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  1. January 20, 2009 ARCHITECTURE REVIEW | COPENHAGEN CONCERT HALL For Intimate Music, the Boldest of Designs By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF COPENHAGEN — It’s usually considered an insult to say that an architect designs pretty packages, let alone that he borrows ideas from a dead genius. But Jean Nouvel should be forgiven for resurrecting old ghosts. His Copenhagen Concert Hall, which opened here on Saturday evening, is a loving tribute to Hans Scharoun’s 1963 Berlin Philharmonie, whose cascading balconies made it one of the most beloved concert halls of the postwar era. And Mr. Nouvel has encased his homage in one of the most gorgeous buildings I have recently seen: a towering bright blue cube enveloped in seductive images. It’s a powerful example of how to mine historical memory without stifling the creative imagination. And it offers proof, if any more were needed, that we are in the midst of a glorious period in concert hall design. Like Frank Gehry’s 2003 Disney Hall in Los Angeles and Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie, now under construction in Hamburg, Germany, Mr. Nouvel’s new hall demonstrates that an intimate musical experience and boldly imaginative architecture need not be in conflict — they can actually reinforce each other. The Copenhagen Concert Hall has the ugliest setting of the three. In a new residential and commercial district on the outskirts of the old inner city, it is flanked by boring glass residential and office blocks. Elevated train tracks running to the old city swing right by the building; swaths of undeveloped land with tufts of grass and mounds of dirt extend to the south. Approached along the main road from the historic city, the hall’s cobalt blue exterior has a temporal, ghostly quality. Its translucent fabric skin is stretched over a structural frame of steel beams and tension cables that resembles scaffolding. During the day you can see figures moving about inside, as well as the vague outline of the performance space, its curved form embedded in a matrix of foyers and offices. It is in darkness that the building comes fully to life. A montage of video images is projected across the cube’s fabric surface at night, transforming it into an enormous light box. Drifting across the cube’s surfaces, the images range from concert performers and their instruments to fragments of form and color. This is the intoxicating medium of late-capitalist culture. You can easily imagine boxes of detergent or adult chat-line numbers finding their way into the mix. Yet what makes this more than an advertising gimmick is the contrast between the disorienting ethereality of the images and the Platonic purity of the cube. For decades architects have strived to create ever more fluid spaces, designing ramped floors and curved walls to meld the inner life of a building with the street life around it. The ideal is a world where boundaries between inside and out vanish. Yet Mr. Nouvel’s box is more self-contained and arguably less naïve: its solid form, bathed in tantalizing images, is in stark opposition to the sterile desolation around it. That impression grows once you enter the building, where more projected images blend with real, living people coursing through it. To reach the main performance space, concertgoers can either ride up escalators directly in front of the main entrance or turn to climb a broad staircase. Just to the left of those stairs are elevators that shoot up to the lobby and upper-level foyers, whose ceilings are decorated in fragmented, overlapping panels. As video images wash over the panels, the pictures break apart so that you perceive them only in fragments, like reflections in broken glass. More images stream across the walls. The effect is a mounting intensity that verges on the psychedelic. None of this would be effective, however, without Mr. Nouvel’s keen understanding of architecture’s most basic elements, including a feel for scale and materials. The towering proportions of the lobbies, for example, seem to propel you up through the building. When you reach the upper foyers, you feel the weight of the main performance space pressing down on you. At the same time, views open up from the corners of the building to the outside world. It’s as if you were hovering in some strange interstitial zone, between the banal urban scenery outside and the focused atmosphere of a concert. This complex layering of social spaces brings to mind the labyrinthine quarters of an Arab souk as much as it does a high-tech information network. That’s largely because Mr. Nouvel’s materials put you at ease: elevator shafts and staircases are clad in plywood, giving many of the spaces the raw, unpretentious aura of a construction site. The building’s concrete surfaces are wrinkled in appearance, like an elephant’s skin, but when you touch them, they feel as smooth as polished marble. By contrast, the main performance hall wraps you in a world of luxury. Like Scharoun’s cherished hall, Mr. Nouvel’s is organized in a vineyard pattern, with seats stepping down toward the stage on all sides in a series of cantilevered balconies. The pattern allows you to gaze over the stage at other concertgoers, creating a communal ambience. Because the balconies are stepped asymmetrically, you never feel that you are planted amid monotonous rows of identical spectators. Yet Mr. Nouvel’s version is smaller and more tightly focused than Mr. Scharoun’s. The balcony walls are canted, so that they seem to be pitching toward the stage. A small rectangular balcony designed for the queen of Denmark and her immediate family hovers over one side of the hall, breaking down the scale. The entire room was fashioned from layers of hardwood, which gives it an unusual warmth and solidity, as if it had been carved out of a single block. The result is a beautifully resilient emotional sanctuary: a little corner of utopia in a world where walls are collapsing. And it underscores what makes Mr. Nouvel such an ideal architect for today. Though he is a deft practitioner of contemporary technology, his ideas are rooted in the historical notion of the city as a place of intellectual exchange. His best buildings hark back beyond the abstract orderliness of Modernism and neo-Classicism to a more intuitive — and human — time. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map
  2. Avison Young Montreal | 2008 Review and 2009 Forecast | 2008 In Review At the start of 2008, a strong Canadian dollar negatively impacted the province’s export industry. However, Montreal still posted positive economic growth of 1.7% for the year.2008 was a challenging year for the Montreal economy. The combination of a strong Canadian dollar for most of the year and the recent financial crisis in the United States negatively impacted the province’s export industry. Quebec’s economy is positioned in industrial sectors that are lagging or in a slump, such as the clothing, forestry, furniture and manufacturing industries. However, despite all this, Montreal still posted positive economic growth of 1.7% in 2008. Employment grew by 1.3% in the year and is anticipated to increase by another 1.5% in 2009. Consumer spending remained high and has contributed tremendously to economic growth. Office Engineering firms, many of whom are expanding to support major infrastructure projects in the province, spurred demand for office space. Downtown office vacancy closed the year at 5.4%, a significant drop from 6.2% at the end of 2007 and 9% at the end of 2006. The decrease in vacancyrates in the downtown market was accompanied by only a slight increase in rental rates. The suburban office vacancy rate has remained stable over the past four years, and closed the year at 13.1%. In 2008, 400,000 square feet (sq. ft.) of space was absorbed in the market, significantly lower than the 2007 absorption of 1.37 million sq. ft. Absorption of office space has been modest due to lack of quality space. Certainly, what is left of quality office space in downtown Montreal is quickly being absorbed, and options for tenants are becoming increasingly limited. Industrial Montreal’s manufacturing sector has been strongly affected by the rise in the value of the Canadian dollar. As a result, the industrial market has moved away from manufacturing to logistics and distribution type industries that drove demand for industrial space in Montreal. These types of companies require smaller spaces with greater clear heights. Consequently, vacancy rates increased for large spaces of 100,000 sq. ft. and more, whereas spaces between 15,000 and 25,000 sq. ft. became increasingly more difficult to find. Buildings with clear heights of 24 feet are in great demand and have an extremely low vacancy rate of approximately 1%. The rental rates for these buildings have therefore increased. Limited availability of appropriate space motivated tenants to construct built–to-suit projects that provide the amenities they require. Many of the older, more obsolete buildings are being demolished or completely renovated by developers. Retail Substantial consumer demand in Montreal created an active retail market in 2008, and retail sales rose by 5.5% in the year. In the downtown core’s central area, rental rates have quadrupled and vacancies are nonexistent. Rental rates closed the year at between $200 to $215 psf at the corner of Ste-Catherine and Peel Streets. Newcomers to Ste-Catherine Street include Apple Computer’s first Montreal retail location at 1321 Ste-Catherine Street West and H&M at the corner of Peel Street, with 20,000 sq. ft. Investment The financial crisis in the United States has softened the investment market in Montreal. Assets offered for sale require a longer exposure period. Investors using financial leverage as the basis for investment are having trouble completing acquisitions, thus diminishing the occurrence of successful transactions. As a result capitalization rates increased by approximately 25 basis points this year. Despite this, many successful transactions were completed earlier in 2008. Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services Inc. invested approximately $100 million to acquire a 50% interest in 1981 McGill College, together with a major financial partner that acquired the remaining 50%. Cominar REIT acquired 2001 McGill College for $165 million. Canderel and Proment sold the first Phase of the Bell Campus for $185 million to a German real estate investment fund. 2009 Forecast Office Montreal is the only city in Canada with no significant downtown office construction projects. Until recently, large tenants have been able to find suitable alternatives that were much less expensive than proposed new projects. However, as vacancy rates continue to plunge, the availability of quality space will become even more limited. Tenants will soon have no choice but to consider one of the new construction projects. Expect to see the beginning of one or two office construction projects in 2009. Potential office developments include Canderel’s development of 1201-1215 Phillips Square, Hines’ development of 900 de Maisonneuve, Magil Laurentienne’s office or mixed-use building at 701 University and Westcliff’s development of Phase 2 of Place de la Cité Internationale. Quebec’s 2008 budget aimed to stimulate business investment by eliminating tax on capital for manufacturers and by offering a tax credit for the purchase of manufacturing equipment and a tax credit for new information technology companies. Accordingly, the Province of Quebec agreed to provide investment banking giant Morgan Stanley with $60 million in tax credits for opening a new global technical support centre in Montreal. Morgan Stanley is currently searching for office space in anticipation of bringing staff levels to 500 or more. Phase 1 of the new Bell campus on Nun’s Island was officially opened in August of this year. Phase 2 is anticipated to be ready for occupancy in February 2009. It will comprise 235,000 sq. ft. of office space and amenities, bringing the total to 840,000 sq. ft. A third phase is also planned, thus bringing the campus total to approximately 1.4 million sq. ft. The downtown core office market has absorbed a large percentage of the space formerly occupied by Bell. Retail In 2009, Canadians will likely be faced with weakening job prospects, tighter credit conditions and economic uncertainty, thus leading to moderated consumer spending. Retail sales are expected to grow by only 3.5% in 2009, as opposed to the 5.5% growth seen in 2008. Demand for space on Ste-Catherine Street will slow dramatically in 2009. As a result, retail vacancy rates are anticipated to increase and if retail sales continue to lag, we expect to see some retailers walking away from stores that do not perform. This will give tenants the upper hand in lease negotiations. Industrial The diminishing strength of the Canadian dollar will benefit the export industry in 2009. Demand for industrial space will likely come from the logistics, distribution and aerospace industries. We anticipate the overall vacancy rate to increase, as more space comes to market and older buildings that lack required ceiling heights remain empty. However, the vacancy rate for smaller buildings with adequate clear heights will remain low. Rental rates for the older, more obsolete buildings will decrease and rates for newer, smaller spaces with adequate ceiling heights will remain flat. Industrial construction activity will continue to slow in 2009 as a result of financing difficulties coupled with high land and construction costs. However, industrial growth will continue off the island of Montreal due to lower land costs and higher availability. Investment Banks have tightened credit significantly and consequently, financing is more difficult to obtain. Borrowers that lack liquidity will likely have difficulty acquiring assets. This, however, will leave the door open for REITs and international investors with capital at their disposal. In 2009, we anticipate a general slowdown in the investment market. The majority of investment sales deals in 2009 will be concentrated on a few portfolio deals; mostly smaller transactions involving retail and warehouse properties. Prices for commercial real estate product will likely decrease and cap rates will increase by 50 to 100 basis points. http://www.avisonyoung.com/library/pdf/National/forecast2009.pdf Également présent dans la section "Ressources".
  3. St. Catherine Street: the changing of the guard Remember that little boutique where you bought the leather jacket 15 years ago? It’s gone. If you have not visited St.Catherine Street in Montreal since the early 1990s, you would not recognize it. Of the stores that were located in the prime area between Bishop and University, not more than fi ve are still in existence. The locallyowned stores are gone, replaced at first by national retail chains, which in turn are giving way to international chains. Storefront retail throughout North America has been in decline for many years. St. Catherine Street is the exception. Rental rates have quadrupled. Vacancies are nonexistent. It is not just any street. Fifteen kilometres long, St. Catherine comprises 1,200 stores, making it the largest concentration of retail outlets in Canada. The street is witness to 3,500 pedestrians per hour, 250,000 offi ce workers at lunchtime, and 100,000 students per day, keeping the street alive at all hours. Furthermore, eight subway stations, 30 kilometres of underground walkways with 178 entrances, and 2,000 underground stores totalling 36 million square feet (sq. ft.) of floor space are used by 500,000 people on a daily basis. In street front retail, if you don’t have a store on St. Catherine Street, you have not made it. There are two strategies for retail chains entering Quebec: 1) open a fl agship store on St. Catherine Street; or 2) open four or five stores in major malls around Montreal, and a flagship store on St. Catherine Street. At the corner of Peel and St. Catherine, three of the four corner stores have changed in the past year. The newcomers are H&M (Hennes & Mauritz of Sweden) with 20,000 sq. ft; Guess with 13,000 sq. ft; and American Eagle, with 17,000 sq. ft and Apple Store. In the last five years, more than 20 flagship stores have opened here, mostly multinationals, such as: Lululemon, Oakley, American Eagle, Esprit, Garage, Guess, Khiels, Geox, GNC, Ecco Shoes, H&M, Mango, French Connection, Quicksilver, Marciano and Adidas. The shortage of space forces stores to take minimal frontage on the ground floor, and more space on the second and third fl oors. Ground fl oor space that leased in the early 1990s for $50 net per sq. ft. (psf ), with the landlord offering $25 per sq. ft. for leasehold improvements, now leases for $200 net psf and up, plus $30 psf for operating costs and taxes. And some of the stores spend $5 million renovating the space. But as they say in Rolls Royce dealerships, if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it. Some of these stores are not making money, but they are here for image and marketing purposes. All the other banners are here, so they have to be here too. Whereas the mixture of stores constantly evolves, most of the landlords have been here for 30 or 40 years. They have seen the market go up and down. In this market, they will turn down all but the best. For one vacancy last year, there were four multinational chains trying to outbid each other for the space. http://www.avisonyoung.com/library/pdf/National/Fall-Winter_2008_AY_National_Newsletter.pdf
  4. Market’s Troubles Echo in a Building’s Vacant Floors Article Tools Sponsored By By CHARLES V. BAGLI Published: November 9, 2008 The elevators work fine, the views are great, the offices have been refurbished and no one is complaining about rats. In so many ways, the green-tinted, 41-story office tower overlooking Bryant Park seems a desirable address. So why are tenants who rushed to rent space a year ago in the building, at 1095 Avenue of the Americas, rushing to break their leases now? The answer says much about the increasingly precarious state of Midtown Manhattan’s real estate market at a time when once-mighty financial companies like Lehman Brothers are disappearing and the slowing economy is driving the vacancy rate up and commercial rents down. Though the building, once owned by Verizon, just went through a two-year, $250 million makeover, several financial firms that signed leases in 2006 and 2007 say they no longer can afford the rents or the cost of outfitting new spaces. Others are laying off workers or reorganizing their offices and no longer need as much room. The first sign of trouble came over the summer when iStar Financial, a real estate finance company, decided not to move into the 100,000 square feet of space that it had rented on the 36th, 37th and 38th floors. Several weeks later, Metropolitan Life Insurance, whose name is now in block letters over the tower’s front doors, quietly began shopping for tenants to sublease 100,000 square feet of its space in the building, a quarter of what it signed up for in 2006. And last month, Centerline Capital Group, a suddenly struggling commercial property finance and investment company, confirmed that it would not be moving into its 100,000 square feet of space on the third, fourth and fifth floors. The company is negotiating with the landlord, the Blackstone Group, to buy out its lease or to sublet the space, said real estate executives who have been briefed on the talks. The companies signed leases for as much as $132 a square foot, when the market was near its peak. Despite the building’s new glass skin, refurbished space and prime location at the corner of 42nd Street, many brokers say they would be lucky to get $95 a square foot today. The difference would translate into millions of dollars a year. Neither iStar nor MetLife have found any takers. For landlords and brokers, the building has become a closely watched barometer of the commercial real estate market in Midtown, where the mercury is clearly falling. Although the rents being asked have hardly moved, brokers say that landlords are providing a menu of concessions that are substantially reducing the effective price. “It’s definitely a microcosm of the last few years in the New York real estate market,” said Peter Riguardi, president of Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate brokerage and advising company. The problems at 1095 Avenue of the Americas are not hurting Blackstone so far. The combined unused space of Centerline, MetLife and iStar accounts for roughly one-third of the 1.06 million square feet owned by Blackstone in the building, and the three companies are obligated to pay full rent even if they are unable to sublease the space. Brokers say that Blackstone would require the companies to pay dearly to break their leases. But trouble could emerge if any of the companies tumble into bankruptcy court and stopped paying rent. Other tenants seem to be staying put. Dechert L.L.P., a law firm and the first tenant to sign a lease in 2006, is moving onto floors 25 through 31, and Bank of Scotland is occupying its two floors, 34 and 35. MetLife is moving into its space at the top of the tower, even as it tries to sublease its space in the middle. And Robert Alexander, chairman of the New York office of CB Richard Ellis, the real estate brokerage for the tower, said he had pending deals for two other vacant floors, 32 and 33. “We’re signing smaller deals at premium rents, and we look forward to finishing our leasing program,” he said. Brokers familiar with the space offered by iStar, MetLife and Centerline say competition for tenants in Midtown is growing in part because there is ample renovated space available in other buildings. As a result, many companies are demanding rent concessions from landlords or are refusing to take on the cost of adding walls, carpeting and bathrooms to newly renovated space. “What’s missing right now is the demand for raw space,” said one broker, who requested anonymity because he was active at the former Verizon building and he did not want to alienate the landlords or other brokers. The building was constructed in 1974 with vertical white marble slabs and few windows to house switches and other equipment for New York Telephone, which became Verizon. In 2005, as rents and sales prices for commercial buildings were skyrocketing, the company put the tower on the market, with the exception of 234,000 square feet on Floors 6 through 12. Equity Office Properties, one of the largest commercial real estate owners in the country, won a hotly contested auction with a bid of $506 million, more than Verizon had anticipated. At the time, many analysts suggested that Equity Office had overpaid, especially after the new owner started a $250 million renovation that included replacing the marble exterior with a glass skin. Equity Office, however, was betting that the tower would lure prime tenants and generate rents as high as $90 a square foot. And it was right: Rents escalated even higher as the vacancy rate in Midtown plunged and investors clamored to buy properties. Blackstone bought Equity Office for $39 billion in early 2007, at what turned out to be the height of the market. It sold most of Equity’s New York buildings but held on to 1095 Avenue of the Americas. The firm signed leases last year with Bank of Scotland and Centerline for as much as $150 a square foot, brokers active at the tower said. MetLife’s average effective rent, for floors in the middle and at the top, is about $100 a square foot, or $40 million a year, according to real estate executives familiar with the deal. The insurance giant had moved most of its New York employees to Long Island City in 2002, where rents were as low as $30 a square foot. But in 2006, MetLife reversed course, signing a lease to move about 1,300 employees from Queens into the former Verizon building. But this year, the company reassessed how many employees were actually in the office at any one time and determined that it needed only 9 of the 12 floors it had leased in the tower. So early next year, MetLife plans to formally market three of its floors, said John Calagna, a spokesman for MetLife. Mr. Calagna said that the same number of people who moved into 1095 Avenue of the Americas two years ago, about 1,300, are now “moving to less space.”
  5. Nakheel to build 1km-high new tower Dubai: 5 hours and 49 minutes ago Dubai-based master developer Nakheel has announced plans to build Nakheel Harbour & Tower, a new community which will boast a tower more than a kilometre high and the world’s only inner city harbour. The project, inspired by Islamic design and geometry, was launched at a VIP event hosted by Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, chairman of Dubai World. The development will cover an area of more than 270 hectares and become home to more than 55,000 people, a workplace for 45,000 more and attract millions of visitors each year. “There is nothing like it in Dubai”, Bin Sulayem said at the launch. “Nakheel Harbour & Tower is located in the heart of ‘new Dubai’, where we have focused on creating a true community, a location for living, working, relaxing and entertaining, for art and culture. All of this is concentrated in one area.” Nakheel Harbour & Tower incorporates elements from great Islamic cities of the past - the gardens of Alhambra in Spain, the harbour of Alexandria in Egypt, the promenade of Tangier in Morocco and the bridges of Isfahan in Iran. Nakheel Tower will have four individual towers within a single structure – a groundbreaking engineering feat. A distinctive crescent-shaped podium encircles the base and complements its remarkable height. Not only has a development of this shape and scale not been attempted before, but it is also a further example of Nakheel’s innovative projects that have changed the way the world looks at Dubai, he said. The multibillion dollar Nakheel Harbour & Tower development will include 250,000 sq m of hotels and hospitality space, 100,000 sq m of retail space and huge expanses of green spaces including canal walks, parks and landscaping. The new development is geographically central to the Emirate of Dubai, at the intersection of Sheikh Zayed Road and the Arabian Canal; and will also complement Nakheel’s surrounding developments including Jumeirah Park, Jumeirah Islands, Discovery Gardens and Ibn Battuta shopping mall. The Nakheel Harbour & Tower development minimises car use and maximises train, bus and water transportation. A complete transportation hub blends into the harbour area with metro transportation combined with a unique water transport interchange, with Abra and Dhow station links. Sustainability and safety will be key to the planning and design of Nakheel Harbour & Tower, with the latest standards and technology incorporated in the development. “It sends another message to the world that Dubai has a vision like no other place on earth.” FACT SHEET • The project will take in excess of 10 years to complete, but completion will be phased, with various stages coming on line much earlier • The project location is at the intersection of Sheikh Zayed Road and the Arabian Canal, with Waterfront to the west and Deira to the east • It will cover an area over 270 hectares • It includes the world’s only inner city harbour • It includes a tower that will be more than a kilometre high • Apart from the Nakheel Tower there will also be another 40 towers ranging in height from 20 floors to 90 floors (250 meters to 350 meters) • Nakheel Harbour & Tower will be home to more than 55,000 people and a work place for more than 45,000 people • There will be more than 19,000 residential apartments. These will include a diverse mix of housing – from affordable family homes to exclusive villas and penthouses. • There is more than 950,000 sq m of commercial and retail space • There will be more than 3,500 hotel rooms. There will be a super luxury 100 room hotel at the top of Nakheel Tower • There will be approximately 30,000 workers involved in the development of the Nakheel Harbour & Tower • Nakheel Tower public space: to complement the dramatic height and volume of the tower, an expansive, breath-taking crescent-shaped open space “rings” the tower and extends out into the neighbouring districts • The (Arabian) Canal Promenade: visitors and residents will have access to over 3.9 km around the tower precinct of meandering canal promenade environment and stretching to over 10 km along the entire embankment. As one of the unique features of this development, the canal promenade will connect Sheikh Zayed Road to Emirates Road through a myriad of urban experiences and spectacular views to the Tower • Internal public space: while every block will be identifiable by a unique common internal open space, a series of distinctive neighbourhoods are planned. Weaving through the precinct blocks will be a chain of interlinked open and public spaces. Residents and visitors will be able to walk though continuous walkways stretching over 1800 m, while experiencing the uniqueness of every community block • An eight hectare canal district along the bank of the canal will incorporate a network of waterways. This district will also allow for the most desired vantage points towards the tower. Onlookers will be able to see the uniqueness of an over a kilometre high tower with a bustling marine harbour at its base • To provide an active connection to the Ibn Battuta district, a ‘living’ bridge is planned over the canal allowing a seamless urban experience. This will be complemented by another iconic pedestrian bridge connections overlooking the Arabian Canal The Nakheel Tower • The Nakheel Tower will be more than a kilometre high • It will have over 200 floors • It will have approximately 150 lifts • The design structure of four separate elements allows for structural rigidity while also allowing the wind to pass freely in the spaces between the skybridges reducing the overall wind load • Total volume of concrete will be 500,000 cu m • All of the reinforcing bars laid end to end could stretch from Dubai to New York (1/4 of the way around the world) • The tower will have 20 km of barrettes – (almost 400 barrettes). Barrettes are a form of pile used to make the foundation. A single foundation barrette has the capacity to support a 50 storey building. • The building has enough cooling capacity to air-condition over 14,000 modern homes or to service 14 luxury resort hotels each with 2,000 rooms and all the public areas and amenities • The building is so tall that it experiences five different microclimatic conditions over its height, each with individual design features • The temperature in the atmosphere at the top of the building can be as much as 10 degrees cooler than the bottom • Due to the high speed shuttle lifts one may be able to see the sunset twice from the bottom and again from the top of the building • The goal is to achieve the highest LEED certification we can for a building this size • There will be approximately 10,000 car parking spaces in Nakheel Tower • Nakheel Tower and podium combined will be in excess of 2 million sq m – TradeArabia News Service http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worl...-1km-high.html http://www.tradearabia.com/news/REAL_150270.html http://canadianpress.google.com/arti...djiFHAm5kzMsIA http://www.thenational.ae/article/20...042682/-1/NEWS
  6. http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/saturdayextra/story.html?id=34389692-7401-4f72-8dc1-0193f394a578&p=1 A partir de samedi le 16aoùt 2008, une série de sept articles sur le patrimoine architectural de Montréal. Ce samedi, le restaurant du 9ième étage de l'édifice-amiral de l'ancien magasin Eaton. Aujourd'hui : le Wilder Block Luxury to the 9TH ALAN HUSTAK, The Gazette Published: Saturday, August 16 Like all cities, Montreal has its share of aging buildings that aren't architecturally significant but contribute to the texture of the streetscape and help identify neighbourhoods. Often, how a building fits into its surroundings is more important than how it looks. When old, familiar structures are torn down to make way for another overscale high-rise, the city is diminished, some say. A bigger problem is that many important buildings in Montreal have been allowed to deteriorate as real estate speculators, developers and politicians spar over profit margins, zoning regulations and height restrictions. Montreal is no longer a place where we tally up heritage losses, as we did in the 1960s and '70s, when sections of historic Old Montreal were razed and mansions in the Square Mile were demolished in the name of progress. Still, urban planners keep tabs on sites they consider at risk. We look at some of the properties on Heritage Montreal's list and invite readers to share their views on whether these places should be saved or surrendered. - - - WITH ITS OPAL GLASS WINDOWS, nickel steel railings, and pink marble columns with black Belgian marble accents, Le 9e dining room in the former Eaton's building downtown remains one of the most staggeringly beautiful art deco rooms in Montreal. But the restaurant has been off limits to the public since the Eaton's department store chain went bankrupt and closed its flagship Montreal store in 1999. Inspired by a trip company matriarch Lady Eaton took aboard the transatlantic luxury liner Île de France in the 1920s, the dining room was incorporated into the plan when Eaton's decided to expand its Ste. Catherine St. store to nine floors from six in 1928. The 650-seat dining room opened on Jan. 25, 1931, as Le François Premier, but the ladies who lunched there never called it that. It was always known as "The Ninth Floor." The room is the work of interior designer Jacques Carlu, the French-born professor of advanced design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was also responsible for the celebrated Trocadéro in Paris and the Rainbow Room in New York's Rockefeller Plaza. The restaurant is an elegantly proportioned space, 40 metres long and 23 metres wide, with a 14-metre ceiling. It has two smaller dining rooms off to the side, the Gold Room and the Silver Room. At either end of the main room are two allegorical cubist murals, Pleasure of the Chase and Pleasures of Peace, painted by Carlu's wife, Natasha. Initially, the Ninth Floor foyer offered a panoramic view of the city, but the vista disappeared as more skyscrapers arose downtown. Even before the restaurant opened, The Gazette enthused over its opulence. "Spacious and lofty, it is a room fit for a palace," an article in the paper said at the time. It was never a high-end gourmet restaurant, but the food was substantial, the ambience luxurious, and the wait staff attentive and motherly. After Eaton's closed, the building was sold to Ivanhoe Cambridge, a real-estate arm of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, which invests funds from the Quebec Pension Plan. There were rumours the site would be incorporated into a luxury hotel - which was never built - and it would reopen as a swank supper club. It has been used occasionally for private functions. Even though the Ninth Floor has been declared a heritage site by the provincial government, that classification does not oblige the owner to maintain or conserve the space. An official of Ivanhoe Inc., which owns the former Eaton's building, confirmed the real-estate firm has entertained several offers but has not decided what to do with the property. What should be done? Preserve it: The Ninth Floor restaurant and the elevator shafts leading to it were declared a heritage site by Quebec's Culture Department in 2001. If that floor of the former Eaton's store continues to be mothballed, it might be forgotten altogether or converted into private offices, inaccessible to the public. Forget it: The plumbing at the Ninth Floor requires a major overhaul to meet health standards. And without nine floors of retail space beneath the restaurant to attract customers, the room might not be a profitable commercial venue for another 20 or 30 years. - - - Landmarks in limbo: The series Today: Le 9e, popularly known as the Ninth Floor, the art deco restaurant at the former Eaton's store downtown. Day 2: The Wilder Block on Bleury St. Day 3: The Redpath Mansion on du Musée Ave. Day 4: The Montreal Planetarium at St. Jacques and Peel Sts. Day 5: Grain Elevator No. 5 on Montreal's waterfront. Day 6: Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine House, at Overdale Ave. and Lucien L'Allier St. Day 7: The Guaranteed Pure Milk Co. bottle, overlooking Lucien L'Allier St. ahustak@thegazette.canwest.com montrealgazette.com Share your views Which historical and cultural sites in Montreal should be maintained? Which should be demolished? Give us your opinion at montrealgazette.com/soundoff A trip through the past Log on to our website to view a slide show of Montreal's threatened landmarks and hear the history behind them. Go to montrealgazette.com/galleries
  7. Toronto : OMERS grabs rest of TD Tower LORI MCLEOD From Saturday's Globe and Mail July 25, 2008 at 8:34 PM EDT Brookfield Properties Corp. has sold its stake in one of the two Toronto skyscrapers that make up its flagship Brookfield Place, a surprise deal that set a new price record for Canadian office space. Brookfield said Friday it sold its half-interest in the TD Canada Trust Tower to co-owner OMERS Realty Corp. for $721 a square foot. OMERS, part of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, acquired full ownership after triggering the shotgun clause in its partnership agreement with Brookfield, a commercial property company based in New York. The move led to rumblings that friction between the partners may have sparked the deal, but this wasn't the case, said Tom Farley, president and chief operating officer of Brookfield's Canadian commercial operations. “Absolutely not. Brookfield and OMERS have a terrific relationship. The building was and is 100-per-cent leased, OMERS decided they wanted to own 100 per cent … and we found the price to be attractive,” Mr. Farley said. If Brookfield had not wanted to sell its stake, it would have had the option of buying OMERS' stake under the partnership agreement, he added. The record price paid for the 51-storey tower built in 1990 suggests demand for top quality buildings remains strong despite fears of a spreading real estate slump, said Michael Smith, analyst at National Bank Financial. “This sets a new benchmark price for rare, trophy assets, which simply don't come on the market that often,” he said. The next highest recorded price paid for a large office building was $625 a square foot for the Harry Hays Building in Calgary in 2007, according to data from CB Richard Ellis Ltd. Friday's purchase comes at a time when Canada is experiencing its greatest shortage of office space in 10 years. However with 3.7 million square feet in development in Toronto alone, vacancy rates in the city are expected to pop to 10 to 12 per cent in the next two years from 4.4 per cent in the second quarter of 2008, according to CB Richard Ellis. The market will still have strong fundamentals, and the deal confirms Brookfield Place's position as a premier asset in the downtown core, said Paul Morse, senior managing director of office leasing at Cushman & Wakefield LePage. Brookfield still owns 100 per cent of Brookfield Place's larger Bay Wellington Tower, 50 per cent of the complex's shared retail space and 56 per cent of the parking, Mr. Farley said. “If in fact we had sold out our entire interest in the property I would have had mixed feelings, but we still have a significant ownership interest in one of the best properties in Canada, if not North America,” he said. Brookfield's gross proceeds from the sale of $425-million could be used for a variety of purposes, including acquisitions in North America, Mr. Farley said. The funds could also be used to buy back shares or pay down debt, he added. Mr. Smith said the purchase makes sense strategically for OMERS, which has already been doing extensive renovations at the Royal Bank Plaza across the street from Brookfield Place. Representatives from OMERS weren't available to comment on the deal. http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080725.wtdcentre0725/BNStory/Business/home
  8. Voici ma vision pour un réseau light-rail/tramway sur la rive sud (principalement Longueuil, mais aussi Brossard, Boucherville et Saint-Lambert.) 85% of the lines will run through large boulevards that have existing space between the carriageways. (Ex: Boul Roland-Therrien, which was precisely designed with tramway-expandability in mind.) About 10% of the lines will run adjacent to major roads, along currently (as of 2008) vacant or more or less acquirable space. A final 5% will have to be dug or passed through some existing (infra)structures. Ligne 1 - 11km Roland-Therrien (et aussi boul. Cousineau) Ligne 2 - 17km Jacques-Cartier (et le bord de l'eau) Ligne 3 - 9km Taschereau (et boul. Lafayette) Note #1 - Il devrait y avoir des modifications aux infrastructures existentes a certains endroits... exemple, pour avoir suffisament d'espace pour installer un tram, Taschereau va devoir tasser ses voies sur les cotes (pas un enorme probleme, considerant qu'il y a presentement des acotements assez large de 2m+) Note #2 - Il y aurait possibilité d'expansion! Surtout sur la ligne 3 vers le sud. Note #3 - C'est une VISION seulement; pour le fun! I haven't considered all the details, i just had fun and put this map together. Please keep that in mind! Questions / commentaires / suggestions / compliments / insultes / tomates / n'hésitez pas!
  9. Condos, costs squeeze Vancouver office space DAVID EBNER From Monday's Globe and Mail June 29, 2008 at 10:33 PM EDT VANCOUVER — The numbers, at first glance, couldn't look better for a commercial real estate developer. On the small peninsula that constitutes downtown Vancouver, there's barely any available office space. The 2.6-per-cent vacancy rate ranks as the lowest of any city core in North America. And rents are soaring, with the cost of prime office space jumping 25 per cent in just one year to more than $34 per square foot. Yet hardly any new commercial space is being built. Just 130,000 square feet is under construction in downtown Vancouver, which would add less than 1 per cent to what exists. It's a fraction of what's happening elsewhere: Calgary's downtown is expanding by 5.6 million square feet, or 17 per cent, and Toronto is growing by 3.8 million square feet, or 5 per cent. Construction costs have risen far faster than rents, driven by a Western Canadian construction boom that has made labour scarce and expensive, and the climbing cost of materials such as steel. Vancouver developers say they just can't make the numbers add up for new projects. In Calgary, for example, the energy boom allows developers to charge $45 a square foot, a third more than they can get in the Vancouver market. “It takes a lot of nerve to build today,” said Don Vassos, a senior vice-president at real estate services firm CB Richard Ellis Ltd. who opened the company's Vancouver office 24 years ago. Since then, the downtown has gone through a transformation that helped produce the current shortage of commercial space. It's a trend the city now hopes to reverse. In the 1980s and 1990s, planners and politicians set about creating the Vancouver that currently exists, one consistently on best-places-to-live lists. Under the rubric of “living first,” the city heavily promoted residential development downtown, pushing the population on the peninsula to 90,000, more than double the 40,000 or so in the mid-1980s. But the dozens of residential condominiums have begun to squeeze the commercial core. Four years ago, alarm bells started going off for planners when Duke Energy sold the landmark Westcoast Transmission building for a condo conversion. That provoked the city to impose a temporary halt on such changes in the central business district. With developers predicting that Vancouver will run out of space to build new commercial buildings in the next 20 years, city council is poised to encourage construction of more office space. In July, it will consider a series of proposals from planners that include an expanded central business district, tighter rules on condo conversions and proposals to allow taller towers with more density. Until things change, however, businesses will continue to feel the squeeze. Part of the problem, developers say, is that condos are far more profitable than commercial space because residential buyers are willing to pay large premiums for benefits such as views of the ocean and mountains. And unlike Calgary and Toronto, where large corporations drive demand for many storeys of commercial space, the typical Vancouver tenant is more likely to be a law firm or upstart technology company requiring far less space. Developers have to sign on many more tenants to make a project work instead of landing one big name. Some Vancouver developers say the city has to take measures to encourage new commercial buildings that go beyond the proposals city planners have put together. “They need to address costs,” said Tony Astles, executive vice-president for B.C. at Bentall Real Estate. “And they need to address the length of time it takes to go through the whole process, from zoning to approvals. “It's a clogged-up system. Right now, it's very difficult to rationalize a high-rise office tower in downtown Vancouver. The costs of construction have risen so fast that rents – even though they're at their all-time high – haven't kept up.” http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080629.wrdowntown30/BNStory/Business/home
  10. The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By June 8, 2008 Allez voir plus de photos sur le site: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/magazine/08mvrdv-t.html?_r=1&sq=montreal&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=all By DARCY FREY In the fall of 2002, a young Dutch architect named Winy Maas came to Yale to give a lecture on designing and building the 21st-century city, the challenges of which he illustrated by showing a 30-second video that could have been shot above any American metropolitan airport: a view of the tops of several buildings and then, as the camera rose, more and more buildings, more roads and bridges and asphalt lots, until an ugly concrete skin of low-rise development spread to all horizons. Maas was not the first architect to protest the unsightly sprawl that humans have left over much of the earth’s surface, but he may have been the first to suggest that we preserve what’s left of our finite planetary space by creating “vertical suburbias” — stacking all those quarter-acre plots into high-rise residential towers, each with its own hanging, cantilevered yard. “Imagine: It’s Saturday afternoon, and all the barbecues are running,” Maas said, unveiling his design for a 15-story building decked out with leafy, gravity-defying platforms. “You can just reach out and give your upstairs neighbor a beer.” He turned next to agriculture. Noting that the Dutch pork industry consumes huge swaths of land — Holland has as many pigs as people — Maas proposed freeing up the countryside by erecting sustainable 40-story tower blocks for the pigs. “Look — it’s a pork port,” he said, flashing images from PigCity, his plan for piling up the country’s porcine population and its slaughterhouses into sod-layered, manure-powered skyscrapers that would line the Dutch coast. Maas is the charismatic frontman for the Rotterdam-based architecture, urban-planning and landscape-design firm known as MVRDV, which brims with schemes for generating space in our overcrowded world. With his messy, teen-idol hair and untucked shirt, Maas strolled the stage extolling the MVRDV credo — maximize urban density, construct artificial natures, let data-crunching computers do the design work — while various mind-bending simulations played across the screen: skyscrapers that tilted and “kissed” on the 30th floor; highways that ran through lobbies and converted into “urban beaches”; all the housing, retail and industry for a theoretical city of one million inhabitants digitally compressed into the space of a three-mile-high cube. The Netherlands, prosperous and progressive, has long been one of the world’s leading exporters of architectural talent. By the mid-1990’s, not only Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture but also a whole new generation of designers — MVRDV, West 8, UNStudio — were trying to enlarge Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture as the “magnificent play of volumes brought together under light” and arguing for a process driven by research, information and a greater social and environmental awareness. Fighting their battles not just building to building but on a sweeping, citywide scale, Holland’s architects and designers were, in the words of the Dutch culture minister, “heroes of a new age.” Still, paradigms tend to fall only under pressure, and at the start of the new millennium an audience at the Yale School of Architecture could be forgiven for greeting vertical suburbs, pig cities and the rest of MVRDV’s computer-generated showmanship with the same slack-jawed disbelief that once greeted Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” or the 1909 Life magazine cartoon that promised an urban utopia of country villas perched atop Manhattan skyscrapers while double-decker airplanes whizzed through their atria. When Maas came to New Haven, MVRDV was barely 10 years old and had hardly built outside its native Holland. And yet there he was with his straight-faced scheme to “extend the globe with a series of new moons” — send up food-producing satellites that would orbit the earth three times a day. “Can you imagine,” he said with a boyish, science-fair enthusiasm that indulged no irony, “if we grew our tomatoes 10 kilometers high?” On the lecture-hall screen, New York’s skyline appeared just as the MVRDV satellite passed overhead, darkening Gotham with a momentary eclipse of the sun. Who were these Dutch upstarts? And in the so-called real world, would anything actually become of their grand, improbable visions? The 45 architects and designers who make up MVRDV (the name is formed by the surname initials of Mass and his two founding partners, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries) work out of a converted, loftlike space in an old printing plant in Rotterdam, a dull but industrious port city whose historic districts were leveled by the Nazis and whose jagged skyline of new office towers and construction cranes attests to its still-restless effort to rebuild. Inside MVRDV, a liquid northern light pours through a wall of high arched windows, and the occasional cries of foghorns and seagulls confirm its location just blocks from the city’s main shipping lane. But otherwise, the mostly 30-something architects who sit with a slouching intensity at rows of long communal tables, surfing Google Earth or manipulating blue-foam architectural models, seem to have their minds in other places. “Now here’s a nice project of ours,” Jacob van Rijs said, leading me over to a small cardboard model for a library near Rotterdam when I visited the firm this spring. Because zoning laws required that the library not exceed the height of the town’s steeple, MVRDV designed it like a barn and filled its spacious interior with a continuous spiral of book-bearing walls leading to a bar and a fireplace at the top. “It’s like a spatialization of a library filing system. Every title will be visible, so you won’t have to know what you’re looking for — you can just come in and browse.” Van Rijs — menschy, informal, with a skill for taking Maas’s flights of rhetoric and bringing them helpfully down to earth — guided me on to the next model, this one for a new housing block in a generic, somewhat featureless region of the Netherlands; from a distance the housing block will appear as giant letters spelling out the region’s name. “It’s like the Hollywood sign — you’ll see our building and instantly know where you are.” And on to the models for an arched, open-air market hall whose ribs are formed by apartment units (“so you can call down from your kitchen window and ask your husband to pick up some fruit”); the design-your-own mountain grottos with interchangeable rooms for a developer in Taiwan (“they’re like customizable Native American caves”); the new soccer stadium in Rotterdam that, because it replaces an older one fondly known as the Tub, will sit like a dish in the Maas River. “You know, what’s the best place for a tub? So we put it in the river!” Van Rijs gave a giddy laugh. “Some projects just make you happy.” Maas and van Rijs, who both worked for Koolhaas, and de Vries, who practiced with the Delft-based Mecanoo, formed MVRDV in 1991 after their design for a Berlin housing project won the prestigious Europan competition for architects under 40. Holland has always been a good place to think creatively about space, with its congested countryside (16 million people squeezed into an area the size of two New Jerseys), its faith in planning and the democratic welfare state and its keen appreciation for land that comes from having reclaimed two-thirds of its own from the edge of the North Sea. Meanwhile, young designers were hoping the economic boom and housing shortage of the 1990s would give them the chance to build domestically on a large scale. Still, two years after they formed MVRDV, Maas, van Rijs and de Vries were struggling to find work and practicing out of makeshift offices (during meetings with prospective clients, they’d sometimes recruit friends to keep the phones ringing and wander through in suits) when a Dutch public broadcasting company, VPRO, approached them about a possible new headquarters in Hilversum. The project’s constraints were formidable. VPRO’s 350 employees — “creative types,” van Rijs says; “individualistic,” de Vries adds; “a settlement of anarchists with an obnoxious attitude toward corporate identity” Maas concludes — were then spread out among several buildings, enjoying their fiefs and the company’s culture of noncommunication. Even if a new headquarters could bring them all under one roof, it was impossible to predict how the employees would actually use the building, given their fluid work patterns and chaotic organizational hierarchies. “The mandate was: How can we get them to start communicating with each other?” Maas says. “And the answer was: By putting them in a box.” Villa VPRO, which became the defining project of MVRDV’s early career, is a densely constructed, five-story box — a “hungry box,” as one critic called it — with an endlessly flowing and adaptable interior that renders in spatial form the company’s anarchic spirit. MVRDV created a concrete labyrinth of winding stairs, twisting ramps and narrow bridges; a continuous surface of stepped and slanted planes with no real walls, just colored-glass partitions so that sunlight could penetrate into the depths of its compact terrain. “Clearly, VPRO was a social-engineering project,” Maas says. “We built a vertical battlefield for the users, one place where they could all meet and argue and find out how to behave. Because of all the hills, slabs and stairs, they were forced to maneuver through the building. Some people hated it — they lost their way, they were overwhelmed by their colleagues. Others loved it. But they all had to deal with each other. I like that. That’s part of life.” A year later, MVRDV took social engineering to a new level when it won a commission to represent Holland in Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany. Expos are notorious excuses for creating second-rate architecture, piling up dreary national pavilions and Disneyfied theme parks around which crowds circulate in a candy-consuming stupor. At the Hanover expo, MVRDV stole the show with another vertical confection — this time a six-story tower of stacked and sustainable artificial Dutch landscapes that included an oak forest, a meadow of potted flowers, ersatz concrete sand dunes for purifying irrigation water and a “polder landscape” of dyke-protected turf powered by wind turbines spinning away on the roof. The MVRDV pavilion was, one critic wrote, “science class with the chutzpah of Coney Island.” Another predicted that it would “go down as one of the few truly great pieces of expo architecture,” alongside Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat flats at the Montreal expo. Visitors lined up for hours to climb through what was inevitably dubbed the “Dutch Big Mac.” But beyond its playful innovation, MVRDV had lofty aspirations for its pavilion, hoping that it would carry the optimistic (and very Dutch) message that in the face of extreme population densities and the craving for open land, you could actually manufacture space — even create an artificial nature out of thin air — by condensing your landscapes on the floors of a building and reproducing them endlessly toward the sky. “The Dutch population is essentially antiurban,” de Vries says. “Therefore as architects in Holland we have a special responsibility to make living in cities and under dense circumstances not just habitable but preferable.” “It was sort of a test case,” Maas says. “At a time when urbanism is still dominated by ‘zoning,’ which is a very two-dimensional approach, we wanted to know: can we extend our surfaces? Can we develop an urbanism that enters the third dimension?” The Hanover pavilion was “a utopian formula born of necessity to allow the unlimited creation of new real estate,” wrote the critic Holger Liebs. It was “a practical model for the reinvention of the world.” At the architectural library at the Delft University of Technology, there’s a copy of a 736-page book by MVRDV called “Farmax: Excursions on Density,” which is a hodgepodge of essays, transcripts, photos, computer designs, graphs and charts, all examining the growing suburban “grayness” of the Dutch landscape and proposing different solutions for saving the pastoral landscape by “carrying density to extremes.” So many students have borrowed, read and plundered that copy of “Farmax” that it had to be pulled from circulation and has sat in a state of complete disintegration inside a kind of glass vitrine. When I mentioned this to van Rijs, he laughed and said: “Yeah, I’ve seen that. Our book is like a museum piece. Isn’t that fun?” While projects like VPRO and the Hanover pavilion were leading to design commissions in Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris, Tokyo and China’s Sichuan province, MVRDV was also reaching outside the realm of established architectural practice by producing a series of theoretical exercises — books, films, exhibitions, even computer games — that amounted to an ongoing propaganda war on behalf of the firm’s radical ideas about space. After “Farmax,” MVRDV put out another doorstop manifesto, “KM3: Excursions on Capacities,” which warned that if the global population “behaved with U.S.-citizen-like consumption,” another four earths would be required to sustain it. In the exhibit 3D City, they pushed ever upward, advocating giant stacking cities that, as MVRDV breathlessly described them, exist “not only in front, behind or next to you, but also above and below. In short a city in which ground-level zero no longer exists but has dissolved into a multiple and simultaneous presence of levels where the town square is replaced by a void or a bundle of connections; where the street is replaced by simultaneous distribution and divisions of routes and is expanded by elevators, ramps and escalators. . . .” Perhaps MVRDV’s most ambitious theoretical exercise was the traveling computer installation they called MetaCity/Datatown. Predicting that globalism and an exploding planetary population will push certain regions throughout the world into continuous urban fields, or megacities, MVRDV conceived a hypothetical city called Datatown, designed solely from extrapolations of Dutch statistics. (“It is a city that wants to be explored only as information; a city that knows no given topography, no prescribed ideology, no representation, no context. Only huge, pure data.”) According to its creators, Datatown was a self-sufficient city with the population of the United States (250 million) crammed into an area the size of Georgia (60,000 square miles), making it the densest place on earth. MVRDV then subjected this urban Frankenstein to 21 scenarios to see how they would affect the built environment: What if all the residents of Datatown wanted to live in detached houses? What if they preferred urban blocks? What could be done with the waste? (Build 561 ski resorts.) What kind of city park would be needed? (A million Central Parks stacked up over 3,884 floors.) “The seas, the oceans (rising as a result of global warming), the polar icecaps, all represent a reduction in the territory available for the megacity. Does that mean that we must colonize the Sahel, the oceans or even the moon to fulfill our need for air and space, to survive? Or can we find an intelligent way to expand the capacities of what already exists?” On one level, MetaCity/Datatown was a game and a provocation — architecture as a kind of thought experiment: can the urban landscape be reduced to a string of ones and zeroes? Is what we think of as outward reality nothing more than the physical manifestation of information? But MetaCity/Datatown was also a serious investigation: by translating the chaos of the contemporary city into pure information — or, as MVRDV called it, a datascape — and then showing the spatial consequences of that datascape through computer-generated designs, MVRDV set out to reveal how our collective choices and behaviors come to mold our constructed environments. “These datascapes show that architectural design in the traditional sense only plays a very limited role,” Bart Lootsma, an architectural historian, writes in one of many essays inspired by the exhibit. “It is the society, in all its complexities and contradictions, that shapes the environment in the most detailed way, producing ‘gravity fields’ in the apparent chaos of developments, hidden logics that eventually ensure that whole areas acquire their own special characteristics — even at a subconscious level.” Lootsma cites a number of these invisible forces — market demands precipitating a “slick” of houses-with-gardens in the Netherlands, political constraints generating “piles” of dwellings on the outskirts of Hong Kong, the cultural preference for white brick causing a “white cancer” of housing estates in the Dutch province of Friesland. These are “the ‘scapes’ of the data behind it,” he writes. Moreover, to the extent that MVRDV approaches architecture not as a conventional expression of aesthetics, materials and form but as an almost scientific investigation into the social and economic forces that influence our constructions, the datascapes were also a dry run for the firm’s own built work. That work, says Aaron Betsky, the former director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute and a longtime MVRDV-watcher, is really an ongoing project of “giving shape to those zeroes and ones,” of making the conceptual real, of turning abstract information into concrete form. When MVRDV begins a project, it starts by assembling information on all the conceivable factors that could play a role in the site’s design and construction — everything from zoning laws, building regulations and technical requirements to client wishes, climatic conditions and the political and legal history of the site. Architects often view these rules and regulations as bureaucratic foils to their creativity. MVRDV sees them as the wellspring of invention. In fact, believing that subjective analysis and “artistic” intuition can no longer resolve the complex design problems posed by the ever-metastisizing global city, the architects sometimes use a home-built software program called Functionmixer. When loaded with all the parameters of a particular construction project, Functionmixer crunches the numbers to show optimal building shapes for any given set of priorities (maximizing sunlight, say, or views, or privacy) and pushes limits to the extreme, where they can be seen, debated and, often, thoroughly undone. It creates a datascape that is the basis of the design. In 1994, for instance, MVRDV was asked to build housing for the elderly — an apartment block with 100 units — in an already densely developed suburb of Amsterdam. Because of height regulations and the need to provide adequate sunlight for residents, only 87 of the called-for units could fit within the site’s restricted footprint. Rather than expand horizontally and consume more of the neighborhood’s green space, MVRDV borrowed a page from its “vertical suburbia” and hung the remaining 13 apartments off the side. Their wonderfully odd WoZoCos housing complex takes the conventional vertical housing block and reorganizes it midair with these bulging extensions that seem to be levitating right up off the ground. Four years later, when MVRDV was selected to build economically mixed housing in Amsterdam’s docklands area, the firm held countless negotiations with the parties involved — local politicians, the planning authority, possible future residents — all of whom advocated for a different distribution of the housing. Eventually MVRDV threw all the data into a computer and came up with the Silodam — 157 apartments of various sizes and prices that sit together in one 10-story multicolored block that rises on stilts from the harbor like a docked container ship. From the outside, the Silodam looks simple enough — as literal as a child’s giant Lego construction — but inside the block is filled with a vast array of dwellings arranged into economically mixed “mini-neighborhoods,” while a series of communal galleries and gangways allow residents to walk from one end of the “ship” to the other. MVRDV’s radical, research-driven methodology has been a source of fascination to critics and competitors from the start. “No one else has found as convincing a way,” writes the historian Lootsma, of “showing the spatial consequences of the desires of the individual parties involved in a design process, confronting them with each other and opening a debate with society, instead of just fighting for one or the other, as most architects would.” And the urbanist and designer Stan Allen, now dean of the Princeton School of Architecture, points out that “rather than impose structure, leading to closure and more precise definition, MVRDV works to keep the schema open as long as possible, so that it can absorb as much information as possible.” In fact, MVRDV’s architects rely so much on gathering and metabolizing data, information and competing points of view that they insist they leave no formal signature on their work. “We try to avoid any sort of aesthetic aspect in our designs,” van Rijs told me. “Unlike Gehry, Zaha and others whose work is easy to recognize, we don’t have a strong personal style. Our methodology is based more on logic. Sometimes we call it an iron logic: depending on the situation, we come and take a look and say: ‘What’s happening? What should be done?’ Then we follow a step-by-step narrative, and when you see the building, you get the final result. It’s the only possible outcome. You cannot see anything else.” But if MVRDV’s design process is really so rational and objective — if, as Stan Allen says, the architects reject “fuzzy intuition” and “artistic expression” for a step-by-step pragmatism in which “form is explained only in relation to the information it encodes: architecture as a series of switches, circuits or relays activating assemblages of matter and information” — then why, Allen asks, are their creations so unexpected and witty, sometimes even so spectacular? Commissioned to build large-scale housing in a sprawling Madrid neighborhood already choked with monotonous low-rise construction, MVRDV designed a typical horizontal housing block with an interior courtyard. Then the architects flipped the block on its side to create Mirador, a towering 22-story icon for the neighborhood with the courtyard now transformed into an enormous, open-air balcony offering sweeping views of the Guadarrama Mountains. Some MVRDV designs are so logical they seem to turn reality on its head. In 2007, two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of New Orleans, the actor and architectural enthusiast Brad Pitt asked 14 design firms to help his nonprofit Make It Right rebuild the city’s impoverished Lower Ninth Ward, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the storm. Specifically, he asked for designs for an affordable — but also floodproof — 1,200-square-foot house with three bedrooms and a porch. Maas, van Rijs and de Vries — citizens of a country that is continually defending its buildings from the threat of inundation — had already contributed to an exhibit of post-Katrina architecture: inspired by a child’s crayon drawing of New Orleans residents walking to safety up an imaginary hill, they conceived a new elementary school made safe from rising waters by tucking it inside an artificial, grass-covered mound, where balconies hung off the sides and a playground covered the top. Now, having received Brad Pitt’s call, they came up with an ingenious, almost whimsical solution to the problem of future flooding: their “Bend House” was a variation on the South’s traditional low-slung shotgun houses, this one hinged in the middle so that its front and back are raised above the waterline. Some critics were appalled. By creating a dwelling that already looked flood-damaged, perhaps even uninhabitable, MVRDV appeared to be using the New Orleans disaster to score political points or, worse, to be winking ironically at the residents’ ongoing plight. Others thought the Bend House was emblematic of MVRDV’s best work and of the architects’ knack for creating buildings whose formal inventiveness arises from the explicit display of the social or environmental problems that brought them to life: VPRO’s endless interiors signaling the need for social connection; WoZoCos’s hanging boxes showing how to preserve our green spaces; the festively striped Silodam offering ways to mix rich and poor. “The architecture that we make is part of the ordinary, part of our pop culture,” Maas told me. “At the same time, the buildings try to engage with society by questioning our behavior and offering alternatives. And they offer those alternatives by showing — visibly, obviously — in their actual design the social problems we were trying to address. When you see the object, you see the question.” Maas’s remark brought to mind an appraisal of MVRDV’s work by the French architect Alain Guiheux. “A great mystery in architectural projects surrounds the definition of what is acceptable to the client,” he writes. Where does the client’s caution and censorship begin? At what point does that caution become the architect’s own self-censorship? Guiheux goes on to say that MVRDV tries to resist society’s censorship — and overcome its own — by using playfulness to “soften up conformity” and by “pushing back the line between the reasonable and the incredible.” That, he says, is their “magic,” and has effected a break with architectural convention “like that undergone by painting at the beginning of the 20th century, pre- or post-Duchamp.” In the case of MVRDV’s New Orleans Bend House, the playful break with convention was not accomplished without considerable debate. “When you have a federal government that doesn’t invest in its levees, that makes people’s land completely worthless, that makes its own citizens insanely poor, you need a design that makes a protest, that rises up and says, What is going on here?” Maas said. “But in discussions with Brad and the others, we kept asking: Yes, but can we show that explicitly? Can we come out with that? It’s going to look ironic! How can you be ironic in the face of disaster? Will the American people be angry? “But even in the most tragic circumstances,” Maas went on, “there is often a moment of irony. Well, is it irony? Or is it really more like . . . ?” He paused, at an uncharacteristic loss for words. “There is this beautiful German word, Trost. It means empathy, or solace, or maybe consolation. I think that is what our building meant to express. You know, if the waters are going to come, let them come. Let’s do it. Let’s just turn and face it.” Darcy Frey is a contributing writer for the magazine. His last article was about bears who were overtaking a Canadian town. Home * World * U.S. * N.Y. / Region * Business * Technology * Science * Health * Sports * Opinion * Arts * Style * Travel * Jobs * Real Estate * Automobiles * Back to Top Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
  11. I would hate to be an astronaut right now. Seeing the toilet busted on the space station.
  12. By Andrew Weiland , of SBT Published September 14, 2007 Milwaukee-based developer Steve Stewart and restaurateur Jay Supple, chief executive officer of Oshkosh-based Supple Restaurant Group, plan to introduce America to the Montreal Bread Co. restaurant chain. They plan to open the first Montreal Bread Co. location in the United States in the River Renaissance development, a seven-story, 82-unit condominium building under construction southeast of Water and Erie streets in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward. Stewart, president of New Vision Development Co., is a partner in the River Renaissance project, which will be complete in November. During the next 10 years, Stewart and Supple plan to open and sell franchises for an additional 50 to 100 Montreal Bread locations across the United States. They will be master franchisors for Montreal Bread in their territory, which so far includes Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. That means they will be able to open or sell franchises for Montreal Bread locations in those states. In addition, Stewart and Supple are negotiating with Montreal Bread to add more states to their territory. “We want to be the master franchisor for the entire U.S.,” Stewart said. Montreal Bread Co. is a chain of European style cafes. Its menu includes sandwiches, soup, salads, desserts, pizza, cheese platters, fruit platters, vegetable platters and retail bread and wine. “It’s an upscale café,” Supple said. “It’s another level above Panera Bread and Atlanta Bread Co. It’s kind of a meet-and-greet place, kind of like Starbucks, but with a much bigger menu. It’s a concept we feel we can take and repeat it throughout the country. That’s what is appealing to us.” Stewart and Supple plan to open six to eight Montreal Bread locations in the Milwaukee area and about 15 total Wisconsin locations during the next 10 years. The concept is flexible and can fit in a 500- to 1,500-square-foot space. “We’re going to have a lot of other Montreal Bread locations throughout Milwaukee, but the locations will be very urban,” Stewart said. The concept will work in suburban locations, but only in high-density communities such as Whitefish Bay in high-traffic areas, Stewart and Supple said. They also plan to do catering and deliveries, so they will be looking for locations near a large number of offices. Rob Weich, chief operating officer of Mequon-based Weich Group Inc., and Alec Karter, a commercial real estate broker with Pewaukee-based Judson & Associates, will help Stewart and Supple find locations and franchisees for Montreal Bread restaurants. “They’ve got some good contacts,” Stewart said. The River Renaissance Montreal Bread location will occupy about 2,800 square feet of space, which will include a 1,500-square-foot training area for franchisees. It will be located on the first floor of the building right at the corner of Water and Erie. The restaurant will also have sidewalk seating for about 40. “This is going to be kind of our model,” Supple said. Supple also plans to open a Fratellos restaurant in an 8,610-square-foot space in River Renaissance, along the Milwaukee River. It will be the fifth location for Fratellos, which has two locations in Appleton, one in Ashwaubenon and one in Oshkosh. Fratellos serves a wide variety of American dishes, including seafood, steaks, sandwiches and pizza. “We try to have something for everybody who comes through the door,” Supple said. Most of the Fratellos locations are located on a waterfront, and the River Renaissance location will feature seating for 100 outside along Milwaukee’s Riverwalk. “The places are beautiful, but you have a menu that is very price sensitive,” Supple said. Supple’s company also owns Wave Bar and Ballroom in Appleton, and he is a franchisee for Golden Corral restaurants in Plover and Oshkosh, a Melting Pot restaurant in Appleton and a Hilton Garden Inn hotel in Oshkosh. “We’re a little bit unique in that we have independent concepts and franchise concepts,” Supple said. The company has been looking to expand into the Milwaukee area, he said. Some in the Milwaukee area are already familiar with Fratellos from taking trips north for Green Bay Packer games or vacations. “This is big for us,” Supple said. “It’s a larger market. We’ve been looking down here for about three years. We love the Third Ward.”
  13. Copier-Coller du Site AppleInsider.com Apple Inc. is finalizing plans for its first Canadian flagship shop, a spacious multi-story retail outlet to be located in the heart of Montreal, a source tells AppleInsider. The Cupertino-based gadget maker is reported to have secured some 9,300 square feet of space along the 1300 block of Rue Ste-Catherine Ouest, where it plans to heavily alter -- but not raze -- an existing structure. According to a set of initial design plans, the company has proposed that the ground floor of the building be raised and that existing column structures on the property be relocated. Plans also call for the building to receive a new roof and stainless steel facade. On the interior, Apple's proposal calls for two stories of retail sales space to be joined by a trademark glass staircases, similar to the one found at its SoHo, New York and Regent Street, London locations. Office space, a back-end stock room, and bathroom facilities will consume a portion of the 9,300 square feet, trimming the retail sales area to approximately 8,000 -- leaving the Montreal location a couple thousand square feet short of Apple's Manhattan-based shops. Although Apple presently operates four retail locations in Canada, none of the stores are designated as flagship locations. Montreal would represent just the 10th high-profile location for Apple, joining its eight existing flagships spread across the U.S., U.K., and Japan, as well as a ninth under development in Manhattan's Meatpacking district. Apple's flagship shops have been strategically placed in the world's most densely populated shopping districts and are conceived as projections of the Apple brand with their architecture and interior design. Each year, the company spends an undisclosed sum on marketing costs for the the high-profile locations, ranging up to $10 million. Unexpected delays withstanding, Apple hopes to begin operating out of the Montreal location during the summer or early fall of next year, according to the source.
  14. I would like to see a list of the 10 biggest buildings in floor space. Who can help me here ?
  15. I am living in a very crowded part of Europe , in the triangle Paris-London-Amsterdam so from time to time I'll go to this part of northern France where there is space and a lot of free nature to stroll through: Let me show you some pictures of Cote d'Opale: unspoiled beauty
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