more generous depth and height, these bays become literal rooms or room extensions, something completely different.

photography by Shuhe Architectural Photography Studio-image source
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Click here to check the original post
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Popularity: 6% [?]

from Dezeen

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” Brooklyn architects Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu (SO-IL) have designed a rooftop landscape of allotments to showcase green roof technologies on an industrial building in Queens, New York City.

The project has been commissioned by Garden City Roofs, a company that specialises in green roof systems.

“As a result of [Mayor] Bloomberg’s PlaNYC, in which he call for buildings to be more energy efficient by 2030, interest in green roofs is on the rise,” says Florian Idenburg of SO-IL. “Our client is a start-up company who is catering to this new interest, mostly by inexperienced building owners.

“She is providing a one-stop-shop, where one can learn about the roughly half a dozen systems available, get structural engineering advices, tax rebate advice, installer and maintenance recommendation.

“We have designed the allotments; and a small sales offices, that doubles as a display for “green” materials for which our client is a rep as well.”

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Check the rest of the entry here
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Popularity: 6% [?]

LocalArchitecture

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” In 2003, two Swiss farmers commissioned Localarchitecture to design a free-stall barn for 30 cows. The brief for the design was to minimize earthworks and provide a balance of cuts and fills.
It was to be positioned near the existing farm, delineating an outdoor space for the livestock it houses. Keen to respect the local architectural tradition, the architects conducted a detailed analysis of regional farm typologies, identifying two types. The earliest is characterized by a roof ridge set perpendicularly to the contour lines, creating building façades that are generously open to the valley.
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This model’s disadvantage is that it makes any enlargement problematic. As agriculture became more mechanized, therefore, this layout was replaced by a more flexible typology, with a roof ridge running parallel to the contour lines and side gables. By combining these two types, the architects have created a synthesis of different traditions, giving them a contemporary shape with a new identity.” by Mathieu Jaccard (MIMOA)
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Popularity: 6% [?]

SADAR VUGA ARHITEKTI

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Apartment House Gradaška
Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2003- 2007
Type: Housing
Formula: Switching Surface
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” The size, location, shape and spatial organisation of the Apartment House Gradaška outrank all the neighbouring, almost village-like constructions. It is an independent building. There are twelve different and individualised apartments in it.

They all cover the area of several storeys or between-storeys. The central living area is always divided into one and a half or two storeys. The vertical arrangement of these apartments is thus highlighted, which, besides the open ground plan and the large glass surfaces, exposes the building’s urban and metropolitan character. The apartments form a unity which resembles the three-dimensional tetris.

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The façade is made of three different materials: a stone facing, which outlines individual apartments, a combination of reflexive and transparent glass panels which either reflect the surrounding area into the apartment or reveal the interior of the apartment to the surrounding, and a filigree base whose ornamentation throws a reflection of the building’s greens to its façade.
This façade functions as a kind of a Switching Surface between the structure and the living character of the metropolitan vertical lofts, on the one hand, and the almost village-like atmosphere of the area on which the Apartment House Gradaška is located.”

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PROJECT DETAILS

Client: Lesnina Inženiring d.d.
Address/Site: Gradaška Street 20, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Site area: 1545 m2
Building area: 795 m2
Total floor area: 3800m2 / 12 apartments, largest 350 m2, smallest 90 m2.
Storeys: basement + groundfloor + 3 storeys
Structure: reinforced concrete, steel
Cladding:structured stone panels, glass, reflecting glass
Total parking sites: 39
Nr. of apartments: 12
Architect: SVA (Jurij Sadar, Boštjan Vuga, Beno Masten, Tadej Žaucer, Goran Golubič, Tomaž Čeligoj, Lucijan Šifrer, Ana Struna)
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Popularity: 5% [?]

from The New York Times

MIX MASTER At a terraced Texas garden, Mark Word paired native beautyberry shrubs and limestone with foreign plants like Berkeley sedge.
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“WHEN Kenneth Hillan and his partner, Duncan Robertson, requested that an 80-foot lap pool be built in the hilltop meadow outside their new Marin County, Calif., house several years ago, Bernard Trainor, a garden designer known for ecology-minded landscapes, could have balked. At first glance, the wild meadow and the unspoiled views seemed to cry out for a conservationist approach. And the clients had been clear that they wanted the garden areas “to look completely natural, almost like California was before it had been farmed,” as Mr. Hillan put it.

The swimming pool was their first real request, Mr. Trainor said, and since they were into competitive swimming and he “knew it wouldn’t have to be a suburban-style pool for people to lounge around all day,” he embraced it as a challenge.

The resulting design, built in 2005, set a minimalist, carved-concrete, solar-heated pool almost seamlessly into the meadow, where it is surrounded by seasonal wildflowers and native grasses (planted mainly with seeds collected from the site before construction began) and reflects the surrounding hills like a ground-level mirror.

Three years later, the plantings have begun to mature, restoring the property to something close to its original state and providing its weekender owners with low-maintenance natural beauty.

With its combination of scrupulous planting, formal as opposed to naturalistic design elements, and responsiveness to the clients’ desires — even when they strayed from strict conservationism — the Hillan-Robertson project is typical of an emerging movement in environmentally conscious landscape and garden design.
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Bernard Trainor offset a sleek pool against a vista of local flowers, grasses and hills at the Hillan-Robertson home in California. - Photo: Jason Liske
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Over the past five years, as climate change has become more obvious and energy costs have spiraled up, a number of designers have begun to champion an approach to landscaping that marries traditional environmental concerns — sustainability, biodiversity, restoration, conservation — with a sensitivity to aesthetics and a flexibility that they said was missing from green-gardening crusades of the past.
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San Francisco landscape architect Andrea Cochran did environmental planning for the Tennessee Valley Authority before moving on to residential gardens. - Photo: Heidi Schumann for The New York Times
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Movements that gained popularity in the 1970s, like xeriscaping, which introduced the creed of no added water, and the native plant movement, often got in their own way, these designers believe, by getting hung up on orthodoxies.

“Xeriscaping as a rule tended to look horrible,” said Andrea Cochran, 54, a San Francisco landscape architect who did environmental planning for the Tennessee Valley Authority and the National Forest Service before moving on to residential gardens. “The save-the-planet message was powerful,” she added, but a lack of attention to aesthetic issues left her and other well-meaning gardeners unhappy with the results — dusty summer yards full of scrappy native species.
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At Walden Studios in California, Ms. Cochran juxtaposed planes of crushed local stone, water and a minimal lawn.- Photo: Heidi Schumann for The New York Times
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Rows of grasses echo the nearby linear vineyards.- Photo: Heidi Schumann for The New York Times
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And too often, Mr. Trainor said, those earlier movements were overly rigid and prescriptive. “It’s hard to make ordinary people fit into such a tight scheme,” he said.

The main thing, these newer designers believe, is to win clients over to environmental landscaping through design that is both thoughtful and seductive.

In some cases, the seduction involves small adjustments to traditional eco-friendly practices. Mark Word, a 40-year-old designer who has been creating gardens in Austin, Tex., for 10 years, has faced resistance from some clients to native plants and other low-water alternatives. “Many native Texas plants, like certain grasses, tend to not look so good in 4-inch or 1-gallon pots at the nursery,” he explained. And “most people don’t want their garden to stick out as the only house on the block that looks radically different.”

Believing that he can push clients only so far without losing their confidence, he has found it helpful to temper native plantings with strong design elements that can act as visual anchors, such as crisp-edged stonework or a sculptural non-native plant like a sago palm or a silvery furcraea. In one recent project in Austin, a small front yard and a backyard at a second home for two doctors from Dallas, Mr. Word used a mix of native and foreign species, along with paths and retaining walls made of Texas Hill Country limestone, so his clients could relate to the garden more easily. “My projects need to weave nicely into the residential style of Austin,” he said. “They have to be conventionally attractive and recognizable as a garden in the sense of their particular neighborhood.”
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Other designers delve deeper into their clients’ psyches, particularly when working on larger projects. “I used to hide behind the needs and desires of my clients in the interest of serving them,” Mr. Trainor said, “but now my starting point is the place. The clients bought their property for a reason; it’s up to me to uncover that reason and reveal it.” For gardens like the one in Marin County, his firm uses satellite imagery to identify large patterns in the geography and to zoom in on the edges of neighboring properties. The images are used as design tools and as a means of helping clients appreciate the physical context of their property and understand how they are stewards of the land around them, even outside their own yards.
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Thomas Woltz drew from the area’s geology, agriculture and plant life at Tupelo Farm near Charlottesville, Va., incorporating native smooth flagstone and grasses into his contemporary design. - Photo: Darren Higgins for The New York Times
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Thomas Woltz, a co-owner of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, which has offices in Charlottesville, Va., and Manhattan, likewise emphasizes “the dynamic power of a garden’s site,” both in his designs and in his communication with clients. “Sometimes it seems like people think that anything that was originally on their property must be vulgar or undesirable and needs to be replaced with something new,” said Mr. Woltz, 40. “I find that as you focus your lens on the beauty of the local, it becomes so much more potent.”

At Tupelo Farm, an estate near Charlottesville, Mr. Woltz drew on the region’s geology, agricultural traditions and plants — both native and imported — in designing the garden, a project that he has been working on since 2000. Locally quarried fieldstone walls retain the heat of the springtime sun and establish curving terraces for a peach orchard, a gesture at Albemarle County’s history as one of the state’s largest producer of peaches in the 19th century. Nearby, on a smooth flagstone terrace, a group of half-buried boulders has the same geological composition and similarly mounded shapes as the Blue Ridge Mountains that loom over the farmland.
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At Tupelo Farm, Mr. Woltz typically pays a lot of attention to scientific and agricultural matters like soil analysis and rainwater collection.-
Photo: Darren Higgins for The New York Times
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The exotic and the native make a perfect fit for Mark Word, shown at a terraced garden in Austin where he mixed native plants with hybrid ones.-Photo: Benjamin Sklar for The New York Times
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Not that the project is only about symbolism. Mr. Woltz — who grew up on a farm in North Carolina and who became a convert to ecological design under the influence of his wife, Hara, a conservation biologist — typically pays a lot of attention to scientific and agricultural matters like soil analysis and rainwater collection. At Tupelo Farm, his firm worked with experts to establish native sedges on the property’s lowest points, where rainwater gathers. These grasslike plants tolerate standing water and help cleanse excess runoff from nearby livestock paddocks.

For Ms. Cochran, known for her sleek, pared-down gardens, elements of the hardscape — walls, water features, paths — are also a primary concern. Her design for Walden Studios, a mixed-use development where artists live and work in Sonoma County, Calif., that won an American Society of Landscape Architecture award in 2008, has graphic overlapping planes of crushed local Napa cobble chip in the style of a classic French garden. Rows of trees — a formal allée of fruitless mulberries and a sunken bosque of Korean pears — continue the lines of the adjacent vineyards.

For environmental and practical reasons, she tries to use local stone that blends in with the site’s color palette, but she sometimes finds that what is closest at hand is not always what appeals most to her clients. “The fact that people often want the more exotic imported items, a stone brought in from China can be cheaper to buy even with the shipping costs,” she said. “It can be a challenge to keep your principles in the face of budget concerns.”
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The long, narrow pool at the Hillan-Robertson home reflects the California hills and sky like a mirror, all part of the plan by Bernard Trainor.-Photo: Jason Liske
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But after two years of drought, the worst in California’s history, Ms. Cochran can sense that attitudes are changing. “These days, everybody’s talking about green issues and sustainability,” said Ms. Cochran, who has run her own firm for 10 years. “I find my clients really want to engage in a more meaningful way. They want to think holistically about their property.”

Steven Oliver, her client on the Walden Studios project and the owner of a construction company, Oliver & Company, in the San Francisco Bay Area, agrees. “Ten years or so ago, unless people were approaching a building project with a totally moral or ethical commitment, they wouldn’t have given the idea of green design a second thought,” he said. “Now we are in a completely different environment where everyone is thinking of these issues to some degree.” He also noted that until recently, seeking certification in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design was an expensive choice for a building project, adding 20 to 30 percent to the cost of construction. Now, he said, the features required for LEED compliance are more affordable.

Mr. Trainor also finds that his clients “are more receptive to change now.”

“They know things have to move forward,” he said. “They don’t always know how to do it, but they want to do things differently.”

Still, he and other designers said, the message of conservation and environmental responsibility cannot be couched in punitive terms if it is to succeed. “People shouldn’t have to make a choice between beauty and sustainability,” Ms. Cochran said. “Our work is designed so that I am able to say to our clients during a presentation, ‘Oh, and by the way, its also sustainable.’ ”- by STEPHEN ORR (The New York Times)
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Popularity: 10% [?]

from Dezeen

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New York based architects Rafael Viñoly have unveiled plans for the Museum of Modern Arab Art in Doha, Qatar.
The museum will house over 10,000 articles from the collection of Sheikh Hassan Bin Mohammed Al-Thani.
The collection, ranging from abstract paintings to the earliest Qur’anic manuscripts, will expand as the museum acquires work from contemporary Arabian artists.
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The 33,000 square meter project is due to be completed in 2011.
Check the rest of the article here
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Popularity: 5% [?]