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LAS VEGAS -- Seoul-headquartered "4D" cinema company CJ 4DPlex has inked a deal with AEG to install its first U.S.-based 4DX system at Regal Cinemas L.A. Live Stadium 14 in Los Angeles, which will be a 100-seat theater expected to be completed in late June or early July.

This timing would offer the possibility to launch with one of CJ 4DPlex's upcoming 4D titles such as DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon 2, which, along with Paramount's Noah, will be previewed in 4D this week in a demonstration during theater owners confab CinemaCon.

PHOTOS: 'Noah's' Berlin Premiere: Emma Watson, Jennifer Connelly, Douglas Booth Flood the Red Carpet

Also scheduled for 4DX-supported theaters are titles such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

In 2013, there were 58 titles mastered in the format, including Gravity, Frozen, Iron Man 3 and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

Company execs said they aim to work with the filmmakers to create these experiences, which combine 3D with features such as motion, wind, strobe, fog, mist, rain and "scent-based" effects.

STORY:Johnny Depp's 'Transcendence' to Open on Same Day in U.S., China

L.A. Live reps said the company had not yet determined what the surcharge will be for the 4D experience. Meanwhile, CJ 4DPlex plans to continue to target major U.S. cities for additional sites.

It currently has 91 theater installations in 23 countries, including Bulgaria, China, Chile, Czech Republic, Hungary, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.

It opened in Vietnam during January, and next month plans to debut in India and the Philippines.

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CinemaCon: L.A. Live's 4D Installation by CJ 4DPlex Expected to Launch Early July

With soiled carpet and water-soaked walls replaced, the first round of residents moved back into the Canal Senior Apartments Monday and everyone is expected to be back home by Christmas, staff says.

That is ahead of schedule and good news for dozens of residents who have been staying at a local hotel while construction crews frantically worked to get the three-story, low-income property back open following a small fire, which set off two sprinkler heads and flooded the complex with enough water to warrant ripping out nearly everything in one half of the building.

On Monday, 19 first floor residents moved back in with the help of the Senior Center and local volunteers. That floor received the least amount of damage with the sprinklers going off in a third floor apartment.

Art Martino was one of the first back in. A seven-year resident of the complex, Martino said despite the inconvenience of being displaced for more than a month, things have been going pretty good.

His biggest grievance Monday: his cable box and computer werent hooked up and he didnt know how to make sense of a ball of cables and cords left on his desk.

While a content company had boxed everything up, taking pictures of everyones rooms, meticulously labeling and storing items so things could be put back just as they were found, things werent perfect, but close to it.

Michele Bailey, property manager, said the content crew had put the books back in the order they were found in one apartment and managed to place dozens of small figurines in another units curio cabinet just so.

It is impressive, said Andrew Lasuen, a regional manager with Syringa Property Management, which offers low-income housing throughout the West.

Helping Martino get organized were two elders, Curtis and Anderson, from a local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The young men said several members of the church were helping residents move back in, helping in any way they could, even though neither knew much about cable box installation.

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Going home

Architects Coop Himmelb(l)au in Vienna | Euromaxx
Since it was set up in 1968, Austrian architects Coop Himmelb(l)au has grown into a successful international company with clients in Europe, the USA and Asia. Shortly before Christmas, Coop...

By: DW (English)

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Architects Coop Himmelb(l)au in Vienna | Euromaxx - Video

Zaraso eero apvalgos takas / Zarasas lake panoramic path
2012, Zarasai (Lietuva / Lithuania) Architektai / Architects: "arno Kiauns projektavimo studija". . Kiaun, A. Kiaunien, A. Lukys, V. Butkus, T. Petreikis, konstr. A. Sabaliauskas...

By: Lietuvos architekt sjunga / Architects Association of Lithuania

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Zaraso eero apvalgos takas / Zarasas lake panoramic path - Video

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Copenhagen residents take part in one of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliassons Lego town planning projects. Photograph: Keld Navntoft/AFP

One September day in 2005, the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson set up a few tables in a bustling downtown square in Tirana and unloaded three tonnes of Lego bricks. The Copenhagen-born, Berlin-based artist, known for his enormous, immersive installations he once installed a gigantic, glowing sun at Tate Modern included simple instructions: residents of the crumbling Albanian capital, which was recovering from the end of communist rule in 1990, were to construct their visions for the citys future out of Lego. Building a stable society, Eliasson said, is only possible with the involvement and co-operation of each individual. As the days passed, everyone from kids to adults, passers-by to committed users, gradually turned the plastic rubble into a glistening white Lego metropolis.

Part art installation, part crowdsourced sculpture, part urban intervention, the success of the Collectivity Project was a sign, perhaps, of our desire to become more involved in imagining the possibilities for our cities, even if our bricks-and-plastic creations will eventually be taken apart and packed up in a box. But it also signals the Lego Groups desire for its products to be thought of as more than a childs building blocks. In little more than a decade, the Danish company has gone from a $300m loss to overtake Mattel, the makers of Barbie, as the worlds largest toy-maker. It has achieved this through a canny mixture of movie franchising (The Hobbit, Star Wars, Harry Potter and, of course, The Lego Movie), an ever-expanding universe of video games (including Lego City for Nintendo) and even a forthcoming CBeebies TV show in 2016 based on its long-running Lego City line featuring sets such as Lego City Museum Break-In and Lego City Prisoner Transport.

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But Lego has also made an effort for the bricks to travel from the playroom to the boardroom, with the company appealing to artists, architects and other creative professionals to use their product as the building blocks for innovation. The Lego City video game may be just that, a game; but the company also donated 1m bricks to Dutch architect Winy Maas, who created 676 scale-model skyscrapers for the 2012 Venice Biennale. (They also gave Eliasson those three tonnes of bricks.) This October, the Lego Group held a workshop in Copenhagen, ahead of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that tasked close to 700 children with building ideas for a sustainable future out of their products. Then theres the recently released Lego Architecture Studio, a 149 instruction-free kit of white blocks that lets AFOLs (adult fans of Lego) play Frank Gehry and create their own architectural masterpieces. Lego even sponsors an urban planning project at MIT in the hopes that city planners, like architects before them, might use the bricks as tools to solve issues such as transportation and walkability.

Its at this point that one could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow. Urban areas are bigger, denser, more complex and more reliant on technology than ever before. Can this most analogue of toys dreamed up by an entrepreneurial carpenter in Billund in 1932 really teach us how to build better cities? Or is this just a smart extension of the Lego brand, to persuade well-heeled parents that an expensive Lego City Monster Truck is a serious educational toy? Surely urban planners themselves, laden with degrees and sophisticated insights into the ebb and flow of urban life, arent actually plotting our cities using Lego City Train Station?

The answer might be found in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where MITs CityScope has created what managing director Ryan Chin calls an urban observatory. Its a 30x60in Lego model of the citys Kendall Square, on to which research scientists project digital data. For example, geolocated Twitter feeds from people working and studying in the real Kendall Square are mapped on to buildings; traffic information is projected on the brick roads. The idea, explains Chin, is to get a sense of how people live and work in the city. We can look at flows of traffic, goods and people, and flows of energy, he says. What are the passive solar gains on a building? What are the shadows cast from a building on to a roadway? Details about household sizes, population numbers and walkability can be programmed to provide, as he puts it, a finely grained geospatial view of where things are happening in cities.

In fact, software like this already exists: Autodesk or Esri CityEngine allow planners to map all kinds of data on to virtual 3D models of buildings and cities. Urban areas are intricate, shapeshifting ecosystems that presumably cant be clicked together in an afternoon. Common sense suggests that a plastic city is too pixellated and limited to help planners design resilient cities that can adapt to climate change or find solutions to demographic changes and land use.

Chin argues, however, that it is precisely a lack of refinement that makes Lego useful as a design tool. Hes a fan of the malleability, interactivity and three-dimensional properties of the Lego model at CityScope. A former architect who has worked in automobile design, Chin sees flaws in traditional photorealistic renderings, which are often Photoshopped to death, he says. You can hire the best photographer to make a house look beautiful, and you can hire the best 3D-renderers to make a model look beautiful.

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Lego: can this most analogue of toys really be a modern urban planning tool?

It may be the most wonderful time of the year for some, but for the hardworking residents of the North Pole, Christmas is a time of long hours, tight deadlines, and tricky logistical challenges. In a bid to help ensure presents continue to get delivered in a timely fashion, an architecture competition was recently held to design a new Scandinavian logistics center for Santa and his team.

The Unbelievable Challenge is a conceptual architecture competition launched as part of a marketing campaign for organizers Ruukki (a construction supplies firm), that calls for Santa to move his base of operations over to Oulu, Finland. Out of a total 243 entries from 59 countries, Romania's Alexandru Oprita and Laurentiu Constantinwere given the nod as joint winners, with Nothing Is Impossible: a sustainable building which sports a novel invisible facade that enables it to stay hidden from prying eyes during the day.

Nothing Is Impossible is hidden from view with a photovoltaic membrane and a two-way mirror membrane, both of which help it blend in with the surrounding landscape. We're not quite sure exactly how this system would work, but presumably the magic of Christmas comes into play somehow.

The winning concept also calls for a snow collection system, which melts snow for use in the building, in addition to a rainwater collector. A ground-source heat pump produces heat energy from the ground, and a solar panel array is also located on the roof. We've no word on stables, but it's a given that Rudolph and company would also be made suitably comfortable.

Alexandru Oprita and Laurentiu Constantin have been awarded a cash prize of 1,000 (US$1,250) and just one of the two will be able to participate in a 10-week paid internship at top architecture firm Snhetta. As of writing, primary investor Mr. Claus was unavailable for comment.

Check out each of the runners-up in the gallery.

Source: Unbelievable Challenge

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Architects envision new logistics center for Santa

Something was missing Wednesday when city officials unveiled drawings of a Chinese developer's plans for a massive, mixed-use skyscraper along the Chicago River: the 89th floor.

As currently conceived, the building would be 88 stories tall not 89, as had been widely reported.

In China, eight is considered a lucky number. Many Chinese skyscrapers are 88 stories tall. The Beijing Summer Olympics began on August 8, 2008 8-8-08.

So the change could be product of superstition. Whatever the reason, plans for the $900 million, mixed-use mega-tower, called Wanda Vista, boast impressive numbers and beg the question about where the high-rise would rank among the giants of the Chicago skyline.

To be built on a riverfront site along East Wacker Drive, the $900 million tower would contain a five-star hotel with about 250 rooms, 390 condominium units and about 9,000 square feet of shops. Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration characterized the project, which it said would generate 2,000 construction jobs, as the largest real estate investment by a Chinese firm in Chicago and one of the largest in the United States.

"This is huge," said a spokeswoman for the mayor. "The mayor has put a significant amount of time and energy into ensuring that we open our arms and make this city for international businesses and international visitors."

The timing of the announcement coincided with the onset of U.S.-China trade talks in Chicago.

The developers the Wanda Group, which is controlled by mainland China's richest man, Wang Jianlin, and Chicago-based Magellan Development Group want to break ground in 2016. With Wanda Group's investment, many expect that the project may not need pre-sales before starting construction.

But the developers' path is not without obstacles.

They confront a downtown market awash in new and planned hotel rooms, including a 290-room Conrad Hotel that local hotelier Laurence Geller wants to build inside a vacant office building at 101 E. Erie St.

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A look at plans for Chinese developer's massive skyscraper on Chicago River

TAMPA Jeff Vinik isnt just developing some new buildings in the Channel District. Hes remaking an entire area of downtown into a new neighborhood, and nearly building a second skyline for Tampas urban identity.

Unveiling a master plan Wednesday, Vinik said he looked around the area after buying the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team five years ago, and saw massive untapped potential. Now his development team is ready to start making his dreams into a reality.

Largely funded privately, the project includes nearly a dozen new buildings, including hotels, office buildings, apartment towers, restaurants, medical school facilities, retail promenades, parks and entertainment venues, with a budget topping $1 billion. In all, the project could remake 40 contiguous acres along the waterfront and rank as one of the largest downtown development projects underway in the Southeast, letting Tampa join ranks of other U.S. cities seeing a resurgence of urban spaces.

We have a blank canvas to develop an entire district to help revitalize downtown and change this area for generations to come, Vinik told several hundred people gathered at the Marriott Waterside hotel for the revealing ceremony. Its critical we create a unified district, and its critical that this district have a soul and a brand.

Viniks team has already begun a nation-wide tour to recruit a major Fortune 500 firm to the area and he said they have several very interested candidates. If successful, they will move forward on office construction and the overall project could add 6,700 direct and indirect jobs to the area with an average wage of $78,000.

Some construction work can begin right away, as Vinik already owns or controls the bulk of the land in the area, and has the strong endorsement of Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn. By summer, he hopes to have begun dirt moving to re-arrange some dormant streets in the area, and by this time next year he hopes people see a crane building a new medical school campus for the University of South Florida.

After the big ceremony, Buckhorn pulled Vinik aside to hand him a small, white card with a quote from Winston Churchill: We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.

Ive kept that on my desk since the day I took office, Buckhorn told Vinik. Now you keep that on your desk.

Anticipation has been building for months about Viniks plans downtown.

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Vinik's plans include more than $1 billion in construction

FY15 THIRD QUARTER VS. PRIOR-YEAR PERIOD

COMMENTARY I am pleased that Apogee again achieved another quarter of outstanding revenue and earnings growth, said Joseph F. Puishys, Apogee chief executive officer. In our third quarter, all four segments had double-digit revenue growth, while all but one segment had strong earnings growth.

Architectural glass operating income tripled, and the architectural framing systems and large-scale optical segments each saw approximately 30 percent growth in operating income, he said. Operating income in the architectural services segment was impacted by writedowns on a few projects, issues of which were resolved.

During the quarter, Apogee improved gross margin by 140 basis points and operating margin by 200 basis points, said Puishys. He added, At 8.4 percent, our operating margin is at its highest level in five years. Overall Apogee converted 21 percent of incremental organic growth to operating margin.

At the same time, our backlog grew sequentially and year on year to its highest level in six years, as we continue to win future work at improving margins, he said.

We are expecting a strong finish to fiscal 2015 and have raised the bottom end of our earnings per share outlook and now expect to earn $1.64 to $1.72 per share for the year, Puishys said.

FY15 THIRD-QUARTER SEGMENT AND OPERATING RESULTS VS. PRIOR-YEAR PERIOD

Architectural Glass

Architectural Services

Architectural Framing Systems

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Apogee Reports Significant Fiscal 2015 Q3 Sales, Earnings Growth