 A few weeks ago, a round of renovations was completed at the de Liceu metro station (línea 3) in the Rambla, reported local transportation authority, TMB. All in all, four halls and two platforms were given a complete make-over at a total cost of 2.5 million euro. This phase of renovations took one year...
Read the rest of: "De Liceu Station Renovated"»  Flying high on the success of Vélib, a bike-rental program that turned one year old in July, Paris is thinking about launching another effort, dubbed Autolib.
According to a report by the Associated Press, this program will launch by early
2010 with a fleet of 4,000 electric cars (half of them reserved for areas outside the Périphérique)
and will allow anybody to quickly rent a car from one of 700 planned stations and drop them off at any other...
Read the rest of: "You Liked Vélib? Then You'll Love Autolib!"»  Montreal will soon get its own city-wide bike-rental system clearly modeled after Paris' Vélib. It will work almost exactly the same way as Vélib: you pick up your bike from any of the stations, pay at the station or simply swipe a card, use your bike and return it to any station you deem convenient.
The only (minor) problem is, the system is still to be named. So, the city is asking everyone's opinion. Here are the options: BIXI, Bycik, MontVélo, VélO2 and VillaVélo...
Read the rest of: "Montreal Bike Rental System Looking For Name"»
 Groupe Moniteur is a French company which helps
establish links between the construction &
development industries and the communities in
which they work. They are also the owner of
Librairie Le Moniteur - a highly specialized
bookstore a stone's throw away from the
Jardin du Luxembourg
and Théâtre du Odeon.
Filled with books on architecture, urbanism,
landscaping and interior design, Librairie Le Moniteur
is one the largest specialized bookstores in Paris
(and certainly the largest bookstore on the topic
that I've seen)...
Read the rest of: "Le Moniteur Bookstore"»  The Montreal Jazz Festival 2008 has just finished
and the city is already fevereshly preparing for the 2009 edition. You might think this is an overstatement - after all, there's almost a year left! But in fact, in this short year, one of the most important concert spaces, the plaza between Place des Arts and Rue de Bleury will have to be completely redone.
The models and renderings for the new Place des Festivals were
made public a few days ago and the city's mayor took the opportunity to
assure everybody the project is "on schedule, on budget"...
Read the rest of: "Montreal to Get New Plaza in 2009"»  Few makeover projects have been handled with such a degree of
architectural audacity as the recent transformation of a disused
electric station in Madrid's Las Huertas district into a cultural center
La Caixa Forum - Madrid.
The Swiss architects
Herzog
&
de Meuron
not only gutted the building,
removing most of its interiors and changing its shape and size by
conspicuously adding a layer of several floors, they also literally
lifted it from its foundation, giving the whole structure a tense
“suspended” look.
The resulting space now houses a cultural center with its own exhibition
space, a large auditorium, a bookstore and a top-floor café...
Read the rest of: "Caixa Forum - Madrid"»  Retractable roofs have been architects' idée fixe for decades.
Moshe Safdie once wrote up an idea for
entire neighborhoods shielded by such roofs during the harsh season and
open to the elements when it's nice outside.
The path to these dreams' realization has been fraught with difficulties,
from budget overruns to full-blown engineering disasters like
Montreal's Olympic Stadium (after a decade of efforts to fix it, the
city finally gave up and installed a fixed roof in its place. It won't
be moving any time soon).
Nevertheless, projects like that pop up again and again. And so do the
difficulties. The latest example is Santiago Calatrava's project for the
Lower Manhattan Transportation Hub. Among the project's many innovative
features was a retractable roof. But will there be one in the final
implementation?
Read the rest of: "Calatrava's Transit Hub Roof Gets Stuck"»  A few weeks ago, l'EPAD - the government body
responsible for developing Paris' La Défense
district - announced the completion of an
international tender for the construction of
a new high-rise tower (La Tour Signal). The project went
to Ateliers Jean Nouvel.
The revered French architect (who is the
winner of this year's Pritzker Prize in architecture)
beat several well-known colleagues including
Jacques Ferrier Architectures,
Foster+Partners, Studio Libeskind,
and Wilmotte et Associés...
Read the rest of: "Jean Nouvel Will Build La Tour Signal"» |
