Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
An important Kenzo Tange design is facing an uncertain future in Japan’s Kagawa Prefecture after reports that authorities there are moving forward with the demolition of his 1964 “Boat Gymnasium” over disrepair and an apparent inability to fund seismic structural upgrades. The Brutalist... View full entry
The 17-story tower of the historic Deauville Beach Resort in Miami Beach was successfully imploded just after 8 a.m. Sunday. The oceanfront building at 6701 Collins Ave. crumbled to the ground in a matter of seconds after a series of thundering booms, marking the end of the road for a hotel that famously hosted the Beatles in 1964 and fell into disrepair in recent years. — Miami Herald
The demolition brought to a close a tumultuous saga that saw local preservationists and the city government sue its owner Alex Meruelo over what they said was a wanton disregard for local heritage standards and other code violations more or less continuously issued since an electrical fire... View full entry
The timing couldn’t be more urgent. As Lang notes, 80% of the buildings projected to exist in 2050, the year of the UN’s net zero carbon emissions target, have already been built. The critical onus on architects and developers, therefore, is to retrofit, reuse and reimagine our existing building stock, making use of the “embodied carbon” that has already been expended, rather than contributing to escalating emissions with further demolition and new construction. — The Guardian
Tonkin Liu’s Stephen Lawrence Prize-winning Water Tower project is cited as one of many examples of the growing influence of adaptive reuse in the market as evangelized in Ruth Lang’s new book Building for Change, which is due out in September from the German publisher Gestalten. In a... View full entry
As reported by The Washington Post and other outlets, some of the 140 surviving capsules will be transformed into rentable apartment units, with others traveling to public collections abroad such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which has expressed interest along with many other international... View full entry
The momentum behind the proposed new Royal British Columbia Museum project said to be Canada’s most expensive in modern history appears to be slowing after Premier John Horgan’s recent announcement “landed with a thud” in political circles and the news media. The Art Newspaper is reporting... View full entry
On April 12, work on the demolition of the iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo began after well over a decade of preservation efforts. With its disassembly ongoing, an Instagram account dedicated to honoring the famed metabolist structure has posted updated images of scaffolding rising... View full entry
Why would the U.S. General Services Administration now raise a hind leg to this legacy by wrecking the Century and Consumers buildings, two early 20th Century skyscrapers at 202 and 220 S. State Street?
The buildings’ demolition would create an economic and pedestrian dead zone on State Street, something neither the street nor the city can afford. And it would be a shameful waste of some really good Chicago architecture.
— The Chicago Sun-Times
A $141 million adaptive reuse plan was initially approved in 2017 by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but the city decided to change direction only a few months later after an FBI security assessment determined that the two buildings’ continued existence creates too much risk for the iconic adjacent... View full entry
The fate of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, one of the founders of the Metabolist movement, has sustained a strong following since the announcement of its proposed demolition in 2007. At first glance, it checks all the boxes of a futuristic... View full entry
An expected temporary closure for the oldest art museum in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area has many vying for the not-too-distant debut of what promises to be an instant architectural icon. The Gilcrease Museum began demolition of its existing building Tuesday in order to make room for a new... View full entry
Marcel Breuer's first binuclear house, Geller I in Lawrence, New York has been demolished in the dead of night. Geller I is largely considered the project that propelled Breuer to private practice in New York and prompted the Museum of Modern Art to commission Breuer to design an exhibition house in the museum’s courtyard entitled The House in the Museum Garden in 1949. — Docomomo US
The conservation advocacy organization chalked up the loss to a combination of changing local property dynamics and the inability of the town of Hempstead’s planning laws to prevent the destruction of a structure it says would have claims to both the New York State and National Register of... View full entry
Evergrande Group, the world’s most indebted developer, was last week ordered to demolish 39 buildings on Ocean Flower Island, a project comprising three man-made islands developed by the company in China’s southern Hainan province, within 10 days. — South China Morning Post
The developer was recently forced to hand over control of its $1.7B football stadium in Guangzhou after spending much of the past year attempting to stave off creditors looking to collect on the company’s reported $310 billion in liabilities, which has recently led to another round of public... View full entry
The development of a huge office campus in downtown San Jose can proceed and an old bank building can be demolished, a Santa Clara County judge has decided in a new ruling on the controversial building. A proposed development that would replace downtown San Jose’s decades-old CityView Plaza with a modern tech campus that could bring 14,000 jobs to the city’s urban core is at the heart of a legal action whose goal was to preserve a bank building designed in a “brutalist” architectural style. — The Mercury News
The ruling denies a petition filed by the Preservation Action Council of San Jose filed seeking to preserve the 1973 Bank of California building and alter the construction of the new office campus being developed by real estate company Jay Paul Co. The petition by the preservationist group claimed... View full entry
The proposals are for the redevelopment of the site to replace the poor quality, office use building that is set-back from the street behind a perimeter fence, with a high-quality building that will activate all three street frontages and provide multiple functions, including co-working, retail, roof terraces and central gallery atrium. — The Architects' Journal
According to the Architects' Journal whose offices would be affected by the planned demolition along with the London studio of C.F. Møller Architects, the new Piercy&Co-designed building aims to address "the challenges of climate change by creating an ultra-low carbon building and placing... View full entry
Two big name architecture firms are changing places on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. The university has commenced demolition of its Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed Mattin Center that was originally completed on its Homewood campus in 2001. The demolition... View full entry
Owners of London's Grenfell Tower are expected to announce later this month that the tower will be demolished due to safety concerns. This decision comes more than four years following the fire that claimed the lives of 72 people. UK housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, has been notified... View full entry