From the playground, The Kathleen Grimm School for Leadership and Sustainability at Sandy Ground, also known as P.S. 62, looks like something you’d expect to see in Scandinavia, not Staten Island. With a crisp, clean facade, solar panel-clad roof, and colorful windows, it’s bright, cheerful, and anything but the brick-clad, institutional structure one might expect … Continued
The U.S. Army held its ceremonial groundbreaking Wednesday for the National Museum of the United States Army, an 80-acre project planned to open in 2019 at Fort Belvoir… The campus will include an 185,000-square-foot museum that will house 45,000 pieces of Army art, artifacts, documents and images. Other features will include a memorial garden, amphitheater, … Continued
A striking image of the Center for Character & Leadership Development at the U.S. Air Force Academy, taken by photographer Andy Spessard (@andyspessard), is the winner of the #SOM80 Instagram contest. Organized by SOM, the public photo competition marks the firm’s 80th year and celebrates the connection between architecture and photography. More than 750 entries were received, capturing the … Continued
The skyscraper: representative of spatial economy and a symbol of power. This building typology has a storied, turbulent and even contested past. Here, we bring you a selection some of the skyscrapers and high-rise buildings featured in our AD Classics section… Completed in 1961, the 60 story [One Chase Manhattan Plaza] by Gordon Bunshaft of … Continued
The plyscraper. That’s what everyone’s calling the latest trend in urban architecture… I was lucky enough to interview Bill Baker, chief engineer of the Burj Khalifa, and partner in architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), for my book. During our conversation, he waxed lyrical about the growing interest in wooden skyscrapers—a topic they’ve been investigating … Continued
Back-to-school time brings visions of quads ringed by brick buildings, and idyllic institutions basking in tradition. When most universities follow the blueprints set by traditional forebearers such as Harvard or Oxford, how do you create a modernist campus that still resonates with pride and symbolism, without lifting from the language of ivy-clad academia? For the … Continued
Developing sustainably constructed buildings is an urgent concern as cities look to decrease their ecological footprint. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) sought to address this issue by exploring the potential of mass timber to reduce the embodied carbon footprint of high-rise buildings. The Timber Tower Research Project, funded by the Softwood Lumber Board (SLB) … Continued
The United States is home to several iconic architectural landmarks—everyone knows the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty—but the country also has a great number of lesser championed masterpieces. The new building at New York City’s John Jay College was designed by the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, with a distinctive cube … Continued
Our editors look at hundreds of websites per week. What do they admire and appreciate the most? Organization and simplicity. Sites that are not only clean, but fast. We actively search for projects to include on our platform, so it’s crucial that when we visit a website we not only know where to look, but … Continued
You glance toward Lower Manhattan and expect to see a single tower where two once stood. You delight in the spectacle of sunlight glinting off its slivered facade. Suddenly, you realize, the new 1 World Trade Center — the Freedom Tower — has become familiar… You can now buy snow globes with the tower. Or … Continued