AEC News You Can Use Blog

Museum of Architecture and Design, together with The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban studies, has announced that Miami-based architect and urban planner Chad Oppenheim has been selected as the 2023 Laureate of The American Prize for Architecture^®, the prestigious award that is regarded internationally as the highest honor for architecture in the United States.

Oppenheim’s built works, spanning over two decades, are expansive in typology and geography, including works ranging from cultural and hospitality buildings to residences and urban master planning throughout Asia, Australia, Europe and North and South America.

“Subtle, powerful, elegant, and deeply romantic” states Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, architecture critic and Museum President/CEO of The Chicago Athenaeum, “he is a prolific American architect who is radical in his restraint, demonstrating his reverence for history and culture, as well as time and space, while honoring the preexisting built and natural environments, as he reimagines a more beautiful and poetic world with modern, meaningful buildings that relate to their context and reinvigorates the landscape and places in which his designs exits.”

“His monumental, immutable architecture enhances the lives of its occupants, realizes a site’s full potential, and protects and celebrates the natural environment.”

“From the serene Jordanian desert to the lush Bahamas, he shapes buildings and places to achieve the optimal balance between creativity and pragmatism, function and experience, construction and aesthetics.”

“He treats his buildings and projects with sanctity as he unlocks the mystical and metaphysical essence of the power of architecture.”

“Oppenheim’s buildings engage and harness their surrounding land and seascapes and showcase the designer’s dedication to sustainable practices and materials.”

“He believes that buildings and their environment should be deeply symbiotic, where projects ‘belong’ to their site and form follows feeling. Guided by three philosophical pillars—spirit of place, silent monumentality, and the essential—he has spent decades creating landmark architecture that is highly sensitive and responsive to its context and climate.” Read more here

The legendary Frank Lloyd Wright was a prolific architect but leaned on engineers to ensure his designs’ sound structure.

One of those pros was Mendel Glickman, who built this nearly 3,000-square-foot home in Fox Point, WI. The place is listed for $849,900.

Commissioned by John and Sophia Dulka, this one-level, wooded retreat has been untouched since its 1956 completion.

Added to the property in 2016 is a detached 1,000-square-foot art studio designed by Ramsey Jones Architects. The sellers bought the home in 2015 and are its third owners.

Fox Point is a small community along Lake Michigan’s shoreline, 10 miles north of downtown Milwaukee.

That add-on studio is a selling point, notes listing agent Suzanne Powers, of Suzanne Powers Realty Group, because the community no longer approves these for new construction.

“Fox Point doesn’t allow for outbuildings today,” she says. “You could always turn the art studio into a guest suite.”

Other attractive amenities include the .87-acre lot and the two-block proximity to Lake Michigan.

The three-bedroom, 1.5-bath home has notable architectural features that include a floor-to-ceiling, brick fireplace in the living room and striking kitchen cabinetry.

“Inside the house is a true time capsule,” Powers says. “Anybody who’s looking at this house should be interested in preservation. This isn’t the type of house that should be purchased for a renovation.”

The only major change to the interior is the updated kitchen appliances.

So, who will buy this well-preserved property?

“It’s probably going to be somebody who’s a midcentury modern enthusiast and knowledgeable about Frank Lloyd Wright,” Powers predicts.

Russia-born Glickman emigrated to the U.S. as a child and taught structural engineering to architectural fellows at Taliesin, Wright’s homestead. He later became the iconic architect’s main engineer. The duo worked together on many of Wright’s projects, including Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum.

• For more photos and details, check out the full listing.
• Homes for sale in Fox Point, WI
• Learn more about Fox Point, WI

Read more here

Inside every avid golfer is a golf-course architect.

Or at least a little voice that says, “I could so build a cool par-3 on that empty parcel.”

But daydreaming is not the same as doing. A new program aims to bridge the gap between the two.

Enrollment is now open for Design Boot Camp, a four-day workshop that doubles as fantasy camp for anyone with designs on getting into golf-course design — and is willing to lay out some dough to do it.

Sponsored by the American Society of Golf Course Architects (ASGCA), and held at Erin Hills Golf Course, the Wisconsin host of the 2017 U.S. Open, the program will give 16 participants the chance to learn from — and collaborate with — established architects, including the trio behind Erin Hills: Mike Hurdzan, Ron Whitten and Dana Fry. Past ASGCA presidents Jeff Blume, Tom Marzolf, Steve Forrest, Damian Pascuzzo, Jason Straka, Jan Bel Jan, Bruce Charlton and Jeff Brauer also will serve as instructors.

As part of the curriculum, students will get a crash course on the theoretical and technical foundations of the field, such as design philosophy, routing, hazard placement and green design. They’ll also be asked to put those learnings into practice on a property adjacent to the championship course, where students will be split into four “foursomes.” After walking the site and taking stock of the natural features, each group will be asked to design four- to five-hole routings, under the supervision of two architect instructors, and draw up a detailed plan for them. At a “grand unveiling,” students will then stitch their routings together into a dream 18 at Erin Hills. Alas, the finished product will not come to life as an actual golf course, but each student will receive a color print of the work as a memento. Read more here

The 32-story Edison tower on downtown Milwaukee’s riverfront could begin construction next spring, adding yet another peak to the city’s skyline.

Madison-based developer The Neutral Project has filed a proposal for review by the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals, city records show. The proposal also will undergo Plan Commission and Common Council review.

The firm is planning to complete its financing package in the first quarter of 2024, and planning to break ground on the project in the second or third quarter, followed by about two and a half years of construction, according to Daniel Glaessl, a partner at the firm.

The 381-unit luxury apartment tower would be built on a vacant lot at 1005 N. Edison St. along the Milwaukee River − where the former Rojahn & Malaney Co. warehouse was demolished this spring. The residential units would range from studios to three-bedroom apartments.

Parking is planned for the second through sixth floors of the building. Plans show a seventh floor dedicated to resident amenities. Floors 28 through 31 will be penthouse levels. The first floor will house a lobby, café, and a yet-to-be-determined tenant in a 7,100-square-foot space along the Milwaukee RiverWalk. A small park next to the building will also be relandscaped for public use.

The Edison would use a construction technique known as mass timber, or cross-laminated timber, which uses layers of wood pressed together to create columns, beams and other building frame components. This approach follows The Neutral Project’s mission to construct carbon neutral buildings.

“At completion the building will be one of the tallest mass timber hybrid structures in the world, utilizing nearly 100,000 cubic feet of lumber,” Glaessl said.

The Edison would add to a flurry of recent apartment tower construction in the downtown area. Both the 44-story Couture apartment tower and 31-story 333 North Water Street apartment tower, currently under construction, are to be completed this spring. Read more here

UW-Madison is leveraging swaths of experience across departments — and across the University of Wisconsin system — to meet student demand for an architecture program.

UW-Madison launched its first general architectural certificate, located in the College of Engineering, in late August. Three weeks later, in mid-September, 52 students had signed on — a tiny portion of the university’s 50,000 student population, but large enough to make architecture the College of Engineering’s third-largest certificate program. With the engineering college’s second-largest certificate program at 64 students, architecture is poised to take the second-place spot within a year.

“Certificate” is UW-Madison’s word for “minor.”

UW-Madison has had many of the pieces of a robust architecture certificate for years. The College of Engineering offers civil and environmental engineering, which includes design for infrastructure such as roads and bridges and land surveying. The School of Human Ecology has programs in design studies that look at how spaces can be designed with human needs in mind. The landscape and urban planning department teaches students about sustainable land use. And UW-Madison’s art history courses already teach about historical architecture from Wisconsin and around the world.

What was missing, though, were the introductory courses. UW-Milwaukee has stepped in to provide those online. While those classes are taught by UW-Milwaukee faculty, the classes are considered native to UW-Madison and eliminate the need for students to transfer credits between institutions.

UW-Madison’s lack of a broad architecture program has cost the university prospective students in the past, architecture certificate director and civil engineering professor Greg Harrington said.

“We routinely get high school students interested in our (civil engineering) program who say, ‘I’d come here if you had something in architecture, but you don’t.’ And so that was a motivation for us to increase opportunity for students here,” Harrington said.

The certificate, though, is open to students across campus, not just those in the College of Engineering, so the classes are showing broad appeal. In a 400-level architectural design class this semester, there’s a cohort of College of Business real estate graduate students designing Italian cuisine restaurants for East Washington Avenue alongside psychology and structural engineering majors. Read more here

It’s rare that a building’s design can become so immediately iconic – an attraction unto itself. Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona comes to mind. It is a visual feast – a sculpture that takes the shape of a building. Many architecture critics are already claiming the same for the newly opened Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. Officially named the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, the addition to AMNH is the icing on a very prestigious cake. AMNH boasted five million visitors in 2019 (the most recent year the TEA/AECOM Theme Index ranked museums). It is the ninth most-visited museum in the world, and in North America it is second only to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (also in New York City).

The Gilder Center is a 230,000 sq-ft addition that boasts 33 individual connections across four levels to 10 other buildings on the AMNH campus. In addition to helping unify the museum, Gilder houses impressive exhibits including an insectarium, the Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium, new collection displays and the immersive Invisible Worlds experience, a projection-mapped environment that takes guests to scientific and natural realms nearly impossible to see under normal circumstances.

Also capturing attention, of course, is the building itself. Designed by Studio Gang, the building is curvaceous and flowing, or in architect-speak, it’s nonrectilinear. The west- facing exterior features glass windows peeking out from undulating smooth pink granite forms. The 80-foot-tall interior atrium lobby, evocative of a canyon, is made from a material that coats nearly every surface, applied in novel ways. Openings into exhibit spaces and bridges spanning the atrium are amorphous – no shape is repeated in the design. The finish is off-white, and although the primary material is concrete, the effect is organic, almost like looking at bone on a microscopic level, with its crevices and tendons stretching across the space. Read more here

Neighboring Frank Lloyd Wright homes, the Eppstein House and the Pratt House, are for sale in Kalamazoo County with a reported asking price of $4.5 million.

The original Wright-designed furniture in the homes, however, is extra.

"I refer to it as a piece of artwork that you can live in," Fred Taber of Jaqua Realtors told the Free Press, adding that "it's better than a painting" because you don't just hang it on a wall and look at it, you can go inside, walk around, sleep in it and "stay there."

Wright, an American architect, who designed more than 1,000 structures during his lifetime, aimed to create spaces that were in harmony with their natural surroundings, a philosophy he called organic architecture, but it is rare, if not unique, to have two of them next to each other.

 Boeing plans to begin testing a full 3D-printed main rotor system for the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter in the spring of next year as part of an effort to cut out long-lead times and improve the overall supply chains for parts that are typically forged, according to company officials.

At the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference last week, a Boeing and ASTRO America team displayed its first 3D part, a main rotor link assembly, printed on what is currently the world’s largest 3D metal printer at Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois.

ASTRO, a nonprofit funded by the U.S. government, won a $95 million contract from the Army’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center to provide engineering support to develop additive manufacturing capabilities of large-size, large-scale parts including entire hulls for tanks and other combat vehicles as well as other prototype parts, explained ASTRO engineer Emma Gallegos.

That effort, called the Jointless Hull Project, involves a machine that is big enough to print an entire, single-piece M1 Abrams tank hull, she said. Read more here

Willie Nelson—folk legend, guitarist, outlaw, chain smoker, freedom fighter, town planner?

That’s correct. The pop-up town of Luck is a short drive from Austin, Texas designed by Nelson for a 1986 full-length film he produced and starred in, Red Headed Stranger, that was never torn down after production ended. Luck is an Old West Potemkin Village of sorts that can easily be confused with the fictional town of Rock Ridge in Blazing Saddles starring Mel Brooks, Cleavon Little, and Gene Wilder.

In the film, Willie Nelson plays a shotgun-toting pastor who’s come to Luck to restore order in the lawless abode. Nelson’s Texas utopia features a dirt road for dueling with six-shooters, a Saloon where cowboys with ten-gallon hats smash glasses over each other’s heads, a general store, a jail, a chapel where Nelson delivers sermons, and Opry House, a fictional music venue.

A home builder is accused of faking his own disappearance in an elaborate plot to steal money from clients, a Texas lawsuit says.