Above, the guest suite of Rush Limbaugh’s Fifth Avenue Penthouse, which is now for sale for $13.95 million. The rest of the penthouse is similarly awash in murals, cherubs, and hand-painted gold leaf. I’d hate to own the place when tastes change (or have they already?)…
Via NPR’s Wait wait…don’t blog me!
Image courtesy of Gawker.
Exasperation is running high when demolition is broached as a way to deal with an unused historic building. When demolition is actually supported by both public officials and a plurality of citizens, despite the building’s decent condition and exceptional architectural character, you can fairly assume frustrations are approaching absurd levels. Case in point: St. Paul’s School in [...]
Earlier this week, the EPA designated Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site, much to the chagrin of developers and local group Clean Gowanus Now! (their punctuation, not mine), two groups that generally prefer Mayor Bloomberg’s faster, cheaper cleanup plan, which (because it is faster and cheaper) would allow for major development projects to proceed much more quickly.
But as [...]
Ambassador, you are spoiling our view of the Thames with this boring glass cube.
Is Kieran Timberlake’s winning design for the new American embassy in London really as bad as Lord Richard Rogers thinks? Even though the public only has access to a few renderings of each proposal (and as a judge in the competition, Rogers [...]
One city just passed a measure to spend roughly $600 million over 20 years on its bicycling infrastructure; one city is in the midst of planning similar improvements that, if fully built out, would cost an estimated $230 million.
The substantial difference between the two figures might lead you believe two things: that the $600 million [...]
Olympics may fail to regenerate east London, report warns
As construction continues at the east London site for the 2016 Olympics, evidence continues to accumulate that, per tradition, London’s Olympic legacy may include a combination of unfulfilled promises, under-funded budgets, and forlorn facilities.
A committee of the Greater London Authority just released a entirely unsurprising report in which [...]
To the good fortune of many, no. Ten years after being founded on a shoe-string with an insurgent ”design like you give a damn” mentality, Architecture for Humanity’s relief efforts in Haiti suggest that AFH is no longer a humanitarian group working on the fringes of disaster response. And even if it was never completely accurate [...]
When Buffalo made the cut as one of seven cities that are primed for an architectural renaissance, it was understood that isolated instances of demolition would inevitably play a role in its rebirth. Abandoned homes, obsolete institutional and commercial buildings, that sort of thing. But it was not anticipated that rebirth would happen due to addition by subtraction [...]
Possibly. Mattel is holding an on-line vote (here) to determine what profession Barbie will try out next. The choices: architect, environmentalist, surgeon, news anchor, and computer engineer.
And it turns out that there are many people in western New York who think the contest is an excellent opportunity to attract girls to the architecture profession. At [...]
Apart from delivering the welcome news that Manhattan’s West-Park Presbyterian Church was recently awarded landmark status, ArchPaper’s review about how the building averted demolition also alludes to a interesting - but by no means unprecedented - strategy for generating public support to destroy (inconveniently) historic structures.
Back in 2003 (before being landmarked), the West-Park congregation proposed replacing the 1880s church [...]