An Un-Welcome Addition to NYC's Skyline

The Empire State Building is an emblem for New York City and has dominated the Midtown Manhattan skyline for 80 years. Following 9/11, it reclaimed the status of the city's tallest building, but soon it may have some close competition. Developer Vornado Realty Trust is financing the construction of a $3 billion tower designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects that will rise 1,216'-0" (370.6 m) -- only 34'-0" (10.4 m) shorter than the Empire State Building. The new 15 Penn Plaza tower will be located only two blocks away, on the site of the historic Hotel Pennsylvania near Penn Station. While some citizens and officials believe that New York is a perpetually evolving city and should welcome new additions, others balk at the prospect of the bulky new tower.

Your eyes sweep across the panorama. Rolling hills are bursting with colorful wildflowers of vivid orange, yellow, and purple. A Bay Checkerspot butterfly dances by in the flickering light reflected by what looks like a pond but is in fact a skylight of Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences building. Piano worked with Academy scientists and a team of California professionals, including Stantec Architecture from San Francisco, to revitalize the California Academy of Sciences building, located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

The winning competition entry that Foster + Partners provided to the New Mexico Spaceport Authority makes no reference to the innate femininity of the firm’s design for Virgin Galactic’s Terminal and Hangar Facility at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico. My response to this intuitively sensual design, however, was an immediate attraction to the curvaceous feminine symbology of the Terminal building.

It’s official: architects are in love with bamboo. A tree-hugging designer’s dream, bamboo is an eco-friendly, versatile, and durable material. More importantly, bamboo is the fastest growing perennial on the planet, making it symbolically a perfect choice for a city like Madrid, with its ever growing population and, subsequently, its enormous need for public housing. Located in the Carabanchel district, a “regeneration area” on the outskirts of Madrid, Carabanchel Social Housing is a state-subsidized, five-story residential project with 100 units, covered with bamboo louvres. (The structure itself is not made of bamboo, but bamboo is very prominent in the primary architectural statement it makes, due to the louvers.) Foreign Office Architects (FOA) credit Farshid Moussavi, Alejandro Zaera Polo, and others at FOA for Carabanchel Social Housing’s innovative design, which merges an environmentally conscious model with the social urbanization needs of the 21st century. One of the largest social housing projects in Europe, it was completed in late 2007.

Sometimes breath-taking beauty and fantastic design can be born from a virtually blank landscape, and the Grand Canal Square Theatre and Commercial Development proves just that. For years, the Grand Canal Harbour waterfront in Dublin, Ireland, was simply a deserted former industrial site. All that changed when the Dublin Docklands Authority set out to redevelop the abandoned area and create a multipurpose cultural civic center for Dublin. World-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind and landscape architects from Martha Schwartz Partners collaborated on the project to create an architectural masterpiece that merges aesthetic appeal, functionality, and sustainability.

In just about every part of the world not the United States -- the only country that dares to use the word "soccer" -- the sport of football makes for extremely important events. It is no surprise that many football stadiums feature impressive architectural design, such as the Bird's Nest National Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics by Herzog & de Meuron and the World Cup 2010 stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa, by Populus (formerly HOK Sport) with local firm Boogertman & Partners. Soon to join that list is the FC Bate Borisov Stadium in Belarus by Ofis arhitekti, a Ljubljana, Slovenia-based firm founded by Rok Oman and Spela Videcnik in 1998.

The Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), a firm based in Denmark, Copenhagen, was founded by namesake Bjarke Ingels in 2006 and has been on the architectural community's radar ever since. BIG's work is known for being simultaneously playful and socially conscientious. Though many of their projects are situated on dense urban sites, BIG often carves outdoor spaces within the vertical confines of buildings. Their Technology, Entertainment and Knowledge (TEK) Center in Taipei, Taiwan continues this trend. Other notable BIG projects include the Danish Pavilion for the Shanghai Expo 2010 and innovative housing projects such as 8Tallet and The Mountain Dwellings, which feature topographically inspired sections that incorporate terraced roof gardens with sweeping views.

It seems paradoxical to integrate a structure intended to immortalize the horrific Holocaust within a public park, a setting for recreation and relaxation. The deliberate juxtaposition of these conflicting elements sets the stage for Santa Monica-based Belzberg Architects to curate a meaningful experience for visitors to the recently opened Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH).

This year, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain celebrates its 20th anniversary. Well, sort of. While the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia officially opened its doors in 1990, the building has been transformed by so many architects over the years that it’s difficult to date.

Perhaps no building type has changed more in the past generation than the university library. Enormous book collections, once the organizing feature of these buildings, have lost their prominence as scholastic resources. Today’s college students, having grown up using the Internet, have little patience for a warren of "stacks" and laborious searches through printed materials. Therefore, a building prototype that was traditional, monumental, and static has given way to a new, more fluid style.The dynamic form created by Zaha Hadid to house the new Library and Learning Center for the University of Economics and Business in Vienna, Austria, makes a definitive statement regarding the contemporary function of a scholarly library.

8Tallet, by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), has one of the world's largest green roofs and was designed to function as a complete community rather than an apartment building. Learn more about this cool building in one of the world's most environmentally progressive cities, Copenhagen.