U U Interview :: Architects
Briana caught up with Alex Dean (bass) and Dan Searle (drums) at the NYC stop of their co-headlining tour with letlive. We discussed the band #39;s latest album, Lost Forever// Lost Together,...
By: UnsignedUnleashed
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U&U Interview :: Architects - Video
Late last year, I visited one of the first two Walmart stores to open in Washington, D.C., and discovered a Walmart unlike almost any other in the United States. It was a thoughtfully designed store with a spacious vestibule, parking hidden underground, and--wonder of wonders--windows. You can stand inside that store at the corner of Georgia and Missouri Avenues NW and actually see the color of the sky. Ive been reporting on the big box retailer for a decade, and that Washington, D.C., store was so distinctive that it inspired a thought no Walmart ever has: Who designed this space?
All Walmart stores have architects, of course. But the stores are so uniform--they are numbered, in order of opening, for easy identification--its hard to tell what the architects do. Presumably, they make sure the walls meet the floor and the ceiling at perfect 90-degree angles. I put in a call asking to talk to someone who had been involved in the design of Walmart No. 5968 in Washington, D.C., I mentioned the windows.
About 90 minutes after my request, I got a call from Gabe Massa of MMA Architects, who helped design this Walmart. I asked him how it was that this store managed to be so different and he laughed. Thats a really loaded question, he said. Way before Walmart brought us on, there were a lot of discussions with the developers and the city. Walmart, it turns out, is working with planners, communities, and architects to bring smarter, urban-centric design to cities like D.C. The design difference at this particular store came down to two key things: meetings and inspiration from a historic car barn.
Massas firm was asked to design the Georgia Avenue store in part because of its experience putting stores in urban settings. His firm has 20 Walmart stores in the mid-Atlantic and the northeast that are either in design or finished (they also do stores for CVS, Office Depot, and ACME supermarkets).
There were a lot of meetings in the stores Brightwood neighborhood with local officials, residents, planning board members, members of the historic preservation group. The planning process--which lasted almost three years--and the design reviews vested the community in the way the store looked.
They got a better store than they would have without the design review, says Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, which worked closely with the city, Massa, and Walmart on the design of the store. Those meetings offered the opportunity to bounce ideas off each other--they were like brainstorming sessions. They ended up with much better ideas than they would have come up with on their own.
We looked at this location, Massa said, and there was an old car barn there that had been built in 1908. It originally held horses and buggies. It burned and was rebuilt. Then it was used for Washingtons trolley car system. The car barn stopped being used by D.C.s mass transit system in 1955, but it was still on the property, tucked behind a Chevrolet dealership that had gone out of business.
The car barn was not a distinguished piece of architecture. It was a boxy building, with wide-open spaces along the front to allow the trolley cars to enter and leave. History is not always beautiful, Miller. It was very much a utilitarian building--it was not high style. But that car barn had an enormous impact on the development of this neighborhood.
Rendering, Fort Totten Square, Washington, D.C., by Hickok Cole Architects
And it caught Massas imagination. The car barn helped make Brightwood a destination early in the century, he said. We wanted to try to make Brightwood a destination again. The designers also wanted to echo the car barns utilitarian and industrial feel. In fact, two of the most distinctive visual features of the Georgia Avenue Walmart are its rugged brick interior facade, with many of the bricks looking old, flecked with paint. Inside, one third of the store is devoted to groceries, and that section sits under an unusual peaked roof that is all glass, supported by robust metal trusses with visible rivets. All very un-Walmart-esque.
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What It's Like To Be A Walmart Architect
[Rendering of 1 Ink, 2 Ink, and 3 Ink, as seen from the corner of Harrison Avenue and Herald Street. Rendering by Elkus Manfredi Architects.]
At a meeting in early 2007 in the Fort Point, Boston, headquarters of the architecture firm Elkus Manfredi Architects, cofounder and principal Howard Elkus welcomed developer Ori Ron to discuss his residential conversion plans for the old Dainty Dot factory building on the edge of Boston's Chinatown. Ron had with him several different brands of water bottles, from the stumpy plastic of Poland Springs all the way to the cylindrical glass of Voss.
"Let's imagine every water bottle is a building," Ron said. He began placing them on a table between Elkus and himself, careful to end with the Voss bottle. "I want you to build this type of building."
Elkus laughed. "You're challenging me," replied the veteran architect, whose firm had by that point designed dozens of projects in the Greater Boston area and throughout the world. "You know what, I know where you're coming from."
[The new Las Vegas City Hall. Photo by Brian Feinknopf.]
Voss it was. Seven years later, in February 2014, Ron's Hudson Group North America would commence leasing at its building at 120 Kingston, now called Radian Boston. True to its geometric name and that 2007 brainstorm, it was cylindrical and glassyand, for Boston, quite tall: 27 floors of 240 luxury apartments starting at $3,000 a month for studios, with 4,500 square feet of ground-floor retail.
It was the latest debut of the latest project for the most prolific architecture firm in Massachusetts. In 2012, the last year comprehensive data was available, Elkus Manfredi had billings of $37,731,000 for projects in the commonwealth, most of them in the Greater Boston region; the firm also had 66 architects registered with Massachusetts. Both measures placed them far ahead of the next busiest firm, CBT architects, with billings of $32,800,000 and 51 architects in-state.
More than Elkus Manfredi's activity is the scope of that activity: big and often tall. Such scope has placed the firm's work toward the center of the region's raging debate over density and height, particularly in Boston, a city with designs on being a global capital of biotechnology and technology as well as a pioneer of crunchy urban planning that includes miles of bike tracks and acres of pedestrian-friendly squares. It's also a city plagued by a notorious housing shortage, with rents at Manhattan-like highs and sales prices to rival San Francisco's.
Projects such as Radian Boston are meant to alleviate that shortage through fresh supply, which can in turn satiate Boston's demand for housingand, therefore, theoretically, at least, drive down housing costs. But getting such projects built remains a challenge, thanks to often byzantine zoning requirements and a feature seemingly unique to Boston amid America's largest metro areas: unremitting opposition to building high and dense, even in urban cores.
"I will define Elkus' job almost as a mission impossible," Ron said, ticking off the engineering, zoning, and economic challenges of building ambitiously in Boston. "If someone is ever able to building anything of substance under those constraints, he should be applauded and saluted."
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Curbed Features: How Boston's Busiest Architects Are Changing Their City
There's just a few weeks to go until Galveston sees around 20,000 people descend on its beaches to watch epic sand structures rise up out of the seaside for this year's sandcastle competition.
But this year that's not all the crowds will be doing.
The American Institue of Architects, which organizes the event, has teamed up with the city to attempt to break the world record for the amount of cans collected in one day in an effort to make the big clean up afterward a little more exciting than normal.
Teams of volunteers will be patrolling to ensure the thousands of visitors pitch in and help by disposing of their cans in one of dozens of collection stations set up all along Stewart beach.
The target to get into the Guinness Book of World Records is 160,000 cans collected within eight hours on the day of the competition, May 31. Organizers must beat the current record held by Habitat for Humanity in Evansville, Indiana.
Keen collectors can save up cans at home in the days before the event. As long as cans are deposited at the collecting stations within those eight hours, they will count toward the record attempt.
"Twenty-thousand people, that's alot of bottles and cans," said Steve Stelzer from the sandcastle committee at AIA Houston. "The city had been wanting to promote recycling anyway, so with the sandcastle event going on it was a match made in heaven."
Galveston has dedicated the entire month of May to finding ways to encourage people to keep the island cleaner, with a special emphasis on recycling.
"Typically (cans on the beach) are not a huge problem. We wanted to promote the idea of recycling to folks from here, and for visitors," said Paul Booth, Environmental Services Superintendent for the City of Galveston, which was happy to partner with the annual sand sculptors.
The event will add an extra dimension to the sandcastle competition, Galveston's second-largest revenue generating event, behind only Mardi Gras, according to AIA.
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Galveston sandcastle competition plans to break a world record this year
Pier Solar and the Great Architects (Part 08) - J Streams
NOTE: As this was taken from a live stream, it will not show or reflect the quality of editing or effort put forth into my normal videos. Thank you for under...
By: MegaUltraJMan
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Pier Solar and the Great Architects (Part 08) - J Streams - Video
Architects of What #39;s Next - Costa Rica - Pura Vida
For our people in VMware Costa Rica, #39;pura vida #39; is both a way of life and how we work together -- embracing the moment and taking it on with optimism. We ar...
By: VMwareCareers
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Architects of What's Next - Costa Rica - Pura Vida - Video
May Small Business of the Month: BCDM Architects
BCDM Architects is helping to develop the Greater Omaha community and communities around the country. "Obviously," you might say, "it is, after all, a full-s...
By: GreaterOmahaChamber
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May Small Business of the Month: BCDM Architects - Video
Architects - Naysayer [Remake, Cover, Mixing Practice]
Mutlitracks by: https://www.facebook.com/DaybreakStudioSwe https://www.youtube.com/user/DennisMartenssonCh Tools: TSE 808, Brainworx RockRack, Ownhammer Nebula Programs (ImpulseResponses),...
By: Benjamin Mller
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Architects - Naysayer [Remake, Cover, Mixing Practice] - Video
Pier Solar and the Great Architects (Part 14) - J Streams
NOTE: As this was taken from a live stream, it will not show or reflect the quality of editing or effort put forth into my normal videos. Thank you for under...
By: MegaUltraJMan
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Pier Solar and the Great Architects (Part 14) - J Streams - Video
Architects - "C.A.N.C.E.R." LIVE at The Garage
Brighton, U.K. metal band "Architects" perform their song "C.A.N.C.E.R." live at The Garage in Burnsville, MN on April 27th, 2014. Check them out at http://www.ArchitectsOfficial.com/ Video...
By: THE GARAGE BURNSVILLE
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Architects - "C.A.N.C.E.R." LIVE at The Garage - Video