Tag: Architecture

Plan B for Fixing Penn Station Would Wrap Madison Square Garden in Glass

State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, whose district includes the area around Penn Station, also viewed the presentation and called it “intriguing,” in part because of the involvement of HOK. The demolition of the Theater at MSG would free up substantial room for the train hub below, which is crowded with structural columns that disrupt the passage […]

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What’s Fueling Mushroom Mania in Décor?

Jayna Roy wanted her newborn daughter to dream of mushrooms. Since she couldn’t take her baby on foraging trips, she decided to do the next best thing: turn her nursery into a mushroom-themed, cottagecore haven. Ms. Roy designed the space to include over a dozen fungi-related items, among them crib sheets colored with mushroom dye, […]

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This 835-Year-Old English Manor Needs Some Modern Love

Tim Soar stood in the oak-paneled drawing room of his 12th-century English manor house, known as Long Crendon Manor, fretting as the heat from the crackling fire escaped out of a door left ajar. “Close the door! The heat! We need to conserve the heat,” Mr. Soar yelled. He was leading a reporter on a […]

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QS World University Rankings rates MIT No. 1 in 11 subjects for 2023

QS World University Rankings has placed MIT in the No. 1 spot in 11 subject areas for 2023, the organization announced today. The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Computer Science and Information Systems; Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; […]

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What’s It Like to Live in a Grocery Store? Surprisingly Comfortable.

A few years after Demi Raven and Janet Galore were introduced by a mutual friend and fell in love, they starting looking for a home where they could live together. But for artists with careers in technology, it was clear that a cookie-cutter house would not suffice. “We spent some time thinking about what kind […]

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Colleges Showcase Mass Timber, in Research and on Display

Mass timber, an engineered wood product that offers durability and sustainability benefits, has become increasingly prominent at colleges across the country, where it is included not only as a concept in the curriculum but also as a material in campus buildings. Experts say universities are helping to increase awareness of mass timber — layers of […]

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‘Million-Dollar Staircase’ Adds a New Face: Ruth Bader Ginsberg

ALBANY, N.Y. — Even then, the gender imbalance was glaring. The so-called Million Dollar Staircase, spanning 444 steps and four floors of the New York State Capitol, memorialized the faces of dozens of distinguished figures in delicate carvings, but not one was a woman. Scrutiny prompted a state official to hastily authorize the addition of […]

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As New York Weighs Library Cuts, Three New Branches Show Their Value

None of the three new libraries was built by the Department of Design and Construction, the agency ostensibly in charge of erecting New York’s public works. The Brooklyn and New York Public Library systems opted to oversee construction themselves. During the Bloomberg years, a rejuvenated focus by City Hall on the quality of public architecture […]

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2023 MacVicar Faculty Fellows named

The Office of the Vice Chancellor and the Registrar’s Office have announced this year’s Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellows: professor of brain and cognitive sciences John Gabrieli, associate professor of literature Marah Gubar, professor of biology Adam C. Martin, and associate professor of architecture Lawrence “Larry” Sass. For more than 30 years, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows […]

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Rafael Viñoly, Global Architect of Landmark Buildings, Dies at 78

Rafael Viñoly, a Uruguayan-born architect whose New York-based firm was responsible for major commercial and cultural buildings in nearly a dozen countries, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 78. His death, at a hospital, was caused by an aneurysm, according to his son, Roman, who is a director at the firm. Mr. Viñoly was […]

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Taking the long view: The Deep Time Project

How would we design and build differently if we learned to live at multiple time scales? How would human communities respond to global challenges if the short-term mindset of contemporary life was expanded to encompass new dimensions of past and future — diving into the depths of geological history and projecting forward to imagine the […]

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Integrating humans with AI in structural design

Modern fabrication tools such as 3D printers can make structural materials in shapes that would have been difficult or impossible using conventional tools. Meanwhile, new generative design systems can take great advantage of this flexibility to create innovative designs for parts of a new building, car, or virtually any other device. But such “black box” […]

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In Search for Sustainable Materials, Developers Turn to Hemp

As ballroom dancers twirl, and competitive Ping-Pong players swing their paddles in the French town of Croissy-Beaubourg, they are doing so in what some describe as the future of building construction. When the Pierre Chevet Sports Hall opened last year in the tiny municipality on the outskirts of Paris, it was the first commercial project […]

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An Ice Factory From the 1900s Is Now a Spectacular New Bronx School

I didn’t begin this column with that information because Assemblywoman Septimo is right. Stories about the South Bronx invariably start with trauma, casting the community as victim. For students, the new Dream school is a place of hope and opportunity — a new chapter and good news for the neighborhood. That said, the historical arc […]

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The Color-Changing Party Tower of Christian Louboutin’s Dreams

HEAD SOUTH FOR 80 miles from Lisbon to the village of Melides, on the Alentejo coast, take the dirt road that borders the lagoon and leads to the Atlantic and, after a few minutes of bumpy driving, a 28-foot-tall tower emerges from a thicket of parasol pines. At first glance, it resembles a spaceship: a […]

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Blue-sky thinking and the next 150-year chair

A major aspect of sustainability — a core component in many MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) courses — is considering the future effect of any given business practice or product. Sustainability was top-of-mind for Skylar Tibbits, associate professor of design research and director of MIT’s design major and minor programs, and Jeremy Carmine […]

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Preparing to be prepared

The Kobe earthquake of 1995 devastated one of Japan’s major cities, leaving over 6,000 people dead while destroying or making unusable hundreds of thousands of structures. It toppled elevated freeway segments, wrecked mass transit systems, and damaged the city’s port capacity. “It was a shock to a highly engineered, urban city to have undergone that […]

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