Dezeen and MINI World Tour: property developer Craig Robins discusses his role in transforming Miami’s South Beach from a rundown retirement village into a glamorous holiday destination in this movie filmed during Design Miami last year.
Dacra CEO Craig Robins. Copyright: Dezeen
Craig Robins, CEO of property development company Dacra, was born in Miami and started acquiring properties in South Beach in the 1980s while still studying law at university.
Ocean Drive, South Beach, Miami
“We had the largest collection of historical Art Deco structures in the same place in the world,” he says of South Beach. “It was very rundown: it had become a retirement village for an elderly population that was dying off and there was a crack epidemic. There were a lot of people that thought the buildings should be torn down.”
He continues: “There was a group of us that thought that, not only should they be preserved, but that they could really become this incredible legacy that Miami could offer to the world. So I began my career figuring out how to adaptively reuse these great historical structures.”
Marlin hotel in South Beach, Miami
This was an unusual approach to property development in America at the time, Robins claims.
“[South Beach has] much more of a European feel,” he explains. “The structures are smaller, the neighbourhood is pedestrian-friendly, which in Miami is almost non-existent.”
Cavalier hotel in South Beach, Miami
Many of the Art Deco hotels along South Beach’s iconic Ocean Drive and the surrounding area were refurbished by Robins together with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell in the 1990s.
“Chris had sold Island and wanted to begin doing hotels,” Robins explains. “He and I did a lot of investing in the South Beach area together. From Chris I learned to produce creativity, because he was approaching real estate much more like a guy who made records, who worked with artists and ended up with a great creative product. That was the way we approached the buildings we were doing, and that’s still true for me today.”
Webster hotel in South Beach, Miami
Many of the buildings that Robins and Blackwell bought and renovated were quickly sold on again.
“Part of what we realised was that sometimes it was better for someone else to own a property so that the neighbourhood had this collaborative, competitive spirit where everybody was expressing themselves in their own way,” he says. “Gloria and Emilio Estefan bought the Cardozo from us very early on and did a beautiful job with it.”
Cardozo hotel in South Beach, Miami
He concludes: “It’s kind of the opposite to what Disney World does. The whole idea about Disney World is to give you a fantasy with something that’s fake. Our business model is to do something that’s real.”
Ornamental doors and windows sit within recesses that appear to have been carved away from the coarse granite walls of this mausoleum in Minneapolis by American architecture firm HGA (+ slideshow).
HGA designed the Garden Mausoleum for Minnesota’s Lakewood Cemetery, a complex first established in 1871, after being asked to create burial space for 10,000 people, a new funeral chapel and a reception area for post-service gatherings.
Much of the structure is set into the side of a hill, allowing the neat surrounding lawns to extend up over the roof. All of the emerging walls are clad with dark blocks of granite that contrast with the bright white mosaic tiles lining their recesses.
Glass doors sheathed in decorative bronze grilles lead inside the building, where architect Joan Soranno and John Cook have used a variety of materials that include rich mahogany, oak, white marble and gleaming onyx to give colour and texture to walls and floors.
“Material selections draw on memorial architectural tradition as well as Lakewood’s own history,” they said. “Conventional funerary materials like granite, marble and bronze are reinterpreted within a twenty-first century architectural expression.”
A square doorway punctures a wall of granite within the building, leading from the main reception to a series of subterranean crypts and columbarium rooms that accommodate both coffins and urns.
Rectangular skylights bring a single shaft of daylight into each of the crypts, while the columbarium rooms each feature one circular roof opening that emerges on the roof at the centre of a grassy mound.
“The Lakewood Garden Mausoleum builds its meaning from the most common and indelible aspects of human experience – the immediacy of light and dark, the immutability of squares and circles, and the echo of stone surfaces,” said the architects.
Small courtyards are slotted between the crypts and are fronted by floor-to-ceiling windows that frame views out across the cemetery gardens.
Here’s a project description from HGA Architect and Engineers:
Lakewood Cemetery Garden Mausoleum
Since its founding in 1871, Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis has served as the foremost resting place for Minnesota’s distinguished citizens. Familiar names like Humphrey, Wellstone, Pillsbury, and Walker are found here, among a long list of local pioneers, heroes, civic leaders, industrialists and art patrons. The private, non-sectarian cemetery is laid over 250 acres of rolling landscape adjoining the city’s historic Grand Round’s parkway system. Lakewood Cemetery’s historical importance and impeccably manicured grounds make it a treasured landmark and community asset in the City’s Uptown neighbourhood.
Governed as a non-profit from its beginning, the Lakewood Cemetery Association recognised the need for prudent planning to ensure its vitality for the indefinite future. Despite the broad expanses of Lakewood’s grounds, a mere 25 acres remain available for future development. With an existing 1967 Mausoleum nearing capacity (due largely to the increased acceptance and interest in above ground burial and cremation) the Cemetery’s Board of Trustees commissioned a comprehensive Master Plan in 2003.
The lynchpin of the plan called for a new Mausoleum to expand above ground options for crypt and cremation burials, and to accommodate contemporary memorial rites and practices. The project, a new “Garden Mausoleum” called for burial space for over ten thousand people, a committal chapel, a much needed reception space for post-service gatherings, and new landscaping for the surrounding four acre site.
Challenged with the task of adding a large structure – 24,500 square feet – to a much beloved place, Joan Soranno, FAIA and John Cook, FAIA of HGA Architects and Engineers quickly committed themselves to a strategy that protected and enhanced the cemetery’s historic landscape. A large building, no matter how artful, was bound to detract from Lakewood’s pastoral beauty. Following an extensive site analysis, Joan and John chose to locate the building along the northern edge of a 1960’s era “sunken garden.” By placing the new Garden Mausoleum between the existing, two-storey mausoleum on the west and the cemetery’s 1910 Byzantine styled memorial chapel on the east, development is clustered around one location near the cemetery’s entry. This has the benefit of consolidating much of the high traffic and infrastructure to a discrete precinct within the grounds, leaving the vast majority of the original landscape and critical view sheds undisturbed.
Entering the cemetery from the main entry gates, visitors approach the new Garden Mausoleum along one of the cemetery’s many meandering roadways. Pivoting around a mass of towering pines and ancient gnarled oaks, the roadway gently inflects toward the Mausoleum entry – set back from the road with a small turn-around drive. A simple mass of split-faced grey granite, the entry’s chiseled clerestory windows and canted recesses hint at the building’s interior functions and complexity, while reducing the structure’s visual heft.
To the east of the entry, a green roof planted over the lower garden level seamlessly extends the cemetery’s manicured lawn to a newly created overlook. Minimally detailed railings, terrace paving, grass, and Juniper shrubs ensure uninterrupted views to such critical features as the nearby Chapel and the iconic Fridley and Pence monuments. Though essentially a flat lawn, neatly angled grass mounds dot the new turf like minimalist landform sculptures. The projections contain the skylights for the building’s subterranean spaces – a first suggestion to the visitor of the fusion between the building and landscape.
The Garden Mausoleum entrance at street level represents only a small fraction of the total building mass, and includes a reception room and lounge, a small business office, and catering facilities. A full two-thirds of the building lies below, tucked quietly into a south-facing hill and overlooking the lower garden.
At the main entry, framing a pair of bronze doors, intricate patterns of white mosaic tiles trace arcs and infinite loops across billowing surfaces neatly inscribed into the dark granite mass. The contrast of textures – light and dark, rough and smooth, rustic and refined – call upon both visual and tactile senses. The large glass doors, sheathed in bronze grilles that repeat the looping, circular motif of the mosaic tile, usher visitors into a serene space of folded mahogany walls, abundant prisms of daylight and distant views across a newly landscaped lower garden.
A generously scaled stair draws visitors from the entry to the lower garden level. To the west, a sweeping Venetian plaster wall directs mourners to a small chapel for committal ceremonies. Mitigating the committal chapel’s exposure to direct southern sun, tall window recesses are cut at deeply raked angles into the thick exterior wall – a strategy that both moderates the light entering the contemplative space and ensures a degree of privacy for grieving family members.
Returning to the lobby, a simple square opening cut into the rough granite wall marks the threshold between the active and communal spaces of the mausoleum, and the places of burial, remembrance, and individual contemplation. Stretching east, a single long hallway strings together alternating bays of columbaria (for cremated remains) and crypt rooms (for caskets). To the north, chambers are built entirely below grade, with each room illuminated by a single skylight; rectangular openings for crypt rooms, and circular occuli for columbaria. Here, beams of daylight trace arcs across the Alabama White marble walls. To the south, the projecting crypt rooms and interstitial columbaria form a series of intimately scaled courtyards, with each space directly tied to the lower garden’s landscape through large windows.
While geometrically similar, each interior chamber and projecting room is distinguished by subtle design variations that give each space a distinct personality and mood. Inset floors of luminous onyx alternate between honey yellow, jade green, and coral pink. Window and skylight orientations rotate and shift between rooms, variously framing a view to near or distant horizons, up to the tree canopy, or clear blue sky. The design recognises that in contemplating death – as in living matters – people have diverse perspectives and desire uniqueness. It respects that in designing a final resting place for ten thousand people, individuality, human scale, and a sensory connection to the natural world are paramount.
Material selections draw on memorial architectural tradition as well as Lakewood’s own history. Conventional funerary materials like granite, marble and bronze are reinterpreted within a 21st century architectural expression. The polychrome Chapel mosaics, for example, serve as a springboard for the white marble and glass tile pattern that owes as much to Byzantium and the organic tracery of the Chicago School as it does to geometric algorithms and funerary symbolism.
Included as a significant feature of the Garden Mausoleum project, the redesign of the four-acre site strengthens the connections between Lakewood’s distinctive architecture, while offering a serene setting for both small family services and larger community events. Formal relationships between the Chapel, the existing Mausoleum and the new Garden Mausoleum are reinforced by double rows of Autumn Blaze maple trees, a simple arrangement of walkways and parterres, and a long rectangular reflecting pool. Additionally, a grove of Hawthorne trees ameliorates the existing outdoor crypt walls on the east, while multiple exterior stairs improve access between the lower garden and the adjoining historic burial plots.
The Lakewood Garden Mausoleum, true to the Cemetery’s non-sectarian mission, builds its meaning from the most common and indelible aspects of human experience – the immediacy of light and dark, the immutability of squares and circles, and the echo of stone surfaces. An unabashed 21st century building, the design of the Garden Mausoleum is not going to confuse anybody about what is old and what is new.
Already a remarkable place before the Mausoleum broke ground, Lakewood’s landscape and its small campus of buildings are enriched because it is there – framing a view, completing an edge, and embracing human scale. At this cherished haven within the city, architectural progress meets history with grace and a newfound vitality.
The Ace Hotel chain has opened its newest outpost inside a 1920s tower in downtown Los Angeles, complete with a 1600-seat theatre.
Ace Hotel‘s in-house design team worked with local firm Commune Design to restore and renovate the building formerly used by film studio United Artists, located in LA’s Broadway Theatre District.
“While the theatre’s original design was a lush interpretation of the Spanish Gothic style, the tower’s facade hid a minimalist poured concrete structure,” said Atelier Ace. “Therein lies the basis for the concept at Ace Hotel’s newest home – the marriage between… 1920s Hollywood glamour and modern minimalism.”
As a contrast to the tower’s Gothic exterior, the guest rooms are kept minimal and maintain their original poured concrete ceilings.
Commune Design referenced twentieth-century architect Rudolf Schindler’s West Hollywood residence when designing the decor.
The furniture in the rooms is made of dark grey-tinted MDF, while splashes of colour are provided by the upholstery and artwork. Bathrooms fitted with brass fixtures are separated from sleeping and living spaces by steel and glass windows.
Public spaces in the tower include a coffee bar, a restaurant and a mezzanine lounge, which have also been stripped back to reveal the original concrete surfaces.
The Spanish Gothic-style theatre has had intricate wall and ceiling mouldings restored and provides 72 square metres of event space. A range of suites and a private screening room are also available to hire out for meetings or parties.
Each Ace Hotel is located in an emerging neighbourhood and is designed to reflect its character. The concept by the company’s founder Alex Calderwood centres around fitting out old buildings using a modest budget and utilising industrial salvage. Calderwood sadly passed away in November last year and this hotel is the first to open since his death.
Even with the influx of new men’s basics brands in recent years, there still seems to be a gap in the market for fledging adults not quite ready to settle into life in solid stripes or basic patterns. In an effort to deliver…
Studio O+A created the interior for Cisco‘s primary San Francisco workplace, after the company acquired WiFi firm Meraki in November 2012 and needed more space.
Located in the city’s Mission Bay neighbourhood and overlooking the waterfront, the 110,000-square-foot office is split over two floors. It was designed to maximise daylight and provide communal areas based on feedback the designers received from staff.
“O+A surveyed Meraki’s employees to find out what they liked about their old, much smaller headquarters,” said the designers. “A consensus emerged for natural light, plenty of collaboration space and preservation of the company’s tightly-knit culture.”
Wood-frame pavilions that are partially enclosed with triangular panels provide intimate meeting spots and break up the large floor plate.
Timber-clad walls feature padded niches in which individuals can recline with their laptops.
Seating areas are sunk beneath floor-to-ceiling windows to prevent them blocking the light into the deep open-plan areas.
Giant whiteboards and blackboards give the employees opportunities to write and sketch ideas over the walls, while notes and memos can be pinned to cork panels.
Levels are connected by a wide open staircase, which has wooden stadium seating integrated at its base.
The mix of flooring types includes carpet, wood and astroturf, and a varied palette of colours is used for walls and furniture.
Green electricity cables run up the white corridor walls and across the exposed concrete ceilings to power the overhead lights.
The hallways are wide enough for workers to cycle or skateboard between zones.
A large roof terrace provides views across San Francisco bay towards the baseball stadium, the Bay Bridge and downtown.
Studio O+A has designed offices for quite a few technology companies around California. The studio completed both Facebook and AOL‘s headquarters in Palo Alto, as well as the Silicon Valley HQ for Evernote.
The panoramic view of San Francisco’s waterfront visible from Cisco’s new offices in some ways sets the theme for O+A’s design. From almost any angle the visual impact is of light, spaciousness, bright colour, long sight lines.
Meraki, which was recently acquired by Cisco Systems, makes wireless routers—and takes pride in the elegance of their design.
O+A sought to build the space the way Meraki builds its products – with an emphasis on simplicity and seamless ease of use. But it was also mindful of the importance to the company’s identity of the Cisco-Meraki merger.
Located in the rapidly changing Mission Bay neighbourhood, Cisco’s 110,000-square-foot suite of offices now becomes the company’s principal San Francisco location.
At the outset O+A surveyed Meraki’s employees to find outwhat they liked about their old, much smaller headquarters. A consensus emerged for natural light, plenty of collaboration space and preservation of the company’s tightly-knit culture.
The size of the new space and the prominence of its floor-to-ceiling windows made collaboration and natural light relatively easy bills to fill.
O+A’s design offers a variety of meeting spaces formal and informal, indoor and outdoor, many of them bathed in the crystalline light of San Francisco Bay.
The scale and the light support both a rich palette of colours and design elements tailored to the broad canvas: a wide staircase with integrated stadium seating at its base, a meeting room showered from above with hanging tillandsia plants, an outdoor deck with views of the baseball park and Bay Bridge.
Maintaining Meraki’s cozy ambience in the hangar-sized complex proved more challenging. O+A’s solution was to create a medley of small gathering spaces within the large footprint.
Sunken seating brings intimacy to horizontal common areas while preserving broad sight lines. Yurts, cabanas and phone rooms offer varying levels of enclosure. And throughout the office informal lounge spaces allow passing colleagues to sit down and talk.
Despite the richness of the finishes and the wide array of typologies deployed, this is not a project that feels overly “designed”. One of O+A’s goals was to give Cisco a canvas on which to paint their own pictures.
In lieu of pervasive branding graphics, O+A provided ubiquitous chalkboards, whiteboards and corkboards so that Cisco’s employees could sketch, write and pin-up graphics meaningful to them.
As might be expected of the company’s strongly do-it-yourself culture, mobility and adaptability were big factors in the selection of furniture and workstations. These are people who like to move things around.
Seattle firm Olson Kundig Architects used dynamite, chippers and saws to bore through the huge boulders of a rocky outcrop on a North American island to make room for this raw concrete house (+ slideshow).
Named after the French word for stone, the Pierre is a single-storey residence designed to cut into the protruding bedrock of the client’s existing property, located on one of the San Juan Islands off the coast of Seattle.
“Putting the house in the rock follows a tradition of building on the least productive part of a site, leaving the best parts free for cultivation,” said Tom Kundig, a director at Olson Kundig Architects and the lead architect on the project.
Photograph by Dwight Eschliman
The house is slotted between two sections of rock. Its walls are made from exposed concrete, with a smooth surface that opposes the rough stone, while the roof is covered with grassy plants to allow the building to merge into the landscape.
Photograph by Dwight Eschliman
Traces of the stone continue through the house’s interior, where a cave-like bathroom tunnels through one of the boulders and features a mirror that hangs down from a hole in the ceiling.
A large living and dining room spans the length of the building and features a fireplace hearth comprising a carved rock with a levelled surface.
The master bedroom sits off to one side and includes a sink with a basin made from another huge lump of stone, where polished sections allow water to cascade down three separate pools.
Photograph by Dwight Eschliman
All rooms of the house are furnished with a selection of antique pieces, artworks and custom-designed lighting fixtures.
Leftover rock from the site excavation was turned into crushed aggregate for use during the construction.
Here’s a project description from Olson Kundig Architects:
The Pierre
The owner’s affection for a stone outcropping on her property inspired the design of this house. Conceived as a retreat nestled into the rock, the Pierre (the French word for stone) celebrates the materiality of the site. From certain angles, the house – with its rough materials, encompassing stone, green roof, and surrounding foliage – almost disappears into nature.
To set the house deep into the site, portions of the rock outcropping were excavated through a combination of machine work and handwork. The contractor used large drills to set the outline of the building, then used dynamite, hydraulic chippers, and wire saws and other hand tools, working with finer and finer implements as construction progressed. Excavated rock was reused as crushed aggregate in the on all the stonework, a reminder of the building process, while huge pieces of rock were employed for the carport structure.
Photograph by Dwight Eschliman
With the exception of a separate guest suite, the house functions on one main level, with an open-plan kitchen, dining, and living space. A wood-clad storage box (made with siding reclaimed from a Lionel Pries-designed house) transitions from outside to inside. Its two large bookcases open to provide concealed access to laundry and kitchen storage. A large pivoting steel and glass door provides access to a terrace.
Photograph by Dwight Eschliman
Set at a right angle to the main space, a master suite features a custom-designed bed with a leather headboard and footboard set in the middle of floor-to ceiling bookshelves.
Throughout the house, the rock protrudes into the space, contrasting with the luxurious textures of the furnishings. Interior and exterior fireplace hearths are carved out of existing stone; levelled on top, they are otherwise left raw. In the master bathroom, water cascades through three polished pools, natural sinks in the existing stone. Off the main space, a powder room is carved out of the rock; a mirror set within a skytube reflects natural light into the space.
The materiality of the built structure – mild steel, smooth concrete, and drywall – create a neutral backdrop for the interior furnishings and artwork and the exterior views to the bay and surrounding landscape. Contemporary works of art by Cameron Martin, Jesse Paul Miller, Andres Serrano, Franz West, and Claude Zervas are mounted inside and outside the house. Antique furniture and art objects are complemented by custom pieces. The custom light fixtures are based on the designs of Irene McGowan, a Seattle artist and lighting designer best known for her work with noted Northwest architect Roland Terry.
Design Firm: Olson Kundig Architects Lead Architect: Tom Kundig
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News: Michael Graves’ seminal postmodern work the Portland Public Services Building is under threat of demolition, following news that the 32-year-old building needs more than $95 million worth of repairs.
Also known as the Portland Building, the 15-storey municipal office block in Portland, Oregon, was completed by American firm Michael Graves & Associates in 1982 and is credited with being one of the first major buildings of postmodernism, yet its demolition is one of several options under consideration by city officials following a recent analysis of the building’s condition.
According to the assessment, a complete overhaul of the building would require $95 million (£58 million), while replacing it or relocating could cost anything between $110 million and $400 million (£67 million and £243 million).
The Portland Building has been plagued with major structural problems and defects ever since its completion, many of which are attributed to the tight $25 million budget of the original construction.
The recommendation of the report was to renovate the structure, which would take two years and require finding a temporary home for 1300 employees that currently work in the building. However, city commissioners have branded it a “white elephant” and are considering pulling down both this building and a neighbouring courthouse to make way for an all-new public services complex.
“My reaction is we should basically tear it down and build something new,” long-standing commissioner Dan Saltzman told local newspaper The Oregonian, describing the building as “a nightmare for people who work there”.
“There’s got to be a better option than putting another $100 million into a white elephant,” added Nick Fish, who oversees the city’s water and environmental services bureaus.
Responding to the news, architect Michael Graves described the Portland Building as “a seminal project”, as recognised by its addition to the USA’s National Register of Historic Places in 2011. “Of course my preference would be to repair the existing structure,” he said.
Architectural historian Charles Jencks underlined the importance of the building in his influential book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, where the author wrote: “The Portland still is the first major monument of Post-Modernism, just as the Bauhaus was of Modernism, because with all its faults it still is the first to show that one can build with art, ornament, and symbolism on a grand scale, and in a language the inhabitants understand.”
News: the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced 26 winners for this year’s Institute Honor Awards, including a holocaust museum beneath a hill in Los Angeles, a stone mausoleum in Minneapolis, and a concrete house on a rocky outcrop in Washington (+ slideshow).
Lakewood Cemetery Garden Mausoleum by HGA Architects and Engineers – photograph by Paul Crosby
The AIA awards, which recognise excellence in the fields of architecture, interior architecture and urban design, awards projects from all around the world by architects licensed in the United States, and this year’s winning firms include SOM, Olson Kundig Architects, KieranTimberlake and WXY Architecture + Urban Design.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Centre by Weiss/Manfredi – photograph by Albert Večerka
Winners in the architecture category include the renovation of a Beaux Arts library in St. Louis, an art college at a former railroad complex in Georgia and a visitor centre with a curving green roof at a botanic garden in Brooklyn.
St. Louis Public Library by Cannon Design – photograph by Tim Hursley
A bar in a converted warehouse in San Francisco and an overhauled 1970s library in Seattle were among projects recognised in the interior design category, while urban design projects to pick up awards included a vision for Manhattan’s East River waterfront in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and a new zoning code for public spaces in Miami.
The East River Blueway Plan by WXY architecture + urban design
A jury of architects and academics selected this year’s winners from over 500 submissions and the awards will be presented at the AIA 2014 National Convention and Design Exposition in Chicago this June.
The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust by Belzberg Architects
See the full list of winning projects below with descriptions from the AIA:
2014 Institute Honor Awards for Architecture
Photograph by Albert Večerka
Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Centre; Brooklyn, New York WEISS/MANFREDI
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Centre is an inhabitable topography defining a threshold between the city and the garden, culture and cultivation. Nested into an existing berm, the LEED Gold building is a seamless extension of the garden path system, framing views through the historic garden. As a chameleon-like structure, the visitor centre transitions from an architectural presence at the street into a structured landscape in the botanic garden. The building redefines the physical and philosophical relationship between visitor and garden, introducing new connections between landscape and structure, exhibition and movement.
Photograph by Maris Mezulis
Centre for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI) Campus; Waterloo, Ontario, Canada KPMB Architects
This project is located on a 3.9-acre site and is a reinterpretation of a traditional academic quad building based on the Oxford model. The client asked for a campus to last at least 100 years, a “vibrant sanctuary”, to facilitate reflection, collaboration, and discussion. The solution consists of two three-story, interconnected buildings and an auditorium pavilion organised around a courtyard. The scale, proportions and materials of the brick elevations facing the street are a direct response to the 19th-century masonry industrial buildings in the surrounding neighbourhood. A limited palette of local limestone and brick masonry, wood and glass was used to create a serene atmosphere for study and reflection.
Photograph by Jane Messinger
New Boathouse for Community Rowing, Inc. (CRI); Boston Anmahian Winton Architects
This is the first permanent facility for Community Rowing, the largest public rowing organisation in the country. The project is composed of two buildings that form a courtyard that overlays two typically incompatible conditions: a public forecourt to the river and a staging terrace for the boats. The small building, a glass-shingled pavilion for single shells, displays the boats to the adjacent parkway. The large building houses longer boats, offices, and training rooms. The unique kinetic cladding system, which regulates natural ventilation and light, literally transforms the shape of the building and its relationship to the surrounding landscape.
Photograph by Matthew Millman
Jackson Hole Airport; Jackson, Wyoming Gensler
With respect to Teton National Park, The Jackson Hole Airport renovation and expansion considers the building as a simple, understated foreground feature intended to merely reside within the landscape. The queen-post trusses reduced beam depths, increasing the volume, allowing for an expansive glass curtain wall that reinforces the connection between interior and exterior. This LEED Silver Certified airport distinguishes itself from the aesthetics of typical airports because of its regional design approach, materiality, and intimate scale. The airport serves as passenger’s first and last impression to this truly unique region.
Photograph by Benjamin Benschneider
King Street Station; Seattle ZGF Architects LLP
The rehabilitation of King Street Station restores historic 1906 architectural finishes, re-establishes the station as a modern transportation hub and capitalises on materials and energy invested a century ago by reusing materials rather than replacing them. The project enhances public spaces, improves pedestrian and multi-modal connections in and around the station, and has served as a catalyst for additional redevelopment within the neighbourhood. Securing the station for the future, the rehabilitation also included significant seismic and structural updates to improve the building’s safety and durability. The project has achieved LEED Platinum certification.
Photograph by Paul Crosby
Lakewood Cemetery Garden Mausoleum; Minneapolis HGA Architects and Engineers
Addressing the intimacy of personal grieving and the shared rituals of commemoration, the design for the new Garden Mausoleum at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis revisits an ancient building type whose setting demands contextual sensitivity and attention to materiality. The mausoleum minimises the visual impact on its historic context by nestling more than three-quarters of the building into an existing south-facing hillside. In each crypt and columbarium room, daylight strengthens the relationship between the spiritual and the earth-bound while offering a serene and healing environment. The material palette – stone, bronze, wood and glass – calls upon visual and experiential senses while recalling centuries of memorial tradition.
The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust; Los Angeles Belzberg Architects
The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is submerged into the surrounding public park space allowing the landscape to continue over the structure. Pathways are morphed onto the building and appropriated as surface patterning. The museum emerges from the landscape as a single, curving concrete wall that splits and carves into the ground to form the entry. Entry to the building entails a gradual deterioration of this visual and auditory connection to the park while descending a long ramp. Inside visitors experience a series of isolated spaces saturated with interactive archival content with diminishing natural light while descending further into the earth.
Photograph by Benjamin Benschneider
The Pierre; San Juan Island, Washington Olson Kundig Architects
A secure and unexpected retreat nestled into a rocky outcropping, The Pierre (French for stone) celebrates the materiality of its Pacific Northwest site. The house – composed of concrete, wood, steel and glass, and topped with a green roof – visually and physically merges with nature. Inside, rugged surfaces of rock periodically emerge into the space, contrasting with the refined textures of the furnishings. While one side of the house is hunkered into the site, the other overlooks the water, balancing the dual desires of prospect and refuge.
Photograph by Michael Moran
Quaker Meeting House and Arts Centre, Sidwell Friends School; Washington; D.C. KieranTimberlake
With a minimum of means, this project transforms a non-descript 1950s gymnasium into a Quaker Meeting House and Arts Centre serving the entire middle and upper school community at Sidwell Friends School. The building program includes a worship space, visual art and music rooms, and exhibition areas. The essence of Quaker Meeting, and thus the Meeting House itself, is silence and light. Architecturally this is achieved by filtering light and sound through architecture, landscape, structure, and systems arranged in successive concentric layers around a central source of illumination, both literal and spiritual.
Photograph by SCAD
SCAD Museum of Art; Savannah, Georgia Sottile & Sottile and Lord Aeck Sargent in association with Dawson Architects
Resurrecting the ruins of the nation’s only surviving antebellum railroad complex, the Savannah College of Art and Design transformed a National Historic Landmark. The design process emphasised an artistically manual approach, honouring the humanity and integrity of the site’s heritage. Ruins were integrated within a contemporary concrete structure, preserving and highlighting the historic materials as a fundamental part of the new architecture. With its galleries, art studios, classrooms, theater, public gardens, and vibrant streetscape, this new civic landmark stands as a centre of intellectual exchange, artistic discovery, and urban evolution.
Photograph by Tim Hursley
St. Louis Public Library, Central Library Transformation and Restoration; St. Louis Cannon Design
St. Louis Public Library’s Central Library, designed by Cass Gilbert, fills a city block in the centre of downtown St. Louis. The transformation of the 3-story 1912 Beaux Arts structure focused on the north wing, replacing multistorey, non-public book stacks with a new “building within the building” for public use. Now light filled and welcoming to its urban neighbours, the north wing is a new entrance surrounded by upper stories of books visible to all. The original entry and public rooms are restored and revitalised, continuing their active use as a vibrant public resource.
2014 Institute Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
Photograph by Matthew Millman
Bar Agricole; San Francisco Aidlin Darling Design
This project is a 1,400-square-foot restaurant and bar located in San Francisco’s industrial South of Market district. A wooden “hull” -constructed of reclaimed whiskey-barrel oak, milled into thin strips, and suspended from the ceiling – creates a sense of intimacy in the long, tall interior of the former warehouse building. Above the hull, three existing skylights, fitted with delicate glass sculptures formed from warped Pyrex cylinders, filter natural light throughout the space. Designed to complement the restaurant’s seasonal menu, the interior palette balances warm textures with the use of durable, sustainable materials. Two bars, made of board-formed concrete and old barn beams, anchor the space. Inch-thick ribbons of ductal concrete form the high-backed banquettes.
Photograph by Richard Bryant
K&L Gates at One New Change; London, United Kingdom Lehman Smith McLeish
International law firm K&L Gates’ London office is seamlessly integrated into Land Securities’ complex and iconic One New Change, which was designed by Jean Nouvel. Commanding views of St. Paul’s Cathedral are a backdrop to technologically advanced meeting spaces and collaborative work areas that enhance the provision of integrated global services. The design responds directly to the dynamic and irregular building envelope, with enclosures, ceiling treatments, lighting, and site-specific art that define space and reflect K&L Gates’ physical and strategic brand.
Photograph by Elizabeth Felicella
Knoll Flagship Showroom, Offices and Shop; New York City Architecture Research Office
Architecture Research Office’s design of Knoll’s New York showroom, offices, and shop reflects intelligent planning, sensitivity to craft and joyful materiality. A choreographed path draws visitors from the ground floor shop through the showroom and offices. Colourful textile layers define the space, including a vibrant 55-foot wall that showcases 2,400 material samples. Two steel stairs display felt and leather and promote connectivity in the offices, where clients experience open plan, private office and activity spaces in use. This mix of spaces supports a variety of work styles – formal, informal, public and private.
The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust; Los Angeles Belzberg Architects
The interior architecture at The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust employs natural light and the morphing of space to open and lift or darken and compress the user’s experience at key points. The lighting of the interior galleries dim as the visitor steps deeper into the earth and subsequent rooms, while limited natural light serves as a companion to each patron’s unique experience. The final ascent up is filled with sights and sounds of unrestricted park land. The exhibition design incorporates educational content that is synthesised with all aspects of the design via innovative technology using integrated interactive design methods.
Photograph by Scott Frances
Marc by Marc Jacobs Showroom; New York City Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects PC; HLW International
The Marc by Marc Jacobs Showroom is housed within the Manhattan headquarters of the global fashion house Marc Jacobs. The showroom is a reinvention of the client’s original space and addresses the challenge to maximise the use of daylight within the building’s deep floorplate, while simultaneously addressing the need for areas of relative privacy. The design solution employs a central curvilinear glass form as an organising element of the space which is used to filter natural light while creating subtle visual screening to delineate the private zones.
Photograph by Lara Swimmer
Odegaard Undergraduate Library; Seattle The Miller Hull Partnership
The interior renovation of the Odegaard Undergraduate Library re-imagines the learning experience for 21st century students through the astonishing transformation of space in an outmoded 1970s building; accomplished in two years by state mandate. Updates to the massive 165,000 square foot library, serving 10,000 students, 24 hours a day, include removal of an imposing atrium stair, and a ‘kit of parts’ approach supporting key learning behaviours in a bright, open setting. New seating, individual and group workstations, and Active Learning Classrooms further enhance the academic experience for a collaborative and tech-savvy student body.
Photograph by Benjamin Benschneider
The Pierre; San Juan Island, Washington Olson Kundig Architects
A secure and unexpected retreat nestled into a rocky outcropping, The Pierre celebrates the materiality of its Pacific Northwest site. The house – composed of concrete, wood, steel and glass, and topped with a planted roof—visually and physically merges with nature. Inside, rugged surfaces of rock periodically emerge into the space, contrasting with the refined textures of the furnishings. Antique and vintage furniture is complemented by custom-designed pieces, while contemporary works of art are displayed inside and outside the house.
SoHo Loft; New York City Gabellini Sheppard Associates LLP
This 8284 square foot interior renovation enhances the SoHo-Loft typology while creating multi-level garden roof terraces. The design emphasises lightness, openness, spatial fluidity and permeability. Light, considered as a tangible material, is the premise on which the program and spatial organisations are based on, with the creation of light apertures helping to organise the uninterrupted space. Influenced by the client’s requests to blur the lines of separation between public and private, children and adult areas, thresholds are defined by sliding translucent doors, acting as light filters, while providing flexibility of use.
Photograph by Eric Staudenmaier
Venture Capital Office Headquarters; Menlo Park, California Paul Murdoch Architects; Kappe Architects Planners
Gardens, transparency and wood finishes create a warm, intimate work environment for this office headquarters of a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. To reduce on-site construction, the two-story office building is made of prefabricated steel modules set by crane on a concrete parking podium. The building interior is designed to temporarily house and incubate young companies, adapting to their changing needs. Strong, accent-coloured glass expresses the company’s reputation for risk taking while fine, wire-brushed wood finishes form an elegant and understated feeling in keeping with the firm’s market sophistication.
2014 Institute Honor Awards for Regional & Urban Design
Image by University of Arkansas Community Design Centre + Marlon Blackwell Architect
The Creative Corridor: A Main Street Revitalisation for Little Rock; Little Rock, Arkansas University of Arkansas Community Design Centre + Marlon Blackwell Architect
The Creative Corridor retrofits a four-block segment of Little Rock’s historic Main Street based on aggregation of the city’s scattered cultural arts organisations. The project goal is to structure an identity for the Creative Corridor rooted in a mixed-use living environment anchored by the arts, rather than Main Street’s workaday retail base. A townscaping framework reliant on the urbanism of streetscapes—landscape architecture, water management, public space configurations, frontage systems, furniture, and miscellaneous assemblages―ensures a coherent evolution of the street. The street is seen as a platform for capturing value.
Image by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP
Denver Union Station Neighbourhood Transformation; Denver Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
The redevelopment of the former rail yards at Denver Union Station is a case study of the power of transit-oriented urban design. The 42-acre master plan knits together light rail, commuter rail, and buses into a 21st-century intermodal transportation hub. Modal connectivity is facilitated by integrating land use and transportation infrastructure to support more than 4 million square feet of mixed-use urban infill. This substantial public investment has catalysed an unprecedented wave of private-sector activity, with over $1 billion in new projects shaping a transit-oriented precinct and new urban neighbourhood.
Image by WXY architecture + urban design
The East River Blueway Plan; New York City WXY architecture + urban design
The East River Blueway Plan, led by WXY architecture + planning, provides a new vision for Manhattan’s East River waterfront from the Brooklyn Bridge to 38th Street. It addresses issues that were overlooked for the last half century, including waterfront access from the land and water, environmental goals, climate change adaptation and storm resiliency for the waterfront and adjacent neighbourhoods. Completed shortly before Hurricane Sandy, the planning process offered innovations such as structures for storm water capture, saltwater marshes for wave attenuation and water quality, bridges supporting movement along the waterfront, and water recreation including boat launches, pools and fishing.
Image by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. LLC
Miami 21: a New Zoning Code for the City; Miami Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. LLC
Miami 21 is a form-based zoning code that replaced Miami’s Floor Area Ratio (FAR) and land-use based regulations. Using the Transect and the SmartCode as its basis, the new code focuses on the control of building to assure pedestrian-oriented public space, and provide physical predictability for developers and residents alike. Multiple use and density types are consolidated, and the translation from FAR to FLR (floor lot ratio that includes parking) simplifies building capacity measure and reduces parking. A public benefits program encourages the provision of affordable housing, public open space and historic preservation.
The Pearl Brewery Redevelopment Master Plan; San Antonio Lake|Flato Architects
The Pearl Brewery Redevelopment Master Plan is serving as a transformative model and catalyst for green urban revitalisation in a long neglected portion of San Antonio’s inner city. Established in 1883, the Pearl Brewing Company once had the largest brewery in Texas but eventually closed their operation in 1985. After 15 years lying derelict, the creative reuse of this 26-acre brownfield site and its abandoned structures are drawing in a rich mix of new residents, small businesses, retail, and non-profits while emphasising community, conservation, and local economic development.
Image by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP
Son Tra Peninsula Strategic Vision Plan; Vietnam Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Son Tra is connected with Da Nang via the longest suspension cable bridge in Vietnam, the Thuan Phuoc Bridge, which was opened in 2009. This connection to the city has improved accessibility, but it has also brought development interest that threatens the environmental health of the area. The plan champions this territory as one to be enhanced, rather than exploited; it calls for the creation of a protected status for the “mountain-island”, and it establishes clear “no build” zones at altitudes above 100 meters while suggesting locations where development may enhance economic opportunities without affecting the environment and natural beauty.
News: American biotechnology company Bioglow has applied synthetic biology processes to develop ornamental glowing plants that its founder claims are “truly the first of their kind.”
Bioglow, which is based at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St Louis, Missouri, claims its Starlight Avatar is the first plant that is able to light up autonomously, without the need for external treatments or stimuli such as chemicals or ultraviolet lighting.
“There are no comparables on the market, these are truly first of their kind,” the plants’ creator and Bioglow founder Alexander Krichevsky told Dezeen.
Krichevsky, a specialist in microbiology, developed the plants by introducing DNA from luminescent marine bacteria to the chloroplast genome of a common houseplant, so the stem and leaves constantly emit a faint light similar to that produced by fireflies and other bioluminescent organisms.
The Starlight Avatar plant is derived from the ornamental Nicotiana Alata plant family
Krichevsky is working on increasing the brightness of the plants, which currently need to be viewed in a darkened room. He told Dezeen that his technique could attract a new audience to the ornamental plant market and eventually provoke a revolution in lighting design.
“We think that glowing plants will particularly be of interest to the fans of the movie Avatar,” said Krichevsky, referring to the 2009 science fiction feature film set on an alien planet where flora and fauna are illuminated at night.
He added that they could also be used as efficient light sources for interiors, architecture or transport infrastructure. “In the long term we see use of glowing plants in contemporary lighting design, namely in landscaping and architecture as well as in transportation, marking driveways and highways with natural light that does not require electricity,” he pointed out. “We also have a capacity to make plants glow in response to environmental cues, making them effective environmental and agricultural sensors.”
Prospective buyers will be able to bid for one of a limited number of the Starlight Avatar plants via an online auction due to take place in late January. The plants are shipped in cultivation boxes containing a plastic nutrient-rich gel and can be transferred to a plant pot when fully developed. Each plant has a life cycle of two to three months.
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