Daniel Libeskind’s Contemporary Jewish Museum: And yet the project also shows Libeskind working in a more restrained, even muted, mode than ever before. In part this is due to various delays and budget problems that have plagued the project, which got its start in 1998, well before Libeskind prevailed in Lower Manhattan. (The San Francisco commission was his first in North America.) In part it’s due to the tight urban site occupied by the museum, which opens onto a new public plaza across the street from Yerba Buena Gardens and down the block from Mario Botta’s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Whatever the explanation, the generally happy architectural results are not just surprising but encouraging. At ground zero, Libeskind’s designs were crippled and eventually rendered meaningless by compromise. Here they’ve been enriched by it. [LA Times]
Comcast Center, Phila.’s tallest building, is clean-lined and dignified: It’s hard to talk about Comcast without mentioning the Cira Centre, the only other sizable office tower built here in the last 17 years. The petite Cira is more exhilarating, sculptural and satisfying as architecture, though it, too, has some blank moments. But Comcast Center blows Cira away where it counts: at its intersection with the city. It’s still early, but Comcast’s plaza cafe and concourse mall promise to become a bustling urban nexus. How typically Philadelphian that the best feature of the city’s tallest building should be hidden below ground. [Philadelohia Inquirer]
Welcome to the EcoMosque: A new mosque will be opening this month in Levenshulme, Manchester. Nothing unusual in that, except that al-Markaz al-Najmi Mosque is eco-friendly. It is built with recycled materials and generates part of its energy from solar panels. British mosques are not re nowned for their friendliness by any barometer, so this is an event worth celebrating. [New Statesman]
Creating Street-Level Intimacy at NYU: As New York University has grown in recent years, and frenetically gobbled up space to keep some semblance of pace with that growth, a dilemma has emerged: How to forge the visual identity every university craves? [NY Sun]
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