Two in the Bush

Two in the Bush

Robert A.M. Stern and Michael Van Valkenburgh design a library for the 43rd president

Stern's classic building plays off Van Valkenburgh's rolling, bucolic landscape.

Courtesy George W. Bush Presidential Center

On November 18, Robert A.M. Stern and Michael Van Valkenburgh joined former first lady Laura Bush at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas to unveil their design for the George W. Bush Presidential Center. Situated on a 23-acre site at the southwest corner of SMU’s campus, the 230,000-square-foot center will contain facilities for the presidential archive, a museum, and a policy institute.
Nestled in a landscape of Texas oaks and wildflowers, the building’s brick walls and limestone trim respond to the American Georgian character of the university. This traditional shell, however, conceals a high-tech heart: The archive will feature the most advanced systems for electronic communication preservation of any presidential library to date, and the building itself is striving for a LEED Platinum rating with a range of sustainable design strategies.

The library and institute have a more formal face on the SMU campus.

Winning the job involved answering a fairly standard request for qualifications, followed by an interview with the first lady, who is in charge of the design committee responsible for the project. Other members of the committee include Roland Betts, founder of Chelsea Piers; philanthropist Deedie Rose; and Gerald Turner, president of SMU, but both Stern and Van Valkenburgh credited Mrs. Bush with giving the design process its focus. “She is a wonderful person,” Stern told AN. “She’s smart, visual, a clear thinker, and she’s out to move the project in the best possible direction.”
Van Valkenburgh had similar praise for the first lady, whom he first worked with while redesigning Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. “One of the reasons I was interested in the job is because she is a first-rate human being and a superior client,” he said. The landscape architect was less certain about working with Stern, however, and requested a work agreement directly with the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation. “It’s just better if the architect is your co-equal in the design process,” he said. “It probably wasn’t necessary. Working with Stern has been unbelievably enjoyable. They really like landscape in their office. They have ideas, but aren’t prescriptive.”

The grounds include the "Texas Rose Garden," drawing on the original at the White House.

Among its antecedents in the world of presidential libraries, the Bush Center will stand out as one of the few that contains the archive, museum, and policy institute all in the same building. Stern pointed out that the Clinton library in Arkansas has its companion institute in a separate building, and while the Kennedy library was intended to be linked with its school of government, they now sit at opposite ends of Boston.
At the Bush Center these functions will have dedicated entrances—scholars and the general public will enter from a courtyard on the north side of the building, while the institute entrance will occupy the west—and their programs on the interior will remain separate, but at certain points it will be possible to open the spaces up to each other for special events. The Bush Center will also be the only presidential library to feature a public restaurant, which will sit outside of the security cordon and spill out onto a terrace in the garden.

The Bush Center, unlike its antecedents, includes a library, archive, and policy institute (above) all under one roof.

This spirit of casual openness is an integral part of the landscape design. Van Valkenburgh took inspiration from President Bush’s frequent appearances in Crawford. “I always found his connection to the outdoors to be genuine,” he said. “I like that about him. I liked how comfortable he looked in the Texas White House.”
As opposed to the rigidly structured lawns of the SMU campus, the Bush Center’s landscape will be more informal, featuring rolling meadows and native plantings, as well as an amphitheater, courtyards, and tree-shaded lawns. The site’s urban location will make it easily accessible to the public. “One of the things Mrs. Bush said inspired her was that this landscape will not be fenced,” said Van Valkenburgh. “It will not be private. It will act as central park for this neighborhood in Dallas.”

Aaron Seward

BIM's in the Money

BIM's in the Money

GSA doles out major modeling contracts to ten firms

A BIM rendering from an ONUMA white paper. The firm is one of ten BIM specialists on contract with the GSA.

Courtesy ONUMA

The General Services Administration awarded ten hefty contracts for Building Information Modeling (BIM) services in Septmber, each worth $30 million, with a retainer of up to five years. While work under the contracts has not yet been assigned, the GSA has clearly indicated that BIM services are an important factor for the federal government’s new construction projects, as well as for renovating and modernizing existing structures.
The Indefinite Delivery–Indefinite Quality (IDIQ) contracts were awarded across the GSA’s regions, and six went to architecture firms: Ghafari Associates of Dearborn, Michigan; KlingStubbins in partnership with Tocci Building Corporation of Philadelphia; HNTB of Kansas City, Missouri; ONUMA of Pasadena, California; View By View of San Francisco; and Kristine Fallon Associates of Chicago. The four remaining contracts were awarded to construction management firm DPR Construction of Falls Church, Virgina; engineering and systems-based Hallam Associates of South Burlington, Vermont; and software development firms Beck Technology of Dallas and Applied Software Technology of Atlanta.
The ten offices will primarily act as project consultants, and depending on the services required for each assignment, a team may find itself modeling information as varied as energy analyses, operations and facility management, planning and programmatic organization, or cost estimating schedules.

The GSA awarded six contracts for the laser scanning of its current holdings, an effort that won an AIA BIM award last year.

Courtesy AIA

“The IDIQ for BIM services will provide consulting services available to GSA to verify, model check, train, and prepare independent models on any American Recovery and Reinvestment Act projects or future projects,” said GSA spokeswoman Mary Anne Beatty. The contracts promote the GSA’s commitment to “strategic and incremental implementation of BIM technologies and reflect the technological advances in the marketplace,” Beatty added.
Chris Leary, a project director at KlingStubbins, said that the firm had essentially been prequalified for a very broad assignment. “It’s up to the local GSA, or perhaps the national GSA office, to come up with specific assignments that meet these categories,” he said. “It’s a pretty clever way for an owner like the GSA to accelerate the adoption of this technology.”
Six additional IDIQ contracts were awarded for 3-D laser scanning services to provide accurate 3-D models of existing GSA facilities in advance of architecture or engineering work. In partnership with BIM services, scanning should help streamline the GSA’s vast portfolio of construction and renovation projects, which include federal office buildings, border stations, courthouses, and childcare centers.
Two of the winning 3-D scanning firms, Stantec Consulting Services of Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and Architectural Resource Consultants of Irvine, California, provide architectural and design services. Coign Asset Metrics & Technologies of New Brighton, Pennsylvania offers a broad range of capabilities, including facility and asset management, engineering, surveying, planning, information technology, and business process improvement. The remaining three offices—Quantapoint of Pittsburgh, Pharos Consulting of Orlando, Florida, and Beck Technology of Dallas—specialize in software development and laser scanning.

Brian Newman

Eminent Defiance

Columbia expansion opponents score surprising win in court

A rendering of Renzo Piano's plans for 131st Street, which is currently occupied by Tuck-It-Away self-storage.

Courtesy Columbia University

When Columbia University proposed a new $6 billion, 17-acre campus in the Manhattanville section of West Harlem in 2004, the institution considered using eminent domain to acquire land it could not buy. Most owners sold—the university had quietly bought up half the neighborhood starting in 2002, and more followed suit after the announcement—but two local businesses, Tuck-It-Away Self Storage and a pair of gas stations, did not. Instead, they sued the state last year over its use of eminent domain, and today a state court handed down a surprising decision in their favor.
In a stern 3–2 ruling, the First Department of New York’s apellate court determined that the project lacked any true public purpose, with the state exercising eminent domain wholly to the benefit of a private entity, Columbia University. Furthermore, the decision admonishes the state on two counts related to its finding of blight in Manhattanville, which became the pretext for condemning the area. First the blight study was done belatedly—two years after the state had gotten involved on the project—and the study was prepared by the same firm, AKRF, employed by Columbia, creating a blatant conflict of interest.

An aerial photo of Manhattanville. One of Sprayregen's storage facilities is plainly marked by its orange paint. A gas station sits on the triangular lot at the corner of 125th Street and Broadway, the other at 125th Street and 12th Avenue, next to the viaduct.

“This ultimately became the defining moment for the end game of blight,” Judge James Catterson wrote in his majority opinion. “Having committed to allow Columbia to annex Manhattanville, the EDC and ESDC were compelled to engineer a public purpose for a quintessentially private development: eradication of blight.” Catterson is referring to the city’s Economic Development Corportation and the Empire State Development Corporation, and his writing may have wider impacts on both: “The time has come to categorically reject eminent domain takings solely based on underutilization.”
The move is all the more surprising because this same panel of judges found in favor of the state’s use of eminent domain at Atlantic Yards, a ruling that was affirmed last week and touted by the state in its promise to appeal this decision: “ESDC believes the decision of the Appellate Division, First Department in the matter of the Columbia University Manhattanville Campus to be wrong and inconsistent with established law, as consistently articulated by the New York State Court of Appeals, most recently with respect to ESDC's Atlantic Yards project.”

A sketch by Renzo Piano shows the service roads that run beneath the project. The university says it must control the entire 17-acre site to accommodate these facilities.

How Columbia will proceed remains to be seen. Should an appeal fail, the school would have to negotiate with the two holdouts. This could mean a buyout, though both parties have expressed their interest to remain in the neighborhood, suggesting Columbia build around them."It's a good and valuable business and they'd like to keep doing it," said David Smith, attorney for the gas station owners.
The school has called such a scenario impossible, because its new campus, designed by Renzo Piano with planning by SOM, entails a below-grade service core stretching across much of the site. The school argues that this would eliminate truck traffic in the neighborhood, providing for a better pedestrian experience, which could not be achieved without controlling all of the land, of which it currently has 91 percent. A Columbia spokesperson declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
Nick Sprayregen, the owner of Tuck-It-Away, called the decision a victory not only for him but for all New Yorkers who fear for their property rights. “Although I’ve always been cautiously optimistic, I knew the weight of prior eminent domain rulings had been against us,” he said. “It’s nice to see the courts, when given actual proof of collusion, will rule in the right way and support the people.”

Matt Chaban

High Hopes

High Hopes

Despite recession, new downtown plan calls for seven tall towers near SF's TransBay Terminal

A rendering of the transformed downtown.

Courtesy TJPA

The recession has pummeled San Francisco’s real estate market, but don’t tell that to the city. On November 19, the Planning Department unveiled **a new downtown plan —the first since 1985—that adds seven new skyscrapers and designates the area around the Transbay Terminal as the city’s new downtown.
“This comprehensive plan is one of the lynchpins of the city’s future growth – one that is based in sustainability and channeling growth around major investments in public transit,” San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said in a release.
The Transit Center district, a 145-acre parcel south of Market Street, would be the site of seven new towers that would blast past the city’s current 550-foot height limit. Two would tower over the Transamerica Pyramid, one of the city’s tallest buildings, by 100 feet or more. The tallest would stand at the site of the planned Transbay Transit Terminal, a new high-speed train and bus station. The earliest version of the plan was introduced in April 2008, and it has been developed with significant community input.
Changing the city building limits, however, will require a lengthy approval process. Public hearings will continue through next year, with possible adoption by the Board of Supervisors in late 2010.
The plan aims to make downtown more walkable and pedestrian friendly by adding wider sidewalks, mid-block passageways, kiosks, narrower streets, and a rerouting of commuter traffic away from the area. A public plaza, new power and water conservation systems, and a 5.4-acre park atop Pelli Clarke Pelli’s Transbay Tower would also help make the district more environmentally friendly.
None of these amenities, however, could be built unless there is new construction downtown. An estimated $567 million in development taxes and fees would be needed to fund everything.
But development plans always attract dissenters in San Francisco, and this time is no different. A 1984-voter approved initiative blocks any building above 40 feet to cast a shadow on a public park. The only way around Proposition K, or the Sunlight Ordinance, is if the Planning Commission modifies it. The proposed towers would shade two plazas and possible two others.
Since the city last released its downtown plan in 1985, over 20 million square feet of office space, hotels, and apartments have been built downtown. Over the next quarter century, the new plan would allow half that, in the range of nine million square feet of new space.

Kristina Shevory

Gold-Plated Bohlin

Gold-Plated Bohlin

Peter Bohlin, principal of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, wins 2010 AIA Gold Medal

Apple Store Fifth Avenue, New York (2006).

COURTESY bcj

Peter Bohlin was selected today as this year’s winner of the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Gold Medal, the highest honor attainable by an individual architect. Bohlin is a founding principal of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, which has received over 400 design awards in its forty-four year history, including the AIA Firm Award in 1994.
“I’m so pleased and I’m surprised,” Bohlin said in a statement. “We all believe in architecture,” he added. “Like athletes, we all know that it’s hard work to make it look easy, and we’re all constantly striving to do that.”
Overseeing a 200-person firm with offices in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh; Philadelphia; Seattle; and San Francisco, Bohlin has championed a nuanced approach to contextuality. In New York City, the firm's most iconic building is arguably the subterranean Apple store on Fifth Avenue, whose entrance is marked by a pristine, 32-foot structural glass cube that houses a transparent glass elevator and circular stair leading down to the store below. On the West Coast, he is also known for Seattle’s LEED-Gold certified city hall, a 200,000-square-foot building with a planted roof and gently curving curtain walls of steel and glass, built jointly in 2005 with Bassetti Architects.

Seattle City Hall (2003).

Nic Lehoux

These urban icons notwithstanding, Bohlin has done some of his most characteristic work in natural settings, earning plaudits for his environmental sensitivity and contextual materials. His portfolio includes numerous private residences, including a partially earth-integrated, 66,000-square-foot home for the Gates family in Medina, Washington, built with Douglas fir and surrounded by a recreated wetland.
In New York, a chain of low-lying buildings stretches along the edge of one of the Finger Lakes to form the award-winning Combs Point Residence. Bohlin’s rural institutional work has a similarly light touch: the Pocono Environmental Education Center in Dingmans Ferry, Pennsylvania, is a simple shed topped with an overhang roof and outfitted with a host of green features, such as south-facing windows and shingles cut from locally scavenged tires.

Combs Point Residence, Finger Lakes, New York.

Nic Lehoux

Along with the Gold Medal, the AIA also awarded top honors in two other categories today. The 35-year-old Pugh + Scarpa Architects garnered the 2010 AIA Firm Award, the highest award bestowed on an architecture firm, with the AIA praising its “seamless blending of architecture, art, and craft” and its “nurturing of in-house talent.” The Firm Award comes on the heels of Pugh + Scarpa winning the 2010 AIA California Council Firm of the Year Award in October. Finally, the AIA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education went to Michael Graves, who has taught architectural design and theory for more than 40 years and is now a professor emeritus at Princeton University.

Julia Galef

10 photos most impressive decade

Smoke covers Manhattan after the terrorist attack on 9 / 11, rescue hostages in Beslan, SARS epidemic threatening the world.
Here are some images record the memorable events during the last decade, voted by Reuters.

Smoke rises from the Twin Towers International Trade Center in Manhattan, New York, following terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. People in New York saw the surprised and panic when the plane crashed Sam was robbed on terror tower double International Trade Center, causing 3,000 fatalities. On 11/9 open a new era for world security and led U.S. and allied forces to bring Afghanistan, is a place for harbori

Screamed a little girl crying in the hands of Afghanistan after his father aftershocks in her village. Afghanistan is a country of high risk of earthquakes and each suffer a series of earthquake caused thousands of people died. Awe earthquake in decades occurred in 2002 in Baghlan province, at least 1,500 dead and 30,000 homeless.

Funeral of the woman doctor Tse Yuen-man, Hong Kong, the first doctor killed by acute respiratory infection diseases for SARS while treating patients. SARS epidemic originated from southern China, then spread around the world in 2003, leaving 800 people dead.

Usain Bolt, Jamaican athlete, celebrates winning the Men's 200 m race at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Bolt was honored as heroes in the sport which is full of scandal because athletes use drugs. He set world records on the track 100 m with a time of 9.69 seconds and 200 meters with 19.30 seconds. However, he was making love is not only talented but a bright happy character.

Russian police take a baby was rescued from the school were the masked gunmen held up in Beslan. Chechen militant arrested about 1,000 children and parents hostage in the school in Beslan, North Ossetia, near the Muslim day of September 1, 2004. After 3 days, task organized to attack the Russian school. Total of 333 hostages, more than half children, were killed and hundreds injured.

An immigrant from Africa are on the beach after to Fuerteventura, Spain, next to a group of tourists are sunbathing. Trafficking in increasing the population of rapidly growing. Through the development of information technology, those who put blacks on European immigrants increasingly sophisticated operations.

Ms. Alicia Casilio, dressed like Iraqis, im standing in a demonstration against the war in Iraq in Boston, USA. Wave of protest U.S. launched the war in Iraq increasing. Many civilians killed in Iraq since the time when the U.S. military brought here in 2003, there are many sources for this figure is 100,000. War makes the Middle East countries as more ruins, scenes commonly seen bloodshed everywhere.

A female Korean soldiers standing outside a military base in the Yalu river banks, in the city of Sinuiju. After decades isolated, Korea remains resolutely not abandon nuclear weapons program. Six-party talks between North Korea, U.S., South Korea, Russia, Japan and China still stuck. Recently, Korea continuously conducted nuclear test and missile.

A worker cleaning Rwanda collective graves outside the church in Nyanza. Hutu combatants killed 800,000 people in just 100 days during the massacre in Rwanda in 1994. President Paul Kagame to swear that no similar event took place and he was praised in the past decade because of the achievement of operating the country and attract international investment.

Cậu bé Sadiki Basilaki bị suy dinh dưỡng nặng được cho uống sữa ở Congo. Mặc cho các nỗ lực của Liên Hợp Quốc, đất nước châu Phi này vẫn chìm trong nghèo đói với nhiều tệ nạn như tra tấn, cưỡng hiếp, giết người không xét xử và hàng loạt trẻ em bị chết đói.