iHomeidea.com - Magical "Stinson Beach House" situated in Northern California.
Magical "Stinson Beach House" situated in Northern California. Project by "Butler Armsden Architects". Let us to inspire you: magical beach house designed by "Butler Armsden Architects" situated...
By: Bogdan Dumitrescu
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iHomeidea.com - Magical "Stinson Beach House" situated in Northern California. - Video
architects gallery Teddington London
architects gallery is one of the most popular attractions in Teddington London. Even if you know the area well we are here to help you and can offer advice to help you make the right decision....
By: Ray Looyenga
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architects gallery Teddington London - Video
2014 AIA Austin Design Award - Mir Rivera Architects, Vertical House
Residential New Construction Over 2000 sq. ft. AIA Austin 2014 Awards http://www.aiaaustin.org/awards Jury: Marsha Maytum, FAIA, LEED AP | Founding Partner of Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects | http://www.lmsar...
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2014 AIA Austin Design Award - Mir Rivera Architects, Vertical House - Video
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,...
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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
Retail Space Rent
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Retail Space Rent
Former auto site to house 3 retail stores
The Osseo City Council approved the planned unit development (PUD) and site plan applications for the Osseo Retail Center at 308 County Road 81 during its Monday, April 28 meeting.
The council also approved the PUD and site plan for Villa Healthcare, as well as talked about adding programs at the community center for seniors.
OSSEO RETAIL CENTER
City Planner Riley Grams presented the council with a PUD application that would allow for the construction of a 4,029-square-foot retail center with leasable tenant space at 308 County Road 81. This parcel of land has been vacant for a number years and was last the site of LaViolette Auto Sales. It is currently owned by Richard Welk.
Grams said the proposed development would demolish the current building and make way for the new retail center. There would be three leasable tenant spaces (one 1,599-square-foot space and two 1,037-square-foot spaces). Possible businesses that could use the spaces would include: take-out pizza, coffee shops, floral shops and a dry cleaners.
This property is located next to Premier Wine and Spirits and the new building would mimic Premiers exterior. Grams said the new building would be complete with the end cap tower like Premiers.
The buildings will not actually be together, there will be a separation space, Grams said. The new construction will include a fire separated wall.
He added that city code requires one parking space for each 150 square foot of retail space. This project would need 27 parking spaces, but because the parcel size is small the plan only has room for 12 spaces. Many of the parking spaces would be considered about and beyond what would realistically be needed for this development, Grams said. Additionally, the proposed uses are such that customers would not be visiting these businesses for lengthy periods of time.
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Osseo paves way for new retail center
Thai court to rule if PM abused power in transfer order
Thailand News.Net - Tuesday 6th May, 2014
The Thai Constitutional Court said Tuesday that it would deliver a verdict Wednesday on the allegation that caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra had abused power. Yingluck denied the ...
VOA - Thursday 8th May, 2014
Anti-government protesters are singing as they ride on a truck during a rally. A court ousted Thailand's prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra for abuse of power, giving the anti-government ...
wsws.org - Thursday 8th May, 2014
Thailand's Constitutional Court yesterday removed the elected Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, and almost a third of her cabinet ministers for "abuse of power." The ...
The Guardian - Thursday 8th May, 2014
The rice-subsidy scheme was popular in Thailand's rural north and helped Yingluck Shinawatra win votes of millions of farmers. Photograph: Borja Sanchez Trillo/Getty ...
The Telegraph - Thursday 8th May, 2014
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Cabinet appoints new Sports Authority of Thailand governor
