Set on a seven-acre (three ha) campus directly across from city hall, the public arts complex contains galleries and other exhibit spaces, four theaters, studios, classrooms, and administrative offices, as well as a large outdoor plaza and passageway. The project celebrates the essence of the Southwest while offering comprehensive performance and visual arts programming and education and creating an economic development engine for downtown Mesa.
In the island republic of Singapore, 90 percent of the 4 million population live in apartments. And foreigners may purchase only condominiums—they are barred from owning detached houses. Given this situation, and given the popularity of private outdoor space in multifamily buildings in this tropical nation, it is no wonder that Glentrees has been wildly successful with its offerings of two- to four-bedroom condominiums, each with the option of a small garden, even at the fifth story.
For more than 50 years, a bluff-top site offering some of California’s most spectacular ocean views was a gated trailer park for 268 mobile homes. The 30-acre (12 ha) site was not only an eyesore filled with increasingly dilapidated structures; it also prevented much-desired public access to the beach. Although as many as 37 developers tried to develop the land over the years, the community consistently opposed these plans, even after the mobile home park closed in 1996. Locals knew the oceanfront site as “Treasure Island,” after the movie that was filmed there in 1934.
Belmar, a 22-block downtown in the making, exemplifies the potential for transforming post–World War II bedroom suburbs into more diverse, compact, sustainable, pedestrian-oriented, and transit-oriented communities. When completed, it promises to be a model for the redefinition of suburban communities that have been buffeted by inexorable growth over the past several decades.
Thirty-five years after it was built, the Prudential Center had an established identity as a large-scale, mixeduse complex of office, retail, hotel, and residential buildings in Boston’s Back Bay, the city’s second-largest office district, in addition to being the site of Boston’s convention center. Yet the “Pru,” as it was locally known, had never been able to attract key downtown office tenants, nor had it achieved rent levels comparable to those of downtown buildings. It also was suffering the consequences of a 1960s site plan that walled it off from the surrounding urban streetscape.
The new 35-story headquarters of the Agbar Group, a Spanish multinational holding company, stands out like a lighthouse against the Barcelona skyline. Agbar Tower (Torre Agbar) is the cornerstone for new development in the new “22@ district,” an emerging neighborhood that is transforming 198 hectares (489 ac) of Barcelona’s 19th-century industrial Poblenou district into a 21st-century mixed-use district for the global knowledge-based industry. Its location alone, at the 22@ district’s apex closest to Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes—the remarkable double-decker roundabout at the intersection of three of Barcelona’s major boulevards (Gran Via, Diagonal, and Meridiana avenues)—accords Agbar Tower a landmark status. The multicolored, bullet-shaped tower contains 50,903 square meters (547,915 sf) of space, including 33,210 square meters (357,469 sf) of office space in 32 above-ground stories and 17,693 square meters (190,446 sf) of parking, an auditorium, a service area, and a loading bay on three subterranean levels. The total investment cost was €120 million.
The new Pueblo del Sol, containing 377 rental apartments and 93 for-sale attached houses, replaces a 685-unit public housing project, Aliso Village, that was built in 1942 and condemned in 1998. It was not so much that the buildings were structurally unsound, as that uncontrollable drug gangs made them unsafe. Located in predominantly Latino East Los Angeles, Aliso Village was part of Pico Aliso—the largest public housing complex west of the Mississippi and home to 11 active street gangs.
If the physical archetype for traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) in the United States is colonial Charleston, Savannah, or Annapolis, the holistic prototype has always been Chautauqua. Founded in 1874 on Lake Chautauqua in southwestern New York state by two Methodist ministers as a summer retreat for Sunday-school teachers, it has grown to be ecumenical in its religious, cultural, educational, and recreational programs, and it has grown in size as well, from 129 acres (52 ha) at the beginning to 600 acres (243 ha) today. “Chautauqua,” a Seneca word meaning “one has taken the fish out there,” soon came to mean leisure time adult education with a somewhat evangelistic but nondenominational fervor, and today it means, more broadly, a retreat from daily life for reflection, discussion, and instruction in the company of like-minded people.
Melbourne has always felt the need for a grand civic square, which was promised—but never delivered—in the 1837 plan for the new town on the River Yarra. Federation Square finally meets this need, creates a new gateway to the heart of the city, and completes the family of welcoming institutions—the Flinders Street train station and St. Paul’s cathedral—that occupy the intersection of Flinders and Swanston Streets. On the southeast corner of this intersection, Federation Square replaces the Jolimont railyard that served Flinders Street station and an offensive eyesore, the “Gas and Fuel” towers—land uses that additionally created a barrier between the center of the city and the Yarra.
No single building complex since Rockefeller Center has had the opportunity to exert such a positive impact on New York City. In July 1998, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority selected the development team—a partnership of the Related Companies, LP, and Apollo Real Estate Advisors, LP—to redevelop the approximately 3.4-acre (1.38 ha) site of the demolished New York Coliseum on Columbus Circle in the heart of Manhattan. The development team put together a dynamic and synergistic mix of components, generous public spaces, and breathtaking views to capitalize on this exceptional location that is the gateway to midtown Manhattan, the Upper West Side, and Central Park. Time Warner Center is a city within a building more than it is a building within a city.