Archinect - News

Plans scrapped for $1 billion Hollywood Center towers development

2024-05-02T17:31:00-04:00

New York-based developer Millennium Partners has withdrawn their proposal for the $1 billion Handel Architects-designed Hollywood Center in Los Angeles. The two-tower scheme that was planned for parking lots adjacent to Welton Becket’s iconic Capitol Records building would have been the tallest in Hollywood, standing at 46 and 36 stories each and containing a total of 1,005 residences, but will now be scrapped in favor of a potential new hotel development as per Urbanize LA’s reporting this morning.

The decade-old scheme had been progressing despite a negative Environmental Impact Report and the late discovery of concerning fault lines beneath the property. Millennium Partners said: "While we have made the decision for now not to move ahead with our vision to build housing on the surrounding surface parking lots, we remain committed to working to make the Hollywood community a better place to live and work and to help Hollywood realize its full potential as the entertainment capital...

Frida Escobedo and Handel's National Black Theatre project tops out in Harlem

2023-10-09T17:24:00-04:00

Frida Escobedo and Handel Architects have shared photos of their newly topped-out National Black Theatre and Ray Harlem mixed-use development in Manhattan.

The project entails a new 27,000-square-foot theater, retail spaces, and a 222-unit residential component strategically located along the historic 125th Street corridor in East Harlem. It is the first scheme in the city to utilize the Visual and Performing Arts bonus included in a comprehensive 2008 rezoning plan, expanding on the late National Black Theatre founder Barbara Ann Teer’s vision for “an artistic ecosystem that uplifts the community,” according to Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. Proponents say its creation is also a catalyst for greater representation in the theater and cultural industries overall.

Image © Brett Tiagwad

Construction will now continue towards the NBT’s expected public opening in 2026. Once complete, the theater will include a 250-seat immersive technology performance space, a 99-seat flexible s...

Boston’s new Winthrop Center is now officially the largest Passive House office building in the world

2023-10-06T17:58:00-04:00

The new Winthrop Center in Boston by Handel Architects has just been certified by the Passive House Institute (PHI) as the largest Passive House office design in the world, according to an announcement made Friday by its developer Millennium Partners.

Inaugurated in the spring after a six-year concept and construction phase, the 691-foot mixed-use tower includes 812,000 square feet of Class A office space and another 510,000-square-foot segment with 317 luxury residences within its 52-story design.

The office component of the Center, which earned the PHI designation, incorporates between 30 and 35% more fresh air than a typical commercial design. Millennium Partners shares: "A typical Class A building in Boston’s existing stock uses 150% more energy and existing LEED Platinum buildings in Boston use 60% more energy than Winthrop Center’s office space."

Image courtesy of Millennium Partners.

“With Winthrop Center, we wanted to think beyond the status quo, and we were ready to employ ...

L.A. gives the O.K. to massive Angels Landing high-rise development

2022-03-30T15:15:00-04:00

The city of Los Angeles is moving forward with a historic plan from Handel Architects and OLIN for a slice of Downtown’s Bunker Hill neighborhood called Angels Landing.

The LA Times is reporting the city’s granting of entitlements needed to build on the parcel designated Y-1, which features the site of the historic Angels Flight funicular railway system.

Image courtesy Handel Architects

The project, backed by developers Victor MacFarlane and R. Donahue Peebles, is being hailed as the largest ever by a Black-owned development firm and, at 1.26 million square feet, is one of the largest in the recent history of the city.

Image courtesy Handel Architects

A once bespoke residential area west of LA’s downtown core, Bunker Hill has developed into a commercial high-rise district since the city initiated a redevelopment scheme in the late 1960s.

Image courtesy Handel Architects

Now, with only the funky funicular railway remaining as a vestige of what used to be, MacFarlane and Peebles will lo...

Cornell Tech celebrates Roosevelt Island Campus phase one completion

2022-02-24T14:33:00-05:00

Cornell Tech, Cornell University’s urban campus for technology research and education, has announced the completion of the first phase of its Roosevelt Island campus development in New York City. This news comes following the recent completion and opening of the Snøhetta-designed Verizon Executive Education Center and the Graduate Roosevelt Island Hotel in 2021.

The first three buildings at Cornell Tech, which opened in September 2017 include the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center, designed by Morphosis Architects, the TATA Innovation Center, designed by Weiss/Manfredi, and The House, designed by Handel Architects and developed by The Hudson Companies and Related Companies.

Previously on Archinect: Snøhetta completes two new buildings for Cornell Tech campus in New York

The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center is the campus’s first academic building offering a variety of spaces designed to support different learning modes, while incorporating advanced sustainability features and comm...

These are the 10 most successful NYC architects of the past year according to TRD

2022-02-01T12:07:00-05:00

CRE publication The Real Deal has released its annual list of the ten most commercially successful firms in New York City’s high-profile building market. Most of our readers will recognize these firms as regulars in Archinect Jobs.

As the architects of record, these firms appeared in permitting documents for developments that totaled more than 13.5 million square feet in total area. TDR ranked the firms by the aggregated square footage of their business output.

SLCE took the top billing with 10 projects worth a total of 3.1 million square feet followed by Handel Architects, which had a total of five projects and 2.5 million square feet combined. The top two were followed by Perkins Eastman, which had six totaling 2 million square feet, including a planned 74-story development in Long Island City. Beyer Blinder Belle took the fourth slot with 1.4 million square feet and four developments, followed by Gene Kaufman Architects, which registered five with a total of 1.3 million square ...

Winthrop Center is making progress in its quest to become the world's largest Passive House office building

2021-06-09T13:09:00-04:00

Curtain wall construction has begun on what will become the world’s largest passive house office building, marking an important milestone in the drive to give Boston an iconic and environmentally friendly new skyscraper that could help the city meet its carbon-free mandate by midcentury.

Winthrop Center is awaiting certification from the Passive House Institute conferring its office portion with a status that, once completed, will make it the largest of its kind anywhere in the world.

Winthrop Center. Image courtesy of Millennium Partners Boston.

Handel’s vision for the 52-story center is a mixed-use development that includes a bar, restaurants, 321 luxury residences, and a triple-high atrium gathering space dubbed The Connector that seeks to blur lines between indoor and outdoor space in the through-block site along Federal Street to the adjacent Winthrop Square.

Only the 800,000 square foot office portion of Winthrop Center will seek the designation although the building’s overal...

26-story residential development proposed for Philadelphia waterfront

2021-04-14T14:48:00-04:00

The Durst Organization, the New York company selected last year to redevelop Penn’s Landing, is nearing final land-use approvals for a nearby 26-story apartment building that would be its first Philadelphia project. [...] Durst’s project would rise at a longtime parking lot beside the waterfront north of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

Designed by NYC-based Handel Architects, the proposed residential high-rise near the Delaware River waterfront will offer 360 residential units, a 116-space parking garage, and 10,000 square feet designated for shops and restaurants, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Potential earthquake fault below planned Handel Architects-designed development in Hollywood raises new concerns

2020-07-22T15:17:00-04:00

An ongoing dispute between developers Millennium Partners and the regulatory agencies tasked with reviewing a $1 billion Handel Architects-designed mixed-use Hollywood Center development slated for sites surrounding the Capitol Records tower in Hollywood continues.

The development, which could bring more than 1,000 apartments and over 30,000 square feet of retail areas to sites surrounding the existing tower, has been dogged by concerns that a previously undiscovered earthquake fault lies near the project site.

Investigations by The Los Angeles Times have yielded new documents from the California Geological Survey that “strongly support the presence of an active ... fault strand entering the eastern Hollywood Center property,” according to a recent report.

Philip Aarons, a founder of Millennium Partners, countered the new findings in comments to The Los Angeles Times, claiming that “It is clear that the data relied upon by the state is significantly inferior in quality to the data...

$100 million plan to stabilize Handel Architects' leaning San Francisco tower takes a step forward

2019-08-28T15:30:00-04:00

The [stabilization plan] calls for 52 piles to be drilled 250 feet down into bedrock to shore up the building, now leaning 17 inches to the north and west. The 2-foot-thick circular steel piles would be filled with steel reinforced concrete. Twenty-two would be sunk along Mission Street and 30 on Fremont Street.

The reinforcements will join the tower's existing 950-pile foundation in helping to stop the tower's drift.

According to The San Francisco Chronicle, a report written by a panel of experts studying solutions to the sinking problem states, "In our professional opinion, once the foundation retrofit is constructed, the building is expected to have performance consistent with the stated design objectives."

Passive House towers are good

2019-07-30T13:17:00-04:00

Over the last 10 years, the passive house, a form of green design that originated in Germany, has surged in popularity. By creating an airtight building envelope with thick, insulated walls and triple-paned windows, passive houses can eliminate the need for heating and cooling systems in temperate climates and greatly minimize it in a place like New York. But applying those design principles to the construction of a 26-story high-rise is more complicated than it is in a single-family home.

The New York Times profiles Fernando Gómez-Baquero, a visiting doctoral researcher at the new Cornell Tech campus on New York's Roosevelt Island who lives in a 28-story, Handel Architects-designed Passive House residential tower. The tower is the world's tallest and largest Passive House building, according to the architects.

Photo of Cornell's Roosevelt Island complex. Image courtesy of Handel Architects.

Life in the tower, where thermostats are kept between 68 and 75 degrees and a floor-by-floor energy usage is tallied in the lobby, is good, according to Gómez-Baquero. He told The New York Times, “I geek-out on this building. I was really fascinated by how you make a building this tall consume 60 to 70 percent less energy.”

Gómez-Baquero is the founder of ipHaus, an off-the-grid affordable housing development company.

Handel Architects aims to build a "community of opportunity" in East Harlem

2019-07-19T14:53:00-04:00

Construction on Sendero Verde, a sizable Handel Architects-designed affordable housing development in New York City, is expected to break ground later this summer.

Patch reports that L+M Development Partners, Jonathan Rose Companies, and Acacia Network, the developers behind the project, have secured the necessary funding to get shovels in the ground. AECOM is providing landscape architecture services for the project.

The $233 million, three-phase development will ultimately bring close to 700 affordable housing units to New York's East Harlem district, where recent developer interest and real estate activity have disturbed the area's naturally affordable existing housing stock. The project results in part from the recent re-zoning of the East Harlem neighborhood, an effort that is expected to bring up to 1,288 affordable housing units to the area, overall, according to Patch.

The development will preserve a series of existing community gardens currently located on the developmen...

Plans submitted for $1 billion Angels Landing mixed-use in L.A.

2018-06-20T16:06:00-04:00

The 1.26-million-square-foot project, which would rise at the northwest corner of 4th and Hill Streets in Downtown Los Angeles, will feature 120 condos, 450 apartments, 480 hotel rooms, a 45,000-square-foot charter school, and 50,000 square feet of commercial space, according to a case filing with the Planning Department. Handel Architects is designing the $1-billion project.

Cornell Tech to build world's first Passive House high-rise on NY's Roosevelt Island

2015-06-12T18:20:00-04:00

Construction is slated to start this month on what-will-be the world's first high-rise residential tower built according to Passive House (PH) standards, considered the most rigorous criteria for reducing a building's greenhouse gas emissions. Passive houses, such as the building on the right in the thermogram below, release significantly less heat compared with a typical building (such as that on the left).

Touted as an "iconic marker" for Cornell University's new tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York's East River, the project will innovative design features such as:

A pre-fabricated metal façade that will act like a thermal blanket, insulating the structure.
A louver system, or the building's "gills," which will house the building's heating and cooling systems.
Low-VOC paint to limit off-gassing and improve air quality.
Exterior paint that "naturally shifts color from silver to warm champagne" when reflecting light.

According to figures released by the university, the building wil...