New York

The Empire State Building stands in this aerial photograph taken over New York

 New York City's Central Park along Fifth Avenue is viewed in this aerial photograph from a helicopter over New York

 Baltimore_ORI_Yankees Stadium NY

 The United Nations (UN) Secretariat building stands along the East River in this aerial photograph taken over New York

 The former headquarters of Bear Stearns, now owned by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

 Stuyvesant Town Peter Cooper Village, Manhattan's largest apartment complex

 Aerial view of Madison Square Garden

 Citigroup Center, center, stands in between Citigroup corporate headquarters, center front, and a Citi building in the Queens borough of New York

 A cemetery is seen September 13, 2009 in the Queens borough of New York City

 An American Airlines plane flies over a cemetery September 13, 2009 in the Queens borough of New York City

 Office and residential buildings, including a Citigroup building, center, stand in midtown Manhattan in this aerial photograph taken over New York,

 Aerial view of New York Harbor showing the Statue of Liberty (C), Ellis Island and Manhattan (R)

 Planes are seen at LaGuardia Airport September 13, 2009 in the Queens borough of New York City

 New York City's Roosevelt Island is viewed in this aerial photograph from a helicopter over New York

 Queens borough of New York City

 Aerial view of ships docked at the New York Cruise Terminal on the West Side of Manhattan, 01 July 2007, in New York City

 Aerial view of Manhattan looking south over Central Park 01 July 2007 in New York City

 Office and residential buildings, including the headquarters building of the New York Times Co., left, stand in midtown Manhattan in this aerial photograph taken over New York

 Boats travel around the tip of the financial district of Manhattan in this aerial photograph taken over New York,

 The Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse stands in downtown Manhattan

 The headquarters of The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., bottom left, stands adjacent to the World Financial Center in this aerial photograph taken over New York, U.S., on Wednesday, July 7, 2010.

 The Chrysler Building stands in this aerial photograph taken over New York, U.S., on Wednesday, July 7, 2010

 The Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges cross the East River in this aerial photograph taken over New York, US.

Governor's Island, center, sits in New York Harbor in this aerial photograph taken over New York, U.S.,

 

 The Empire State Building stands in this aerial photograph taken over New York,

 Aerial view of Manhattan looking south-west over the Lower East Side (foreground), 01 July 2007, in New York City

 Aerial view of Manhattan looking southwest over Lower Manhattan, 01 July 2007, in New York City. The Manhattan (front) and Brooklyn (rear) Bridges span the East River from Brooklyn (L)

 Aerial view of Lower Manhattan looking northwest, 01 July 2007, in New York City

 Aerial view of Manhattan looking north over the Lower East Side (foreground), 01 July 2007, in New York City

 The Brooklyn Bridge, lower Manhattan and East River are seen in this view of the New York City skyline.

 Lower Manhattan is lit up as night falls September 13, 2009 in New York City

 Midtown Manhattan is seen at dusk September 13, 2009 in New York City

Midtown Manhattan is seen at dusk September 13, 2009 in New York City

OOM-CCTV headquarters

completion due: 2012
competition: 2002
client: china central television (CCTV)

site: 20 hectares in new central business district
program: CCTV total 473.000m2: administration 64.200 m2, multi-purpose 54.900m2, news production 65.800m2, broadcasting 31.800m2,
program production 105.400m2, staff facilities 30.000m2, parking 61.500m2. service building 15.000m2
budget: 5 billion RMB (850 million EUR)
tower 1: height: 234m, 54 floors. footprint: 40x60m,2,400m2
tower 2: height: 210m, 44 floors. footprint: 40x52m, 2,000m2
overhang bottom: 162m, 14 floors
overhang cantilever: 75m to the west, 67m to the south
base height: 45m, 9 floors, footprint 160x160m
basement: 18m, 4 floors

partners in charge: design rem koolhaas and ole scheeren (until 2010), david gianotten, in collaboration with partners shohei shigematsu,
ellen van loon and victor van der chijs.
project manager: yao dongmei
project architects: anu leinonen, charles berman, adrianne fisher
team: chris van duijn, hiromasa shirai, steven smith, gabriela bojalil, joao bravo da costa, catarina canas, holly chacon,  dan cheong,

Steve Jobs- A Genius of the Storefront, Too

By JAMES B. STEWART, NYT, October 15, 2011

WHEN the architect Peter Bohlin arrived for his first meeting with Steve Jobs, he wore a tie. “Steve laughed, and I never wore a tie again,” Mr. Bohlin recalled.
Thus began a collaboration that has extended from Pixar’s headquarters, completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, all with design work by Mr. Bohlin and his firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson — and Mr. Jobs himself.


The New York Fifth Avenue store, the most famous Apple store (soon to undergo a major renovation).

From above, showing the famous iconic curving glass stair.


“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Mr. Bohlin said last week, a few days after Mr. Jobs’s death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”
Just as Mr. Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.


Apple Soho, arguably where it all began.



“No one in commercial architecture has ever channeled a product into architecture for a client the way Peter did for Apple,” said James Timberlake, a founding partner of KieranTimberlake, who is now designing the new American embassy in London. “Most commercial architecture is under-detailed, under-edited and under-budgeted. It’s gross and ugly, and most of it is an eyesore on the American landscape.”
The work of Mr. Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple, by contrast, is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced — and expensive. In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Mr. Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product’s presentation and customer experience.


Apple North Michigan Avenue.

Apple Pudong.
The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple’s cube on Fifth Avenue, between 58th and 59th Streets in Manhattan, its cylinder in the Pudong district of Shanghai or its soaring market hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have become so distinctive that Apple is seeking to patent the glass elements. Mr. Bohlin’s firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Mr. Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ gold medal in 2010.
In their years working together, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Bohlin, who is 74, appeared to have achieved a rare chemistry.
Mr. Jobs was “a very public person,” Mr. Timberlake observed. “That’s in contrast to Peter. He’s not a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Philip Johnson. He doesn’t sweep into a room and take over. You go to a design meeting, and it’s more like a fireside chat.”


Apple Ginza, Tokyo

A  TEAM led by Karl Backus at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson learned early on to approach Mr. Jobs with alternatives. “He liked to be presented with options and would often make very insightful suggestions,” recalled Mr. Backus, who lives in California and focuses full time on Apple work. “We all enjoyed the collaboration.”
The notion of glass as Apple’s signature architectural statement first appeared in the staircase in its store in SoHo, housed in a historic building.
“We had a two-story space, which is a great challenge to get people to go up or down,” Mr. Bohlin said. “So we thought of glass. Steve loved the glass stairway idea. He got it. You make magic. We made these stairs that were quite ethereal.”
Just as Mr. Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Mr. Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure.
“We got James O’Callaghan involved. He’s brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London,” Mr. Bohlin said. “Now we’re cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom.”
In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. The fittings are embedded in the glass, “so you get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall.” Mr. Bohlin said.
“This is the kind of detail Steve wanted,” he added. “We’ve been driving for this, doing more and more with less and less. This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century. Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It’s an interesting challenge, how to marry the two.”
Apple’s use of glass in retail architecture emerged as a design and branding element at its Fifth Avenue store, which opened in 2006. The site had the initial challenge of luring customers into an underground plaza that had been notoriously inhospitable as a retail destination. The solution was a pristine glass cube and staircase flooded with natural light.
“We came to the conclusion it had to feel inevitable,” Mr. Bohlin said. “The adjacent G.M. Building has a tall, narrow facade, and its best aspect is directly across from the Plaza Hotel. Everything in the area is rectangular. So we thought of a square of light. It looks easy, but it wasn’t.”


Apple Sydney

Customers started lining up 42 hours before the store opened, and lines have formed ever since, with crowd control often required to prevent overcrowding. The building is now being renovated and expanded. In keeping with Mr. Bohlin’s and Mr. Jobs’s never-ending quest to achieve more with less, a new cube will feature larger glass panes and fewer visible connecting elements.
Despite its popular and critical success, Mr. Bohlin and Apple have not simply repeated the glass cube in other cities. The new Apple store in Shanghai is a glass cylinder using huge seamless panels of curved glass. Like the cube on Fifth Avenue, it leads to a large underground space, but in contrast, the area around it isn’t rectilinear, and the most prominent local landmark, a towering television tower, is located at an oblique angle to the shopping plaza.
“We had the idea of a circle,” Mr. Bohlin said. “Steve said, ‘Why isn’t the entire plaza around the entrance a circle?’ I said that was a great idea, but that’s beyond our control. The plaza was already under construction. Somehow he got the developer to agree to redesign and redo it. I don’t know how he did it.”
More recently, Mr. Bohlin has used glass to create what he calls “great market halls,” such as the Upper West Side store at 66th Street and Broadway.
“We’re doing a number of those,” he said. “The glazed lid. Can it be detailed any more delicately? I’m not sure. We continue to press that. Steve was a great client in this regard. He would not discourage innovation that was within his vision of what Apple is or he is.”
FOR someone as fascinated — some would say obsessed — by design and architecture as Mr. Jobs, it’s surprising that he lived in a relatively modest Tudor-style house in Palo Alto, Calif., built by a developer, and never lived in a house he helped to design. That might have changed had he lived a while longer. He and Mr. Bohlin had been at work for years on plans for a new house when Mr. Jobs died.
“He was so busy and, of course, ill, so it was unlikely he’d ever live there,” Mr. Bohlin said. “But he loved the site. It wasn’t a very large house, and we don’t know if he thought we were finished. I remember when Steve first hired us, he said: ‘I hired you because you’ve done very good large buildings, and you’ve done great houses.’ If you’re doing houses, then you’re thinking about the subtleties of a building.’ ”
Mr. Bohlin continued: “I remember that so clearly, and I was impressed that he appreciated that.”


Apple’s glass-filled stores, like one in Hamburg, Germany, show Steve Jobs’s touch.
Link
http://www.bcj.com/public/projects/project/9.html

Grounds by Martha Schwartz Partners

Qatar Petroleum grounds by
Martha Schwartz Partners

Landscape architects Martha Schwartz Partners have designed the grounds for Qatar Petroleum headquarters by architects SOM in Doha, Qatar.

The design comprises artificial dunes made of stabilised sand and gravel mix, with gardens and water features interspersed between them.

Here’s some more information from the architects:
–
MARTHA SCHWARTZ PARTNERS TO BRING STRIKING LANDSCAPE DESIGN TO QATAR PETROLEUM HEAD QUARTERS
Internationally renowned landscape architects Martha Schwartz Partners will be providing Doha with a striking new landscape design for the Qatar Petroleum head quarters.


Peeling away the arid desert environment, Martha Schwartz Partners has created a striking contrast within the landscape by revealing a luxuriant, green oasis in the lead up to the headquarters. This duality of the landscape also provides a logical visual allocation of energy resources.
Working closely with architects Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), the sculpted geometry within the headquarters is extended out into the landscape through a series of dunes that curve around the roads and lead to the headquarters. Comprised of a stabilised sand and gravel mix, these weather resistant dunes provide those driving past the site with a rich visual aesthetic experience, whilst at the same time accentuating the shape of the desert.
Weaving between the dunes before tapering off at the edge of the site, the ribbon gardens draw the green of the oasis out into the desert, gradually becoming more indigenous towards the edge of the site away from the protective micro climate of the buildings.
Oasis garden spaces are also an integral feature of the landscape masterplan, occurring adjacent to the recreational spaces, corporate training centres and carparks. Aesthetically absorbing, the oasis gardens refer to the traditional agricultural language of the oasis through the incorporation of water features and crop planted areas, whilst adding a sense of texture and intimacy.
Martha Schwartz, Head of Martha Schwartz Partners said, “As one of the major workplaces in Doha, we felt it was crucial to go beyond international design language and make the public realm specific to the area. The oasis, dunes and plants will create a truly striking visual display, while retaining a sense of cohesion with the hardscape.
“I always relish the opportunity to work on projects like this in the Middle East; clients tend to be really willing to try new ideas and I think this project is really symbolic of that open-mindedness.”
About Martha Schwartz Partners Ltd:
Martha Schwartz Partners (MSP) was founded in 1990 to provide a full range of landscape design services conceived and executed at the highest artistic level possible. Over the years, our practice has evolved from providing landscape services primarily for private sector urban environments to large-scale public projects, land reclamation and planning studies on complex sites.
With considerable talent and experience, MSP brings balance between environmental practice and aesthetics to national and international projects ranging in scale and scope from public plazas, parks, master plans, reclamation, mixed-use developments to art commissions and private residences.

REEM ISLAND - ABU DHABI, U.A.E.

A Canopy as Social Cathedral, New York

One of the best new works of architecture in New York isn’t a flashy skyscraper or museum but a fairly modest structure, an angular glass canopy over an obscure but busy pedestrian street called North End Way, in the shadow of One World Trade Center no less.

The canopy designed by Preston Scott Cohen covers North End Way, a pedestrian alley in Battery Park City.

The angular glass canopy, commissioned by Goldman Sachs for its headquarters, elevates a gap between two buildings into something almost as inspired as the nave of a Gothic cathedral.

Designed by Preston Scott Cohen, the canopy covers 11,000 square feet of an easement in Battery Park City; effectively, North End Way is a north-south passageway or alley, lined with shops and restaurants. Part of what makes this a notable public space is the quality of construction: the granite sidewalk, the lighting, the stainless-steel and glass storefronts, the street furniture. Goldman Sachs, whose headquarters at 200 West Street backs onto North End Way, owns and developed the arcade, which is zoned for public use. But it’s the canopy, which Goldman also commissioned, that formally elevates what is really just a gap between two buildings into something almost as inspired as the nave of a great Gothic cathedral.

It is composed of three tilting, jagged triangles. Picture giant shards of glass. They filter light gracefully through enameled panes, the light shifting with the passing day. The longest triangle is Mr. Cohen’s big statement: It slices the arcade, which bends toward the south end, along the diagonal. That sweeping diagonal brings together what could otherwise be — precisely because North End Way isn’t straight — a disjointed space. Stretching the length of the easement, the diagonal provides counterpoint to the regular beat of the canopy’s steel ribbing and the modules of 200 West’s facade.

This all may sound complicated, but there’s an elegant simplicity to the three triangles slung from the same long wall. Those glass planes explode outward, upward and downward from the horizontal line where the canopy connects to 200 West. The tension between that steady horizontal and the fun-house effects of the triangles is what gives North End Way its architectural drama.

The arcade belongs to an informal network of pedestrian circulation on the West Side of Manhattan, which includes the riverfront paths and parks, among them the High Line. It’s kind of an inside-out High Line. People walk the length of the High Line to go from one spot to another but also just to be up there and look around; they pause in the arcade too, because the canopy makes it a destination.