Posts tagged as:

building

Strong Suit

by Levi of eOffice News on July 15, 2009

A lot has changed since 2004, when DLA Piper hired Lehman Smith McLeish to personalize a spec building going up on a parking lot in the Penn Quarter in Washington, D.C. As the desolate neighborhood blossomed into a vibrant mixed-use hub, DLA Piper morphed, after multiple mergers, into one of the largest law firms on the planet. Leaving behind a tired 1980′s office, the expanded firm seized upon the 230,000-square-foot space to forge a new identity and work paradigm.

Debra Lehman-Smith lost no time in presenting modifications to developer Boston Properties and building architect Hartman-Cox Architects, which embraced her vision to reshape the structure, still in the schematic phase. That set the tone for an extensive and remarkably collegial collaboration and of course reduced the expenses and complications that last-minute interventions entail. The changes were hardly insignificant. Lehman-Smith completely reorganized the entry and eliminated a through-block lobby that would have bisected the building and fragmented the other ground-level spaces. This created two distinct entries, including a dedic
ated one for DLA Piper on the building’s quieter side, facing the historic General Post Office, now the Hotel Monaco.

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Click to Build

by Levi of eOffice News on July 12, 2009

The McMansion has worn out its welcome, hope for prefab is fading, and anyone with a sense of contemporary design taste shudders at what homebuilders are producing these days. But for most people who want to build a modern, “architectural” house, the price is out of their reach. That’s where Hometta, a new Houston-based company, comes in. Launched in late June, coinciding with LA’s Dwell on Design conference, the firm offers house plans designed by contemporary architects from across the country, and then guides owners to finding a way to build them.

Co-founder Andrew McFarland, and his team of four architects and designers from the Houston area (many are affiliated with or attended Rice University’s architecture school) picked the talented firms after a thorough search. Co-founder Mark Johnson, a builder based in Houston, said that their group of architects and house plans will grow much larger by the fall, which is what sets Hometta apart from the plethora of other sites offering home plans online: designer cache. That, and the sense of community the company attempts to foster through its playful, interactive site.

All projects are single family houses, and none measure more than 2,500 square feet, part of the company’s niche-oriented business plan—“If you can afford to build a larger house, and you can find an architect that you like, then you should,” said Johnson—and also a way to assure that the non-custom projects don’t overwhelm contexts. Johnson notes that if clients do want to customize the homes after buying the plans they are welcome to work with the designers.

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Istanbul’s ‘Accidentally Ecofriendly’ Architects

by Levi of eOffice News on July 11, 2009

Architect Hasan Çalışlar says he doesn’t incorporate “green” features in his buildings because they’re environmentally friendly — he only uses them if they “make you feel better in the space.” For his firm’s design for a telecommunications building on the outskirts of Istanbul, that meant working with the slope of the site, maximizing natural light, creating an open architectural style, and adding some rooftop green space. Perhaps you could call it accidentally eco-friendly architecture.

In the case of the Turkcell building, completed last June, both its site and its intended use lent themselves to incorporating eco-friendly features. The techies who work at the 800-person building travel far to get there and often work long hours, sometimes spending days on end in the office while under a project deadline. “The building has to help maintain that kind of lifestyle,” says Süngü, so it includes a variety of amenities — from a fitness center to dorms for overnight stays to a movie screen that drops down in the main stairway so workers can watch important football matches.

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When Carbon Neutral Buildings Don’t Add Up

by Levi of eOffice News on June 8, 2009

Mario Cucinella is one of the greener architects in Italy; I loved his Casa 100K euro that we featured earlier. His Satander building is interesting too, billed as the first “Zero CO2 office building in Milan.” But the three storey building sits on stilts, so everyone will probably take the elevator, which they might not have done if it sat on the ground like a conventional building. The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability in Vancouver, on the other hand, takes carbon neutral to another level.

Indeed, there is a lot going on here. But if you are telling a green story, why put a three-storey building 42 feet up in the air so that everyone has to take an elevator to just get in? And what is the carbon footprint of making over half an acre of photovoltaics? After all, processing a tonne of silicon produces a tonne and a half of CO2, and a square meter of solar cells appears to carry a debt of 75 kilograms of CO2, or 187 Tonnes. Production of semiconductors like solar cells also uses a lot of chemicals like sulfur hexaflouride or nitrogen trifluoride, both notorious greenhouse gases. The engineer says that the photovoltaics will “avoid the pollution of 175 Tonnes of CO2 per year” so that carbon debt is paid off fast, but it still matters.

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Unusual and Creative buildings

by Levi of eOffice News on May 24, 2009

Unpluggd has an article about interesting, unusual and creative buildings. Check it out, because it is amazing!

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Playing the Building

by Levi of eOffice News on April 18, 2009

Creative Time presents Playing the building, a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

More: DavidByrne.com

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Empire State Bulding goes Green?

by Levi of eOffice News on April 7, 2009

Officials at New York’s Empire State Building today unveiled a new process for analyzing and retrofitting existing structures for environmental sustainability. As central elements of the $500 million upgrade program presently underway at the world’s most famous office building, the program is expected to reduce energy consumption by up to 38 percent, providing a replicable model for similar projects around the world. The program is being spearheaded by former President Bill Clinton’s Clinton Climate Initiative, as well as the Rocky Mountain Institute, Johnson Controls Inc. and Jones Lang LaSalle.

“In this distressed economic climate, there is a tremendous opportunity for cities and building owners to retrofit existing buildings to save money and save energy,” said President Bill Clinton. “I’m proud of the work my foundation’s climate initiative has done with 40 of the world’s largest cities, including New York.”

“Commercial and residential buildings account for the majority of the total carbon footprint of cities around the world – over 70 percent in New York City,” said Anthony E. Malkin of building owner, Empire State Building Company. “Most new buildings are built with the environment in mind, but the real key to substantial progress is reducing existing building energy consumption and carbon footprint.”

With an initial estimated project cost of $20 million and additional alternative spending in tenant installations, the Empire State Building will save $4.4 million in annual energy savings costs, repay its net extra cost in about three years. Work has already commenced, and building systems work is slated to be completed by year-end 2010. The balance of the work in tenant spaces should be concluded by end of 2013.

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