The Jackie Robinson Museum honors the legacy of Jackie Robinson. The museum, the city's first to primarily focus on the Civil Rights Movement, opened in 2022 after more than fourteen years of planning and construction. The museum's collection includes more than four thousand artifacts, most from the Robinson family's own collection, highlighted by Robinson’s original National Baseball Hall of Fame plaque.

These showcase Robinson’s experience in the Negro Leagues in 1945 and his season with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ AAA farm team, in 1946.

The Waldorf Astoria, New York&nbsp;

Jackie Robinson Museum

Conceived in 1999 by AEG as the heart of the international entertainment capital’s downtown revitalization, the $2.5B L.A. LIVE boasts 5 million square feet of entertainment, hospitality and office amenities. Anchored by STAPLES Center arena, L.A. LIVE’s mix of multi-size entertainment venues annually bring over 600 live sports, concerts, major award telecasts, family shows and corporate events to its 35-acre campus. Capitalizing on its adjacency to a major freeway junction, proximity to mass transit, its vibrant streetscape and high footfall, L.A. LIVE’s unique signage and LED features drive unprecedented sponsorship revenues. Two luxury hotels with 1,001 hotel rooms and spacious conference and banqueting facilities have substantially increased bookings in the adjacent Los Angeles Convention Center. L.A. LIVE’s economic success extends well beyond its boundaries as it also boasts an array of public benefits, including a one-acre plaza and an extensive community benefits program while stimulating additional private development into Los Angeles’ urban regeneration.

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel & Residences and JW Marriott at L.A. Live

Gensler recently set out to create a new home for their Los Angeles architecture office that would embody the values of the firm as well as support and enhance the way their employees work. After a thorough search for the new office location, Gensler made the decision to move from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles. 

With the goal of creating a transformative environment that would serve as both a workplace of the future and as a design lab for their clients, Gensler was seeking atypical space. The firm selected a building designed in 1971 for a bank branch at City National Plaza that had sat vacant for 9 years. Once selected, the team had only five months to complete construction of the TI build-out. 

The design philosophy of the new office was to create a highly open, flexible, and transparent workspace focused around a 3-story daylight filled atrium with a connecting feature stair. A number of collaborative spaces are clustered throughout the office and are expressed as distinct, identifiable objects. These hubs provide effective places for various work modes to coexist. The space is designed to be a showcase for the use of a wide variety of materials, furniture, finishes, and details. This helps to inspire designers on a daily basis and creates a diverse, colorful, and varied environment. 

The team was committed to sustainability, and the office achieved LEED-CI platinum certification, with 86 points (80 required for Platinum). There are passive radiant cooling sails and advanced lighting controls throughout the open office that significantly reduce energy use. Chilled water is supplied via copper coils to the sails to activate their metal surface temperature, providing cooling through convection and thermal radiation. This system is more energy efficient than traditional systems and takes up less ceiling plenum space. The state of the art lighting controls reduce energy consumption, improve comfort, and increase productivity. Other sustainable features include Air Handling Units with improved performance and an integrated 30’x50’ skylight with operable windows for smoke evacuation and temperature control. The skylight has high performing glass that allows 25% of natural daylight to pass through.


Gensler Los Angeles

Originally a 10-story building at 219 East 42nd Street

33 story building at 235 East 42nd Street, designed in the International Style

Converted for residential use with 1,600 apartments and expanding 219 East 42nd Street to 29 stories.

The building was evacuated after reports of structural deterioration, after two columns began to buckle. Falling bricks from the facade were reported. This prompted fears of a collapse and required part of the additions to be rebuilt.

Image of Gensler plans for conversion by Streetsense&nbsp;

Pfizer Building

 Located on existing Columbia property on Haven Avenue between West 171st and West 172nd Streets, the 100,000SF Medical and Graduate Education Building will be used by students from all four CUMC schools (P&amp;S, Nursing, Dental Medicine and the Mailman School of Public Health), and the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The &ldquo;Study Cascade&rdquo; is the principle design strategy of the building - a network of social and study spaces distributed across oversize landings along an intricate 14-story stair. The Study Cascade creates a single interconnected space the height of the building, stretching from the ground floor lobby to the top, and conducive to collaborative, team-based learning and teaching. The &ldquo;Study Cascade&rdquo; interiors are complemented by a distributed network of south-facing outdoor &ldquo;rooms&rdquo; and terraces that are clad with cement panels and wood. The &ldquo;Study Cascade&rdquo; is also an urban gesture that, with its transparent fa&ccedil;ade, aims to become a visual landmark at the northern limit of Columbia University`s medical campus. 

Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center 

 Located in the heart of Las Vegas Boulevard, Crystals is the 500,000-square-foot retail and entertainment space, which is the connective center of the MGM MIRAGE City Center project. It is a vertical city within a city that includes 2,400 private residences, two boutique hotels, and a 61-story resort casino. The crystalline &amp; metal-clad fa&ccedil;ade signal to visitors well in advance of arrival that Crystals is not a traditional retail environment. An entryway into the retail area from the Strip will draw pedestrians into the public arcade, covered by a spiraling roof structure. From the interior, the roof`s dramatic angles and skylights become a backdrop for the luxury retail and dining it houses which include Louis Vuitton, TIFFANY &amp; CO., and Bulgari as well as concept restaurants from Wolfgang Puck and Todd English. The public spaces allow for a variety of urban experiences: a water feature at the entry, cafes and a grand staircase leading to Casino Square at the end of the arcade, animating the entire space. The design and construction of Crystals employed the most environmentally conscious practices and materials. In November 2009 it was announced that Crystals achieved LEED&reg; Gold Core &amp; Shell certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), making it the world`s largest retail district to receive this level of recognition. 

Crystals at City Center

The Broad features two floors of gallery space and The Broad Art Foundation lending library. The building's carved underside shapes the lobby below and public circulation routes. Its top surface is the floor of the third-floor galleries. The vault is enveloped by the “veil,” a porous, honeycomb-like exterior structure that spans across the block-long third-floor gallery and provides filtered natural daylight.Dubbed “the veil and the vault,” the museum’s design merges the two key programs of the building: public exhibition space and the archive/storage that will support The Broad Art Foundation’s lending activities. Rather than relegate the archive/storage to secondary status, “the vault” plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit. Its heavy opaque mass is always in view, hovering midway in the building. Its carved underside shapes the lobby below and public circulation routes. Its top surface is the floor of the exhibition space. The vault is enveloped on all sides by the “veil,” an airy, cellular exoskeleton structure that spans across the block-long gallery and provides filtered natural daylight. The museum’s “veil” lifts at the corners, welcoming visitors into an active lobby with a bookshop and espresso bar. The public is then drawn upwards via escalator, tunneling through the archive, arriving onto an acre of column-free exhibition space bathed in diffuse light. This 24’ high space is fully flexible to be shaped into galleries according to curatorial needs. Departure from the exhibition space is a return trip through the vault via a winding stair that offers glimpses into the vast holdings of the collection.

The Broad

 The world headquarters of the educational publisher Scholastic Inc. provides new office and retail space in a ten-story building on the edge of SoHo. Designed in collaboration with Aldo Rossi, and posthumously completed, the Scholastic Building honors the architectural traditions of its landmarked SoHo neighborhood in a contemporary architectural vocabulary. The building`s Broadway fa&ccedil;ade, in steel, terra-cotta and stone, takes its inspiration from the classical organization of the elegant 19th-century facades that line the street. A second fa&ccedil;ade, equal in scale and dimension, expresses a more utilitarian and industrial character of Mercer Street that it faces. 

Scholastic, Inc. 

 Architect Morris Adjmi talks about Scholastic, Inc. building. The world headquarters of the educational publisher Scholastic Inc. provides new office and retail space in a ten-story building on the edge of SoHo. Designed in collaboration with Aldo Rossi, and posthumously completed, the Scholastic Building honors the architectural traditions of its landmarked SoHo neighborhood in a contemporary architectural vocabulary. The building&rsquo;s Broadway fa&ccedil;ade, in steel, terra-cotta and stone, takes its inspiration from the classical organization of the elegant 19th-century facades that line the street. A second fa&ccedil;ade, equal in scale and dimension, expresses a more utilitarian and industrial character of Mercer Street that it faces. 

Goodwin's inclination towards the traditional Beaux-Arts style and Stone's more modern approach came together to create a building of six stories made of sleek white marble and a type of insulated glass called Thermolux. This glass helped in diffusing the light in the galleries of the museum.The building stands true to its vision of popularising and democratizing modern art, with modern and contemporary architecture styles blending together with international styles. The sculpture garden of the museum was designed by the MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. and MoMA architecture curator John McAndrew.

In the late 1990s, Yoshio Taniguchi, a popular Japanese architect, submitted his design for renovating MoMA architecture. After its completion in 2004, it was reopened to the public on its 75th birthday.Taniguchi added granite and glass facades to the entrance of the MoMA museum. He added minimal solutions to the museum’s design while maintaining its modernist roots. Yoshio restored the International style building and enlarged the Sculpture Garden. The architect achieved a minimal aesthetic look with the help of precision. Glass panes were added that surrounded the Sculpture Garden and the curtains walls were detached from the floors to ensure that the glass doesn’t deflect when there are lots of visitors. Taniguchi’s design made the garden the focus while the other buildings acted as the side characters. His design allowed visitors to enjoy NYC’s streets and skyline as they passed through the galleries. Several windows in the galleries and the stairways allow the visitors a look outside. Visitors would find contemporary works on the ground floor and older artworks on the higher floors. A huge sky-lit space for temporary exhibitions was made available on the top floor. An atrium was also added that connects the lobby to the Sculpture Garden. KPF was executive architect for this restoration, renovation and expansion, which included work on the MoMA’s galleries, east wing and education building. KPF restored the original curved canopy and courtyard, added theater, library, and office spaces, and increased the exhibition area by 30%.

A two-phased renovation, the first part involved the MoMA architecture and new walls whereas the second part focused on the new art that is getting installed on those new walls.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Barry Bergdoll, Phillip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA talks about the intellectual origins of the museum building and the development of the sculpture garden. 

Goldman Sachs opened its new headquarters, designed by Harry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed &amp; Partners. &nbsp;It was the final building to complete Battery Park City.

The building has 2.1 million square feet of space by Harry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed, in association with Adamson Associates International for Goldman Sachs. The gently curved building is 43 stories tall, measuring 740 feet above the sidewalks of the World Financial Center. Among other environmentally noteworthy features are its under-floor air distribution system. Some 11,000 people will be working in the building when fully occupied. There is a freestanding 350-seat oval auditorium on the ground floor.

200 West Street (Goldman Sachs Headquarters)

SFO International Airport 

George Bush Intercontinental Airport

Gensler is an architecture, design, and planning firm with 53 offices and 6000+ professionals across the Americas, Europe, Greater China, and APME.

The International Center of Photography (ICP) enlisted Gensler to realize its 20-year goal of unifying its museum and school under one roof. As the cultural anchor of Essex Crossing, Gensler created a compelling visitor journey that supports ICP’s exhibitions, education programs, and public events. The Center features galleries, a research library, and the school. A bookshop, café, and event spaces add to the expansive space, which when combined, creates a dynamic destination for the community.

The 2000 Avenue of the Stars building is a redevelopment of the former ABC Entertainment Center complex in Century City and consists of 720,000 square feet of class A office space, 45,000 square feet of restaurant and amenity retail, a 10,000-square-foot cultural program, and a redesigned open park space four acres in size. The entire development is located above a six-level subterranean parking garage and is part of a super block that includes the Minoru Yamasaki-designed Century Plaza Towers. The redeveloped property connects the site with Century City—the Century City Mall, the Century Plaza Hotel, and nearby office buildings—in a way it never has before. 

In keeping with the progressive vision for the project, an important mandate for the building design was to incorporate energy-saving features and mitigate any environmental impacts. The team performed an energy consumption analysis in coordination with the developer and the environmental agencies to evaluate potential environmental impact. The studies compared the projected utility usage for the new building against the history of utility consumption of the old buildings, demonstrating an energy savings of 16%. The building utilizes water saving features that will provide 20% savings in annual water consumption. Although the client chose not to pursue LEED certification, the 2000 Avenue of the Stars building envelope is, without a doubt, the most energy-efficient design in the Century City area due to double-glazed, low-E glass with a shading coefficient of 0.34.

A 30-foot grade difference between the base of the new building and the Century Plaza Towers provided space for the four-acre Centerpiece Park. The park slopes down from 2000 Avenue of the Stars to Century Plaza Towers, but the final grade is 5 percent, which provides a comfortable transition that meets ADA compliance. The new green space is an inviting destination for the professionals who work in the surrounding office buildings, their visitors and the community at large. A project goal from start was to create a community asset, not simply an outdoor cafeteria. The area has proven successful, packed at lunchtime with workers from all three projects on the block, as well as visitors from nearby buildings.


Replacing two tired Santa Monica motels, both within walking distance of the beach, the Shore Hotel completes the profile of the city’s scenic oceanfront street with a contemporary design that adds 84 moderately priced rooms to the market.
The 90,000-square-foot project between Colorado Avenue and Broadway comprises 164 guest rooms in two buildings. The buildings are connected by a bridge that spans the mid--block alley between Ocean Avenue and Second Street, allowing guests to securely access all areas. The larger building, the structure closest to the beach, is U-shaped with a large, elevated public courtyard that spills onto Ocean Avenue.
The courtyard provides views to the beach, and improves the experience for pedestrians accessing or passing the project, as well as relate to the city’s public garden across the street. A stainless steel trellis over the street-side portion of the courtyard unifies the geometry of the main building and creates a sense of place, an outdoor room.

The horizontal, four-story hotel is clad in stainless steel on its west elevation and features floor-to-ceiling glass and glass balcony railings. The minimalist design is accented with wooden louvers arranged horizontally to screen sunlight and bring warmth to the exterior. Those touches provide a concentrated aesthetic punch. 
The design team went to great lengths to provide as many ocean views as possible from room balconies. Canted walls on balconies not directly facing the ocean improve views and provide privacy for guests. Rooms in the east building that face Second Street will have their own views – into the newly renovated Santa Monica Place outdoor mall.

Additional features include a 750-square-foot meeting room, as well as the addition of 294 subterranean parking spaces, a bonus in parking-starved Santa Monica.


The new LAPD Memorial for Fallen Officers is situated on the public plaza to the east of the new LAPD Headquarters facility.  It is located in this public plaza to form a threshold between the larger more formal space for police ceremonies that face the City Hall to the north, and an informal community garden for congregation and contemplation that faces St. Vibiana’s church to the south. 

It was determined that the most appropriate form to delineate the threshold on this site was a wall, which also has a long tradition in the formal history of memorials.  Thus the team, in its search to transform one’s experience of a wall, looked at the lineage of wall type memorials, as well as the evolution of the joinery of walls.  This yielded the desire to create a memorial wall that would perceptually change from a solid to a porous condition in recognition with the role of the police, both opaque as protectors and transparent as servants.

When contemplating the appropriate material for the memorial, the team focused on the object most sacred to the LAPD: their brass badge. Thus each fallen officer is commemorated with his/her name water jet cut into a brass plate; their aggregation and layered articulation designed to perceptually be held together by light.  More than 2,000 brass plates were used and designed to appear from afar as a solid wall of lit brass.  Moving closer, light captured within the wall can reflect and refract between the plates to create the effect of the commemorated having been liberated from the wall, each plate seemingly suspended in light and air.  The role of light conceptually advances to serve the traditional role of mortar, binding the wall together, while also fulfilling its traditional role as a giver of hope.


Known at the time as the Great Police Riot, was a conflict which occurred in front of New York City Hall between the recently-dissolved New York Municipal Police and the newly-formed Metropolitan Police. Arising over New York City Mayor Fernando Wood's appointment of Charles Devlin over Daniel Conover for the position of city street commissioner, amid rumors that Devlin purchased the office for $50,000 from Wood, Municipal police battled Metropolitan officers attempting to arrest Mayor Wood.Two arrest warrants had been issued against the mayor following an altercation between him and Conover when arriving at City Hall to assume his office. The situation was resolved only with the intervention of the New York State Militia under Major General Charles W. Sandford.

Located in the heart of the Meatpacking district in NYC, Samsung 837 combines art, fashion, technology, and sport in unprecedented ways. It’s not a store, but a new kind of place filled with ideas, experiences, and Samsung’s cutting edge devices.

The building’s physical form integrated with the city grid informed the interior design as well as the materials palette. Expansive and inspiring views contributed to a visual theme and were maximized with long site lines, opening up dynamic spatial opportunities. The concept of the palette honors the industrial background of New York’s gritty beginnings.

Each floor features a divergent approach to programming, pushing business units to break their patterns in daily routines and interactions. Eclectic furniture—grouped to support the programmatic diversity—underscores a curated approach to the design. Custom designed and locally fabricated millwork provides ambient porous edges to the activity wedges and extends the industrial language of the base building.

Samsung 837 is where anyone can try out virtual reality, take part in interactive art installations, and see a larger-than-life, three-story screen. It’s home to live music performances, exclusive screenings, and radio recordings.

The space was designed by WonderWall Inc. and features an amphitheater area, VR tunnel, DJ booth, customer service and workshop area, and café.

Artist Janet Echelman transforms the terminal with fictional nature that subtly engages viewers with real and imagined natural forces. Her sculpture installation cuts three round skylights into the ceiling, from which descend delicate layers of translucent colored netting to create three voluptuous volumetric forms. A series of shaded outlines below are embedded into the terrazzo floor, reflecting the precise shadows that would occur on the summer solstice if the sun could penetrate through the roof. During the day, sun streams through the skylights to cast real shadows that interplay with the fictional shadows in the floor. At night, the artist’s program of colored lighting makes the sculpture glow from indigo to purple, magenta to red-orange. Computer-programmed mechanized air-flow animates the fluidly-moving sculpture at different intervals throughout the day, as if the wind could magically flow through solid walls.

The artist achieved the sculpture’s physical presence by braiding fibers and knotting twine into sculptural netting suspended from powder-coated steel armatures. Despite their large scale, more than 120 feet in circumference for a single form, her sculpture is experienced as ephemeral and weightless. Visually, the sculpture evokes the contours and colors of cloud formations over the Bay and hints at the silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge. Aesthetically, the sculpture looks both backwards and forwards, drawing its color from the heyday of psychedelic music, the Summer of Love, and San Francisco's prominence in the beat poetry movement, while also referencing the contemporary bay area as a hub of innovation and interconnectivity for the world of technology.

Like luminous wings of a bird, or an exotic flying ship, the sculpture will play beneath the skylight. In daylight it will project the sun’s rays in colored swaths onto the floor and reflect moving images over the ceiling and walls. At night, programmed lighting will create mysteriously changing light paintings. From different vantage points various compositions will reveal themselves, offering new views as travelers move through the airport. Each visit will produce fresh experiences depending on time of day and year.

International Center of Photography

AIANY

Gensler

Different members of the Gensler design team talk about 2000 Avenue of the Stars, a redevelopment of the ABC Entertainment Center in Century City, Los Angeles.

Video for the audio is available on the Gensler website, here: 
http://www.gensler.com/#viewpoint/videos/1

Fong Lui of Gensler discusses the Shore Hotel project located in Santa Monica.

Travelers share their opinions about the artwork about Janice Echelman's sculpture in the San Francisco Airport, Every Beating Second

Gensler

SITES