Architecture – Design
Panelists at this year’s ULI Singapore Conference, held virtually for the first time, discussed the challenges they face as developers with recent workplace disruptions, how to allow for working remotely while catering to the needs of stakeholders, and the lasting impact the pandemic will have on commercial real estate as a whole.
ULI will announce the winner(s) by October, and the jury will allocate a prize purse of $10,000 to one or more winning project teams.
Panelists at the 2020 ULI Arizona Trends Day discussed how they are reducing the focus on abundant parking to provide more walkable open space which can be activated. One transit-oriented development in Tempe is billing itself as “car free” as it emphasizes bike lanes, walking, and access to light rail.
Renowned real estate entrepreneur Wolfgang Egger, who founded PATRIZIA AG over 35 years ago, has won the 2020 ULI European Leader Award. Rising star Hala El Akl, a director at PLP Architecture, was named the ULI European Talent Award winner in the ULI European Leadership Awards. The awards recognize industry leaders in Europe whose contributions to urban development and real estate, along with civic and social endeavors, exemplify the spirit and mission of ULI.
First movers on using mass timber for both structural and design elements are seeing a growing wave of projects lining up before them. The regulatory environment is also adapting while the business model is expanding.
Members of ULI’s Technology and Real Estate Council discuss the value of property technologies for real estate developers and investors—technologies that offer the most for building tenants, ways of sorting out the hype surrounding property technologies, promising technologies still in the process of being realized, and other related trends.
The talk about futuristic transportation has been exciting, but reality may be more expensive—and farther off—than imagined.
In the Waterfront Toronto RFP for Quayside, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs saw a key opportunity for a demonstration project unbound by the conventions of traditional urban planning or real estate economics. This was something new: a chance to innovate at the urban scale, to develop, deploy, and measure the success of a web of new technologies in an actual neighborhood.
The Chile-based global architect–and this year’s ULI J.C. Nichols lauraeate–has made extraordinary contributions to the design of affordable housing, public spaces, infrastructure, and transportation.
Cornell Tech Campus represents a new model for higher education in the United States. Located on Roosevelt Island in New York City, the campus is designed around the idea that industry and academia should be intertwined instead of siloed. Along with academic buildings, the development includes corporate co-location, offices, a hotel, a residential tower, and conferencing and assembly areas, with space remaining to accommodate future requirements of the program.
Located in Tanjong Pagar, downtown Singapore’s historic Chinatown, Guoco Tower is the tallest tower in the city-state. It is a mixed-use tower that incorporates office space with retail, hospitality, residential, and park space. The tower serves as a connector between the historic Chinatown and the central business district (CBD), with its taller towers closer to the CBD and the shorter hotel tower nearest the historic district. It has spearheaded the creation of the Tanjong Pagar business improvement district to promote the district as a place where people want to live.
The winners, each of which demonstrates a comprehensive level of quality and a forward-looking approach to development and design, include seven projects in the United States, three in Asia, and one in Europe.
At the ULI U.K. Annual Conference, a range of speakers from across Europe provided fresh perspectives on how the real estate industry is evolving to meet the needs of both the economy and society, including use of smarter sensor technology, creation of micro-units for both housing and retail space, as well as assistance for British cities in tapping sources of capital for regeneration.
The Chile-based global architect has made extraordinary contributions to the design of affordable housing, public spaces, infrastructure, and transportation.
Public and private investment reclaimed the area’s cultural heritage. Increased tourism now challenges its authenticity.
The city of Chicago is celebrating the adoption of an extensive overhaul of its building code that has been decades in the making. The new code means some big changes ahead for the city. For ULI Chicago’s Building Reuse Initiative, it also represents a significant step forward in its work to clear a path for more building reuse throughout the city.
Each year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Energy Star program honors businesses and organizations that have made outstanding contributions to protecting the environment through superior energy achievements. Energy Star Award Winners lead their industries in the production and sale of energy-efficient products and services, and in the development and adoption of strategies that provide substantial savings in the buildings where people work and live. This year, five ULI Greenprint members achieved Energy Star Partner of the Year.
A pair of developers and ULI leaders, one trained as a lawyer and the other as a scientist, shared the paths that led them to become developers and help transform their respective cities during a recent ULI Kansas City event.
When events mega-company LiveNation approached Philadelphia design firm EwingCole about transforming the former Ajax Metal Company into a 3,000-person music venue and entertainment complex, it was a daunting proposition, said speakers at a recent ULI Philadelphia event which toured the site. Modeled off the iconic 1960s venue in San Francisco, Live Nation now operates six Fillmore-branded venues across the United States, with a seventh on the way in New Orleans.
Retailers are focusing their physical presences on offering excellent customer service and curation of products, said panelists at a ULI Colorado event in Denver. The event itself was held at the Dairy Block, an example of new retail projects that are animating both commercial and public spaces with experimental and experiential places for people to shop, eat, drink, be entertained, and find community.
The following ten projects—all built during the past five years—showcase a variety of design strategies that make inventive use of their project budgets, including a textile mill adapted to serve as apartments and supportive housing for military veterans.
A graduate student team from Cornell University, two teams from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a team from the University of Maryland have been selected as the four finalists for the 16th annual ULI Hines Student Competition, an ideas competition that provides students the opportunity to devise a comprehensive design and development scheme for a large-scale site in an urban area.
The following ten theater buildings and concert halls—all erected during the past five years—play key roles in the urban fabric.
E-commerce’s explosive growth, an emphasis on speeding up supply chain fulfillment, and robust leasing demand among traditional warehouse users are dramatically influencing the industrial property market. Several quarters of healthy absorption and strong rent growth across most U.S. markets not only have turned the cavernous boxes into commercial real estate darlings, but also are driving a warehouse construction boom that is churning out larger buildings designed to enhance rapid delivery.
When three national magazines— U.S. News & World Report, Food & Wineand Travel + Leisure— give you glowing reviews, you must be doing something right. Such is the case with Hotel Emma, a 146-room luxury hotel that’s one of the numerous fascinating facets of San Antonio’s mixed-use Pearl complex, which rose from the historic but neglected Pearl Brewery.
San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) has opened a new venue in the Strand, transforming the century-old movie theater into a nonprofit experimental performance space. The new theater acts as a watershed for the economic regeneration of San Francisco’s Central Mid-Market Neighborhood.
Internationally acclaimed architecture professor and architectural historian Vincent Scully, 2003 recipient of the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development, died November 30 at his home in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was 97.
The Chicago Riverwalk, which reused derelict infrastructure, is a 1.25-mile-long (2 km) civic space between Lake Michigan and the confluence of the Main Stem, North Branch, and South Branch of the Chicago River. This reinvention of urban life is at the heart of a new chapter for Chicago in which public space becomes a gathering ground for residents. Providing sweeping views and new connectivity, this civic amenity reunites the river and the city.
Architects must take more responsibility for their work, legendary designer Frank Gehry told a general session audience Tuesday during the 2017 ULI Fall Meeting. Architects need to “get into the fray,” Gehry said.
Flexibility—from the macro level of economies, education, and governmental impact, to the micro level of managing teams and where to put staircases in buildings—was an overarching theme throughout the ULI U.K. Annual Conference 2017. Land-use experts discussed the need to provide flexibility and adaptability in infrastructure, buildings, working practices, and management systems in a world that is changing quickly.
