ATLANTA, April 4, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --Guesthouse Hospitality and SB Architects are pleased to announce that the two companies have partnered to create the design concept for the new Guesthouse Atlanta. Envisioned as a members-only social club, Guesthouse Atlanta will be the inaugural property for the Guesthouse brand. Targeted for opening in 2014, it will be the first of fifteen Guesthouse properties slated for development in key markets across the United States over the next seven years.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130404/PH88318)

Developed by brothers Fred and Andre Smith, entrepreneurs with a long family history in hospitality, Guesthouse is an exciting idea that promises to revolutionize the social landscape for young adults, establishing an entirely new concept in hospitality. Guesthouse Hospitality and SB Architects have worked for the past year to develop the design vision for this innovative social club.

"We lucked out in finding SB Architects," says Fred Smith, co-founder of Guesthouse Hospitality. "They are the perfect fit for our team, not only from a design standpoint but because they really understand hospitality. They can translate the luxury and community of a resort destination to an urban setting to create a truly groundbreaking destination."

"This is a partnership in every sense of the word," asserts Scott Lee, President of SB Architects. "We've pushed each other to achieve the best possible vision for this project."

Designed as an oasis within an urban setting, Guesthouse will combine amenities, events and a sense of community for its members. At the heart of the concept lies a luxurious outdoor entertainment area, with multiple options for relaxing and socializing, private cabanas, beach volleyball, multiple bars, and event venues. Indoors, the living room and dining room provide social hubs, while a state-of-the-art fitness facility ensures that Guesthouse enhances not only members' social and professional lives, but their physical lives as well. The design vision is modern but inviting, sophisticated but not stuffy.

The development team is narrowing in on the selection of the site, and is in discussions with an operating partner for the first property, which will be located between Buckhead and Midtown Atlanta.

About Guesthouse HospitalityGuesthouse Hospitality (www.guesthousehospitality.com) is an Atlanta-based hotel, restaurant and entertainment group, committed to creating unparalleled experiences for its guests by combining innovative concepts with elite service. Founded by Fred and Andre Smith, Guesthouse Hospitality is the next generation of a successful line of hospitality industry entrepreneurs that have founded numerous hospitality enterprises, including one of the largest tour operators in the Caribbean.

About SB ArchitectsIn over 50 years of design practice, San Francisco and Miami-based SB Architects (www.sb-architects.com) has maintained a long-standing reputation for excellence in the planning and design of luxury hotels and resorts, multi-family residential and urban mixed-use projects. The firm's work spans the globe, and includes projects throughout the United States, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, Asia and the Middle East.

Media contact: Heather Hebert, Director of Marketing, 415-673-8990, Email

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Guesthouse Hospitality Teams with SB Architects To Design Contemporary Social Club Guesthouse Atlanta

Residents and architects clash over Jericho's Blavatnik School design

6:00pm Wednesday 3rd April 2013 in News By Damian Fantato, covering Summertown, Jericho and North Oxford. Call me on 01865 425429

Buy this photo Visitors inspect the model of plans for the Blavatnik School Pictures: OX58226 Antony Moore

architects behind the controversial Blavatnik School of Government say they have want it to be seen and loved across Oxford.

But Jericho residents have described the Walton Street structure as something they wouldnt wish on Milton Keynes.

Plans have already been submitted by Oxford University but a public meeting was held in St Barnabas church last week to explain the buildings design.

Its height has already proved controversial and the fact that it is three metres taller than Carfax Tower and 26m high in total has been a frequent criticism. John OMara, from Swiss-based architectural firm Herzog & De Meuron, said: It is apparent that this building is visible from views like Raleigh Park but we wanted to engage with that visibility.

If we were to go over Carfax, which we do, we wanted to go over it with an identity, with a form. We expect this building to be seen, we want it to be seen and we want it to be appreciated.

The architects carefully studied views from Raleigh Park in North Hinksey, Boars Hill and Port Meadow and in all instances the top of the building can be seen in the distance. It has been recessed to prevent it from overwhelming what the architects describe as the civic scale of Walton Street.

But residents in both Divinity Road and London Place have objected to the plans because they fear the impact it would have on the views from South Park.

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Residents and architects clash over Jericho's Blavatnik School design

Exhibitions Museums News Brazil Hans Ulrich Obrist opens show in Lina Bo Bardi's Glass House in So Paulo, plans next exhibition at Calder house in America

By Charlotte Burns. News, Issue 245, April 2013 Published online: 02 April 2013

More than 30 artists and architects including Cildo Meireles, Isaac Julien, Cristina Iglesias, Norman Foster and Olafur Eliasson have created new works in homage to the Brazilian Modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. The So Paulo exhibition, The Insides are on the Outside, is the latest house-museum project organised by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of Londons Serpentine Gallery. It takes place at Bo Bardis former home, the Casa de Vidro (Glass House) and at SESC Pompeia, the factory which she and her husband Pietro Maria Bardi converted into a cultural centre (5 April-2 June).

So many artists told me about the Glass House, and [they are] obsessed by it, says Obrist, adding that the Brazilian context is so dynamicthere are generations of amazing artists. He was introduced to Bo Bardi by Cildo Meireles, who has created an installation, Lina, va fare un caffe, which spreads the smell of coffee throughout the house. The artist Ernesto Neto has covered the SESC Pompeia tower with a gigantic installation, Obrist says, while Dan Graham has built a new pavilion. Several artists, including Adrin Villar Rojas and Tamar Guimaraes, have produced films in tribute to Bo Bardi, while the Japanese architect firm Sanaa has created a suite of furniture. Cinthia Marcelle has created a polyphonic soundtrack for the house, based on Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardis vinyl record collection while Gilbert & George spent a day at the house as living sculptures, documenting the results with postcards that will be distributed to visitors.

The project is the latest in a series of domestic interventions by Obrist, who has previously staged exhibitions at Londons Sir John Soanes Museum, as well as the homes of architect Luis Barragn in Mexico City, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Sils Maria, Switzerland and poet Federico Garca Lorca in Granada, Spain. I started my career as a curator in my kitchen, Obrist says. Artists do different kinds of work than they would in a museum or bigger space. That sense of intimacy is important.

This exhibition will be produced by Isabela Mora, international projects manager at the Fondation Beyeler, who worked with Obrist on the 2008 Lorca show.

The next project will take place in America, at the house of the late artist Alexander Calder in Roxbury, Connecticut. Calder is also part of the show in Brazilhe made two drawings of Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi on the occasion of his first visit to Brazil in 1948, during which time he became friends with the couple.

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Artist and architects pay homage to Brazilian Modernist

For IT architects, one of the most important non-functional requirements to determine is the availability needs of a systems users.

Its often expensive and risky adding availability features to an already deployed solution, so getting it right first time is important. In current times however, were being asked to regularly provide levels of solution availability that until recently were reserved for the largest of enterprises, and perhaps more worrying, the business justification for these grand expectations is getting stronger and more un-deniable by the day.

The question is, are we right to be shocked at the requirements of even the most simple sounding internal IT systems? And are we in a period in which IT departments are struggling to deliver business expectations because they havent kept up with the pace of change? I believe so.

The impact of the consumerisation of high quality IT In times past, consumer IT had little impact on the design of business IT solutions because the IT we used at home was built to a low budget and to be just good enough. Today, its the other way round, the consumerisation of high quality IT has happened and is setting the standard for business IT.

My iPad is more robust than most of the appliances in my kitchen never mind an enterprise data centre, while a minor social media outage of Facebook quickly turns into a major financial media outrage. As a result of this turnaround, the role of an IT architect has got even harder, especially in the small- and mid-enterprise sectors where arguably the pace of IT change has never been faster and the lack of IT governance has never been lower.

With their iPads always working and Facebook always being online, business users increasingly have the same expectation of the IT systems they use.

Its now not un-common for architects to have to accommodate everything from the finance director wanting to look at KPI dashboards while at a conference eight time zones away to allowing marketing teams to analyse the companys Twitter feed during peak-time TV slots.

For IT departments with staff that grew up with 9 to 5 working hours, these are requirements that have been hard to predict let alone efficiently accommodate. The question for architects to answer now is whether having true 24/7 systems is an excessive requirement that has no business case or something that can be genuinely justified.

Helping business users understand, justify, and quantify their requirements is the skill of a good architect, and is a process we can still use to define availability needs even if its to show that ultra-high availability needs bring ultra-high costs.

We could compare a future solutions availability needs to existing systems does the new web site need to be more available than the dispatching system etc. The big change in 2013 that I see though it that while this traditional approach may still feel adequate, we need to make sure it doesnt make us appear antiquated and in denial of recent changes in the world outside of IT.

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How the iPad ruined the lives of IT architects

West Valley School wrapped up a community meeting Thursday with a more defined vision for expansion.

CTA Architects Engineers, along with members from a steering committee, presented five layout ideas and concluded with a tentative concept that combines desirable components from all five. The district has contracted CTA to do master planning for $26,520.

This relieves some pressure on your current space needs and looks to the future, said CTA educational facility planner Nick Salmon.

This early concept looks at the long-term needs of the district and involves multiple phases that may be implemented over several years to accommodate growth and allow the district time to acquire more funding.

The first phase would cost about $7 million and add 30,000 square feet of new construction to the existing building, which is about 60,000 square feet. This phase includes 13 classrooms essentially a middle school wing for grades six through eight two music rooms, a flexible area for eating and educational use, a teacher-preparation room, expanded library and administrative offices and a kitchen.

Currently, the district does not have a kitchen and food is prepared by Evergreen School District. Steering committee members said having its own kitchen would allow the district to provide more healthy options.

Two of the classrooms are designated as flexible spaces.

This is what we call 21st-century learning were trying to get away from just a bunch of classrooms with a hallway, said CTA architect David Koel. He noted that modern learning involves more flexible spaces.

An access road would also be built behind the school for student pickups and dropoffs and kitchen deliveries.

Optional projects would include a gym that could be used by the community and a student commons area.

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Architects draw up plans for remodel, expansion

A couple of months ago, Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars announced that he was building a curvy, loopy and for some reason, largely see-through building, to be made with the help of Enrico Dinis D-Shape 3D printer. The project would cost up to 5 million euros ($6.4 million) and be completed in 2014.

Another group quickly piped up, declaring that a similar project they were working on would be done even faster and cheaper. London-based Softkill Design intends to fabricate a web-like building and whats more, it says it will need just three weeks to print the structureand only a single day to assemble it, which it plans to do at some point later this year.

This month, another Dutch company jumped into the fray. DUS Architects plans to use a 20-ft-tall 3D printer to build a house along an Amsterdam canal. Its also going to do it by the end of the year. Take that, Ruijssenaars.

3d house-printingit certainly sounds like a brilliant idea. Why bother hiring masons and carpenters and plumbers when you can buy a machine and print out your own abode? Goodbye, apartment blocks. Hello, homemade homes.

But what does this 3d house-printing actually mean? And if its so groovy, how com no one has done it yet?

First, the basics: Simply put, 3D printing works through a process of layering. The printer reads a file, much as a deskjet would read an image, and then translates that into a physical object the way your printer spits out ink on a pageone strip at a time.

The ink in a 3D printer is a materialoften plasticthat shoots out of a nozzle and onto a platform. If a printer is making a coffee mug, for instance, it will gradually layer up a ring until it reaches the top. You could call it a bottom-up process.

But you would never want to print a coffee mug, not even a silly one. For the moment, the cool thing about the technology is that its better suited to protoyping shapes rather that reproducing existing ones. Plus,gift shops the world over have shown us that novelty mugs are always a bad idea.

Say you were a design enthusiast, though, and wanted to make a chair in an unconventional form. With a 3D printer, that would cost the same to produce as the sort of vanilla chairs you pick up at Ikea. Thats because 3D printers dont constrain the imagination with mundane restrictions like molds, human labor or cost. If you can dream itand get a design for ityou can print it. It gives designers the freedom to imagine all sorts of kooky things in much the same way that advances in printing equipment freed graphic artists from the tyranny of movable type.

Things get tricky when it comes to large-scale projects, such as houses. The most obvious problem is one of scale. Just as you cannot print a billboard on a laserjet that can, at most, accept A3 sheets, you cant print a entire house on existing 3D printers.

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Architects are starting to 3D print buildings—and not in the way you’d expect

IT pros with skills in Microsoft Dynamics project management and architecture can look forward to healthy raises this year, according to a survey of more than 10,000 respondents worldwide.

Full-time technical architects working on Dynamics stand to earn a 14% salary increase, and project managers are in line for a 9% raise, according to the Microsoft Dynamics Salary Survey 2013 from Nigel Frank International, a firm specializsng in recruitment of Dynamics professionals.

Increases for other Dynamics IT professionals are less, and 4% is the average salary increase across all categories, the survey says.

The survey dealt with professionals with expertise in four products: Dynamics AX and NAV are ERP platforms; Dynamics GP is accounting/ERP software; and Dynamics CRM is customer relationship management software.

Technical architects also pull down some of the largest salaries among Dynamics professionals, with salaries in the US of $148,000 for those versed in Dynamics AX, $115,000 for NAV, $144,000 for CRM and $115,000 for GP, the survey says. Freelancers can earn up to $1,100 per day.

The average freelance wage increase over the next year is 12%, and that is so attractive that 39% of full-timers would leave their current jobs to freelance.

Still, many (30%) Dynamics workers are dissatisfied with training and career development as well as their compensation. A larger percentage (48.1%) describe themselves as satisfied with their jobs and 8.5% describe themselves as very satisfied.

Of those end users who responded to the survey, 41.9% had competency in Dynamics AX, 21.8% in Dynamics NAV, 18.9% in Dynamics CRM and 17.4% in Dynamics GP.

There should be a lot of openings for those with the right expertise since 35% of those surveyed plan to switch jobs in the next year, and most of them (58%) are looking for other positions because their current jobs lack career prospects or don't promise large enough salary increases to suit them, the survey says.

Nearly half (45%) of those looking to change jobs would consider moving to another country, with the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and Germany scoring as the top choices.

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Survey: Microsoft Dynamics technical architects in line for 14% rises

Architects and designers may be on the frontlines of the war against garbage, suggests a new University of British Columbia study, which found that people in "green buildings" are more likely to act in an environmentally responsible manner regardless of their past habits.

WATCH: Hidden cameras show 2 lunchrooms' recycling habits

A group of UBC psychology students used a hidden camera to record other students' recycling decisions at two Vancouver campus cafeterias: the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, a so-called "living laboratory" for sustainability research, and the Student Union Building, a relic from the late 1960s.

At the CIRS cafeteria, 86 per cent of users properly recycled their waste, according to the findings. While, at the noticeably darker, dingier SUB lunchroom, only 58 per cent chose to recycle.

"The design of a building can be a powerful tool to shape behaviour," Alessandra DiGiacomo, a UBC graduate student and co-author of the study, said.

To weed out any potential bias from people occupying the environmentally friendly building, researchers administered surveys in both buildings and found that CIRS patrons didn't have more of a vested interest in the environment in general. DiGiacomo said this means that context is important.

Perkins+Wills designed the CIRS building, which is a well-lit, mostly wooden space that ventilates natural air throughout.

"Design can absolutely influence people," Susan Gushe, a principal with the firm, told CBC News.

She says there are several things designers take into consideration when integrating recycling and garbage receptacles into buildings, such as:

Locating them in areas where people are likely to use them, such as the CIRS's kitchenettes.

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Architects change recycling habits with design

IT pros with skills in Microsoft Dynamics project management and architecture can look forward to healthy raises this year, according to a survey of more than 10,000 respondents worldwide.

Full-time technical architects working on Dynamics stand to earn a 14% salary increase, and project managers are in line for a 9% raise, according to the Microsoft Dynamics Salary Survey 2013 from Nigel Frank International, a firm specializing in recruitment of Dynamics professionals.

[ COMPENSATION: How different tech degrees measure up by salary

RAISES: Tech salaries jump 5.3%, bonuses flat

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Increases for other Dynamics IT professionals are less, and 4% is the average salary increase across all categories, the survey says.

The survey dealt with professionals with expertise in four products: Dynamics AX and NAV are ERP platforms; Dynamics GP is accounting/ERP software; and Dynamics CRM is customer relationship management software.

Technical architects also pull down some of the largest salaries among Dynamics professionals, with salaries of $148,000 for those versed in Dynamics AX, $115,000 for NAV, $144,000 for CRM and $115,000 for GP, the survey says. Freelancers can earn up to $1,100 per day.

The average freelance wage increase over the next year is 12%, and that is so attractive that 39% of full-timers would leave their current jobs to freelance.

Still, many (30%) Dynamics workers are dissatisfied with training and career development as well as their compensation. A larger percentage (48.1%) describe themselves as satisfied with their jobs and 8.5% describe themselves as very satisfied.

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Survey: Microsoft Dynamics technical architects in line for 14% raises

OKLAHOMA CITY -

We are getting our first look at the most controversial project of MAPS 3 will look like. Architects have released their first conceptual renderings of the new convention center and hotel.

Three concepts were presented to a convention center subcommittee Tuesday.

11/27/2012 Related Story: New OKC Convention Center Could Cost Taxpayers More Money

The 470,000 square foot building will sit south of the Myriad Gardens and west of Chesapeake Energy Arena.

Architects say every direction of the new convention center will accommodate openness for pedestrians.

The hotel will go directly next to the new convention center or across the street on the what is now the Cox Convention Center.

"I think this can be a significant addition to that area and a real catalyst for addition and private development," said OKC City Councilman Pat Ryan, who saw the renderings Tuesday.

The same architectural firm designing the $250 million convention center has worked on convention centers in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Qatar.

Construction is scheduled to begin in 2016.

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Architects Release Conceptual Renderings Of MAPS 3 Convention Center