Architecture studio AECOM has unveiled designs for a subterranean visitor screening centre as part of US president Donald Trump‘s revamp of the White House in Washington DC.
The proposed White House visitor screening centre would be built under Sherman Park
Designed by AECOM, the 33,000-square-foot (3,065-square-metre) facility would be almost entirely underground. It would be connected to a single-storey, above-ground structure built alongside East Executive Avenue.
Visitors to the White House would enter the facility via a ramp on the south of the park, before progressing through security checks underground.
The building would be almost entirely underground
A tunnel leading to escalators would connect the underground facility to the above-ground building, with visitors emerging within the White House’s security perimeter.
The above-ground building will be designed “based upon existing security booth vocabulary used throughout the campus”. It will be wrapped in columns, with limestone cladding and a sloped metal roof.
The two structures would replace temporary tents and trailers that have been used by the US Secret Service for visitor screening since 2005.
Screening would take place underground, with escalators connecting to the above-ground building
According to the planning documents, the General William Tecumseh Sherman Monument, which dominates the park, will remain in place and any trees damaged will be replaced.
“Most of the proposed structure is intentionally positioned below grade within the park’s west quadrant to reduce visual impact and to avoid infrastructure conflicts in the southeast corner of the park,” said the project summary.
“Landscape restoration, including new tree plantings, will be provided within all impacted zones to reinstate and enhance the park’s character.”
The White House intends to have the proposed screening centre operational by July 2028, with construction planned to begin later this year.
The proposals are set to be discussed by the National Capital Planning Commission at a meeting on 2 April.
The above-ground building will be wrapped in columns
Architecture studio AECOM is also part of the team designing the extension to the White House, which is set to replace the East Wing and is visible in the renders of the screening facility.
Architecture studio OMA has mirrored the programme of the SANAA-designed New Museum in Manhattan with an extension that has a unique profile and facade treatment.
OMA’s project, its first public building in the city, doubles the footprint of the contemporary art museum to 120,000 square feet (11,000 square metres), adding much-needed social and gallery space and additional egress for the expanding number of visitors.
OMA New York principal Shohei Shigematsu said the conditions for the expansion were unusual, given the relative contemporaneity of the SANAA building and referenced the idea of a “twin or pair” in his studio’s design.
“We were very careful in actually understanding what it means to build contemporary against contemporary,” Shigematsu told Dezeen.
“We actually looked at the idea of the pairs, or that notion of the pair.”
A massive staircase fills the atrium at the front of the building. Photo by Jason Keen
He recalled a set of reference images, such as that of a performance of Marina Abramovic and her then-husband Ulay standing naked facing each other in a doorway for in 1977 and of the fixed-service structures that support an orbital rocket pre-launch.
“I often joked, when I had to present this to the board members, that finding the love of your life is one of the most difficult things, right?” he said. “So this is what we were doing here.”
“It’s highly connected, but highly individual too,” he continued.
The metal-mesh staircase was painted on the inside to produce a moire effect. Photo by Jason O’Rear.
Scrapping the initial notion of maintaining the facade of the pre-existing, mid-rise industrial building, OMA designed a building that resembles a pentagon in section. It has a steep recess at ground level and a deep setback above tapering towards a central point, where it “kisses” the facade of the SANAA building.
From the north, the structure is mostly obscured by the taller SANAA building, but it extends deeper into the block.
“It’s actually quite surprising, because from outside, it’s not so screaming for presence, but as you enter, you feel the depth,” said Shigematsu.
Gaps in the facade near the top allow views out and up. Photo by Jason O’Rear.
The faceted facade was clad in laminated glass with metal mesh that recalls the aluminium mesh of the SANAA building, while remaining distinct.
Immediately inside the street-facing walls, an atrium between the galleries and the facade allowed for a winding staircase that connects at each landing to the levels of both buildings.
It nearly doubles the gallery, programming and office space for the New Museum. Photo by Jason Keen
At the fourth level, there is a soaring columnless space with an auditorium that faces a glass-filled void in the facade, which has views out into the Bowery.
Shigematsu referred to the staircase atrium as a “social and visible condenser” that allows the whole museum complex to become more “open and communicative”.
The office space at the top of the building was referred to as its “brain” by OMA. Photo by Jason Keen
Shigematsu said the vernacular front-facade fire escape played into the articulation of the stair.
Further voids in the facade hold balconies and additional panes of glass without the metal mesh form stripes running down the side of the building, giving the building a sense of publicness and transparency.
Outdoor balconies feature along the building’s upper slope. photo by Jason O’Rear.
OMA’s building sits at the junction of a three-way intersection and faces Prince Street, acting as a terminus. The entry into the newly programmed entrance extends the street into the building and upwards, up the new staircase.
At ground level, the slope of the OMA facade was articulated again at the north side, folding inwards. This exposed more of the SANAA building, leading the team to bring in additional material to extend the original facade.
This double fold created a triangular exterior courtyard. Next to it, the primary entrance into the museum leads into a lobby that includes the unticketed ground floors of both structures.
A massive portal door leads from the original lobby into the ground floor of the extension, which centres around a concealed restaurant, clad in expanded cork painted with silver leaf, blending it into the metal ceilings and polycarbonate-clad elevator core.
It sits deeper in the block but also lower than the neighbouring SANAA building. Photo by Jason O’Rear
The restaurant acts as an enclosed courtyard within the lobby, and the plan is for it to be accessible via the lobby as well as via Freeman Alley at the back of the structure after the museum has closed. Inside, it features walls and ceiling also clad in cork, this time left unpainted.
It has textured glass that obscures the interior of the restaurant from the lobby, but allows restaurant goers to look out.
In order to allow for free movement on the ground level, the ticketing was pushed to the stairwells at the front of the building.
The extension terminates a street. Photo by Jason Keen
The winding stairway crisscrosses the atrium at severe angles and is clad with more mesh, painted green on the inside to create a moire effect. Exposed I-beams and highly polished meshed floors create a collage of industrial materials.
New galleries echo the relatively simple format of the original, with high ceilings and white walls.
The gallery spaces run for the first three storeys, while above level four, incubator spaces and offices form what the studio called the “brain” of the building, conceptually and formally.
The faceted facade creates a triangular exterior courtyard. Photo by Jason Keen
New Museum artistic director Massimo Gioni referred to the prismatic quality of the new building, saying it reflects the non-collecting museum’s mission to “refract” artistic messages from all over the world.
For Shigematsu, the build represents a culmination of arts and culture work in New York for OMA and recalls the studio’s other recent museum, the faceted glass extension for Buffalo AKG Art Museum. He was also part of the failed bid for a Whitney Museum extension in 2001.
“It took 20 years, but gave me the kind of holistic understanding of the ecosystem of art,” he said.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be able to do a building of this calibre in Manhattan. So we are very blessed.”
OMA’s founder, Rem Koolhaas has long theorised about New York, with his 1979 book Delirious New York being a significant work of architectural theory.
Local architecture studio Edward Peck Design has proposed adding a translucent canopy to the Chicago Bears’ stadium to convince the NFL team to stay in the city.
Edward Peck Design designed the concept stadium to meet the desires of the team for a next-generation stadium, with a roof, expanded seating and an entertainment complex.
The studio created the concept to demonstrate how the team could redevelop its current site and stay in the city.
Following pushback from conservationists contributed to the Chicago Bears abandoning plans to build a Manica Architecture-designed stadium slightly south of the current one, the team has seriously considered sites in the neighbouring state of Indiana.
“The Bears should stay”
“We’re not looking to be the architect of the next Bears stadium, but everyone that you talk to in Chicago says the Bears should stay,” studio founder Edward Peck told Dezeen. “They need to stay. This is the heart of Chicago.”
“They’re saying that’s not possible at Soldier Field,” said Peck. “I have an anonymous client who is a lifetime Bears fan who said, ‘I don’t believe them.'”
Edward Peck Design has designed a concept to urge the Chicago Bears to stay in the city
Peck, who is an expert in ETFE installation and has worked for architecture and engineering studios such as Helmut Jahn and Thornton Tomasetti, set out to show the feasibility of expanding the current Soldier Field complex.
This includes suspending a massive ETFE canopy over the field to enclose it, building on top of the modern 2002 addition to the 1920s stadium.
Around the complex, Peck and his team proposed a deck that would elevate an entertainment complex over the adjacent railyards and Lake Shore Drive.
“The concept of decking over Lake Shore Drive and the rail station has been done,” said Peck. “Millennium Park is a result of that.”
“And so it’s part of the language of Chicago now, and the future is to start to consider things like that,” he continued.
On top of the decking would be a series of 50 to 65-storey skyscrapers with entertainment programmes on the lower floors. According to Peck, the skyscrapers would generate revenue for the city, while the ground floors could generate the team’s desired revenue.
The district would also serve the adjacent museum district and convention centre, as well as the mass of residential buildings and office structures in the southern part of Downtown Chicago.
“You have this entertainment district that needs to succeed the other 357 days of the year that there isn’t a football game, right? And so to do that, you have to have a critical mass of people,” said Peck.
“Now they are considering the stadium in Aurora, which is like 30 miles north of the city, and in Indiana, which is like 30 miles southeast of the city – those locations are not going to be able to support it.”
“I’m fearful of what this would do to this city”
Peck’s team has pointed to both the Shed complex in Hudson Yards in New York and Miami’s stadium renovation as precedents for this type of project.
Surrounding the stadium itself would be a plaza as well as additional restaurants and amenities, all covered by a “green carpet” that would reduce the amount of exposed concrete and blend the expanded complex into the park.
Peck also imagines a high-speed water taxi mooring to service the stadium.
He conceded that the deck and skyscraper portion could exceed a billion dollars in investment, but that the reuse of the stadium could allow for that portion to be built with as much as a 60 per cent reduction from a ground-up build.
“The goal is to open this dialogue and have the Bears be challenged a little bit,” said Peck on his ambition for the proposal.
“This was a proof of concept. None of this stuff hasn’t been done before. It’s, think, a creative way of looking at how you can accomplish the Bear’s mission.”
The concept includes decking to support skyscrapers over Lake Shore Dr
On top of that, Peck said that moving the Chicago Bears from Soldier Field would throw into question the financial future of the historic stadium.
“The fact is, if you have an enclosed stadium a quarter mile away, or even if it’s in northwest Indiana, it’s going to be taking the winter concerts, take away that revenue,” he said.
“I’m fearful of what this would do to this city.”
Multiple Indiana municipalities have already put in bids for the stadium, and Bear’s ownership and NFL officials are expected to make decisions about the team’s future soon.
Exploring the idea of moving the Chicago Bears stadium to a location outside of Chicago opens up various alternatives that could benefit both the team and the surrounding communities. Here are several considerations for such a move:
1. Suburban Development
Moving to a suburban area could attract a larger fan base from the surrounding suburbs, where many Bears fans currently reside. Suburbs like Arlington Heights or Naperville may offer more space for a stadium and parking.
2. Cost-Effective Solutions
Constructing a new stadium in a less urban area could potentially lower costs related to land acquisition and construction. This could allow for more funding to be directed toward fan amenities and experiences.
3. Better Traffic Management
A stadium located outside the city might ease traffic congestion during game days, providing more accessible entrances and exits and potentially improving the overall experience for attendees.
4. Enhanced Stadium Features
A new location could allow for the design and construction of a state-of-the-art facility, incorporating modern technology and sustainability features that could enhance the fan experience and reduce environmental impact.
5. Community and Economic Benefits
The presence of the Bears in a new location could spur local economic development, creating jobs and revitalizing areas through increased tourism and event-related activities.
Conclusion
Moving the Chicago Bears stadium outside of Chicago presents unique opportunities to strengthen community ties, improve game-day experiences, and foster economic growth. Such a decision would necessitate careful planning and collaboration with local governments to ensure mutual benefits.
For me, the answer is my mother, Emellen Mitchell Estes. Long before I was designing urban spaces or serving as Mayor, she was the one who gave me the “zoning permits” to build imaginary cities in our backyard in Atlanta.
An educator at heart, Emellen was a graduate of two iconic HBCUs—Morris Brown College and Atlanta University, now known as Clark-Atlanta University. She served as a teacher and Principal in the Atlanta Public Schools during the segregated 50s, 60s, and 70s. Despite the challenges of the era, she and my father fostered my passion for art, architecture, and the performing arts.
A tribute to Emellen Mitchell Estes, a dedicated educator and mother, whose influence shaped a legacy in architecture and education.
She didn’t just teach me how to build; she taught me who I was. She shared our rich ancestral history and kept me grounded in faith at the historic Big Bethel AME Church on Auburn Avenue.
I am the architectural designer, urban planner, and graphic & web designer I am today because she believed in the blueprints of my imagination.
IN THE SUMMER of 1955, Walt Disney had a problem. He was a few weeks off opening his most audacious venture yet and he had a decision to make: should he install flushing toilets or drinking fountains?
His plumbers had gone on strike and there was not enough time to do both. It was the last thing he needed. He was heavily in debt and had decided to stake not just his reputation but his personal fortune on building an amusement park, something which was normally free to enter.
But he needn’t have worried. By combining technical wizardry with the magic of the big screen, Disney had hit upon perhaps his most consequential innovation yet and one which would transform his dwindling kingdom into a global empire.
At the end of WWII, Walt Disney was in a bind. His movie studio had made it through the war making propaganda films, but he was now heavily in debt and it was beginning to seem like the glory days of Disney were in the past. But the man behind the world’s most famous mouse wasn’t done yet.
Above: Walt Disney in 1935.
A chance visit to a railroad fair in Chicago in 1948 sparked an interest in fairground rides. Amusement parks and fairs were nothing new at the time, but for Disney they lacked a certain magic. Usually they were designed around rides, with some attention given to scene setting and decoration, but nothing resembling a creative vision.
Disney wanted to create something new. A place with rides and attractions, but more than that, it would tell a story. It would project an image of an idyllic world, one of innocence and wholesomeness, where children could let their imaginations run free.
Above: An illustration of the original Disneyland layout.
To get his idea off the ground, Disney called in art director Herb Ryman and over the course of a frantic weekend in September 1953 they developed the initial concept for Disneyland. What they created was something radically different to anything that had come before.
The first major difference came in the layout. While researching other parks, Disney found one of their weaknesses was they often lacked a coherent plan, making them confusing to navigate.
If he were to create the happiest place on earth, it would have to be simple to get around and to do that, Disney had to meticulously design the flow of people as well as the attractions. That began at the entrance.
At the time, amusement parks in the US were typically free to enter and as such had multiple entrances. Disneyland however would have just one. By restricting the access to the park in this way, Disney was able to create a tightly curated experience from the moment guests stepped foot in his park.
Visitors would be greeted by an embankment, on which sat a station for a miniature railway, that ran the perimeter of the park. This would also conceal the park’s first illusion, the embankment doubling up as a physical barrier to prevent the sights and sounds of the outside world getting in.
From there, they would enter the park via a tunnel, which Disney called the “stage curtains”. A small plaque marking the point at which guests left the real world and entered the world of Disney’s imagination.
Above: The plaque welcoming visitors to Disneyland.
First stop after entering was Main Street USA, an idealised version of the American high street, heavily based on Disney’s hometown of Marceline, Missouri. From there, the park would make use of eye-catching visual elements, which Disney would coin as “weenies”, to pull people around the park.
The grandest of these would of course be a fantasy castle, which would draw visitors towards a central plaza: the hub from which every land, ride and attraction would radiate out. As well as making navigation easier, it would create a point at which people could meet and rest.
Branching off from this were a series of themed areas. Other parks had often included novelty buildings to give a sense of the exotic, but these would be standalone features, rather than part of a coherent theme. What Disney planned was total immersion. Just like the park itself, each land would be visually cut off from anything that might spoil the illusion.
Above: Visitors to Disneyland were drawn towards a central plaza which other attractions radiated away from.
With the concept sketches complete, Disney sent his brother Roy off to New York to raise the money for the build. But how do you turn something this new and unique into a reality? Disney had no experience building anything on this scale, let alone anything that broke with so much precedent.
He figured: relying purely on imagination would get him nowhere, but engineering on its own wasn’t entertaining. He needed people who could combine artistic creativity and practical skills to create something unique. What he needed was an imagineer.
Fortunately, Hollywood was full of them. He turned to set designers and artists in his own company, but also from a powerful rival. 20th Century Fox had a backlot four times the size of Disneyland and was filled with scenic artists used to building everything from city streets to steamboats. It was from here that Disney filled the ranks of his new army of imagineers.
The design process started with a pitch, which was then worked up into storyboards and further on into models of increasing sizes. The whole process was fluid, with constant revisions and alterations made throughout, including on some of the park’s biggest structures.
Above: Neuschwanstein Castle, in southern Germany.
Neuschwanstein Castle, in southern Germany was used as the inspiration for the iconic Sleeping Beauty Castle, which lies at the head of the park. It has a gatehouse, turrets and palace, all of which provided the reference for Disney’s version.
On the front of the palace, it also has a balcony, which leads from the spectacular Singer’s Hall. This detail was initially included in the plans but in a sign of how fluid the development was, it was changed purely by chance.
During the design phase, imagineers had taken the model apart for cleaning, only to quickly reassemble it when Walt Disney came to visit. In the rush, they put the palace back on the wrong way round. Disney noticed the mistake but preferred the way it looked and ordered it to be built as the model stood. The balcony still lives on today, but on the back of the castle.
This level of improvisation didn’t stop at the design stage. The Jungle Cruise has become one of the most popular rides of Disneyland and has since been replicated at other Disney parks. Designing a ride like this today requires months of planning and design work by huge teams of people.
Back in 1954 though, the ride’s layout was solely down to one man, legendary art director Harper Goff. With a bulldozer driver looking on, Goff took a stick and walked around the ride’s plot, drawing a line in the soil. Once completed, he drew a parallel line a few metres away.
The bulldozer followed, piling up the excavated soil on the embankments and the layout of the Jungle Cruise was complete.
Now this might all sound a bit “free jazz” but there was a lot at stake. If Disney didn’t pull this off, he stood to lose everything. As Disney’s ambitions for the park grew, so did the bill to pay for it all. By the time construction began, he had taken out USD$17M in loans: over USD$600M today.
He’d even put his own personal fortune on the line, selling properties and cashing in his life insurance to raise funds.
Above: The entrance to Disneyland.
In 1954, he had financing in place but with such a huge amount of money at stake, he needed the park to start earning as soon as possible. And that meant, opening in time for the lucrative vacation season the following summer.
On 16 July, 1954, a year and a day before the grand opening, Disneyland broke ground. To supplement his crack squad of imagineers, Disney brought in two crucial figures to oversee the construction: Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood and Joe Fowler.
Wood was a savvy businessman with a keen eye for organisation. It was he who had found the site Disneyland was to be built on: 160 acres of orange and walnut groves in Anaheim, California. At the time Anaheim was a rural farming town, but its flat land was perfect for building on and and access to the recently completed freeway meant downtown Los Angeles was just 30 minutes away.
Wood had previously worked at General Dynamics, training teams of people to build aeroplanes and soon set about organising the thousands of daily people on site.
Fowler, meanwhile, was a retired admiral and veteran of both world wars. He had spent the last few decades overseeing the construction of warships for the navy. Initially, he’d been drafted in to oversee the construction of the Mark Twain steamboat. But his ability to wrangle logistics made him invaluable for the wider construction effort of the park.
Fowler’s initial assessment of the plans were bleak. Of the 20 attractions planned to be ready for opening day, only six were likely to be ready, 11 were doubtful and three would definitely not be ready.
Together, Fowler and Wood adopted a strategy that prioritised the important storytelling aspects of the park while finding ways to cut corners and find efficiencies elsewhere. Their aim wasn’t perfection, instead they raced to get everything “good enough for opening day”, with a view to continue work afterwards.
But among the cost saving and improvisation were some truly impressive innovations. Main Street USA is designed to welcome visitors into a quaint, wholesome vision of Americana.
But it doesn’t take long to spot the movie magic at work here. Only the ground floor of each building is occupied, because the upper floors are too small. That’s because this whole street uses forced perspective.
Above: Main Street USA in Disneyland.
The technique has long been used in Hollywood, where sets are built at distorted angles to create the illusion of depth, or height in a studio.
Building a lifesize American high street was beyond even Disney’s means, but shrinking everything would just make the street look small. Instead, the buildings were constructed to a range of sizes, with ground floors built at a near 1:1 scale and the first and second floors built at increasingly smaller scales.
By decreasing the height of the building the higher it gets, our eyes are tricked into thinking they are further away and we assume it’s taller than it is.
The most effective use of forced perspective however, is on the iconic sleeping beauty castle. The tallest tip of the castle rises 23-metres off the ground making it slightly taller than the White House. So big, but not a towering fortress.
To make it appear bigger, like Main Street, each storey is built at a slightly smaller scale. But that effect is enhanced by introducing so many disconnected elements, all of a different height. Because there are no consistent storeys, our brain has less of a reference for how tall it should be, making the castle appear taller.
On July 17, 1955, after a year of frantic construction the moment of truth had arrived: the opening day of Disneyland. Everything had been building up to this moment. Thousands of guests were invited and a live TV broadcast was scheduled. But the opening was blighted by a series of disasters.
The park was swamped with people after thousands of counterfeit tickets were sold. Just as Joe Fowler had predicted, many of the rides weren’t finished and most of those that were ended up breaking down.
Above: Sleeping Beauty Castle.
A gas leak near the Sleeping Beauty Castle nearly burned it to the ground and the Mark Twain almost sank with the amount of people boarding it.
As for the striking plumbers: Walt had opted to finish the toilets on time, rather than drinking fountains, leading people to accuse him of a cynical ploy to buy drinks instead of providing free water.
But ultimately, none of that mattered. Just as his first cartoons had done nearly 30 years earlier, Disneyland had captured the public imagination. Work on the park went on and over the following years rides were continuously improved. Despite the princely entrance fee of USD $1 for adults and USD¢50 for children, within two months of opening, 1 million people had visited the park.
Disneyland had become so iconic, on a trip to America in 1959, President of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, publicly expressed his and his wife’s disappointment that they were barred from visiting.
For his part, Disney was never completely satisfied with Disneyland and with the lessons he had learned, quickly turned his attention to building a bigger, better version of his park in Florida. Walt Disney died before he could ever see the completion of his next creation, but Disneyworld would prove to be one of the biggest and most sophisticated theme parks ever built.
70 years on, the rough edges of opening day are long forgotten. What endures is the blueprint Walt created: a place built with the tools of Hollywood, the discipline of engineering and an imagination all of his own. Disneyland didn’t just revive his studio, it rewrote the playbook for how we design experiences, cities and entire worlds.
Additional footage and images courtesy of Disney, Orange County Archives, City of Anaheim Public Library, Library of Congress, ABC.
Members of the advisory council Commission of Fine Arts unanimously voted to approve designs for the White House ballroom expansion, releasing new renderings of the controversial project.
With this unanimous vote, the project will move forward for further discussion on 5 March by the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), which “adopts, approves, or provides advice” on projects in the greater Washington DC area.
The CFA vote advances the project towards a 5 March meeting
The East Wing Modernization project includes replacing the former East Wing of the White House with a two-storey building and an expanded colonnade that would attach it to the Executive Residence, which sits at the centre of the White House complex.
The second storey will contain a 22,000 square foot ballroom (2,043 square metres), which was commissioned by President Trump as a space to host visiting dignitaries.
The CFA is made up of seven members appointed by the US president.
Established in 1910, the CFA reviews “matters of design and aesthetics” within the Washington DC area, and acts as an advisory board, but does not have approval in terms of the actual realisation of the White House expansion.
A large colonnade lines one side of the ballroom design
As a whole, the White House is largely exempt from the National Historic Preservation Act, which mandates review for projects on federal buildings, allowing for Trump’s expedited approval process for the project.
Drawings of the East Wing were effectively leaked recently by the NCPC ahead of the 5 March meeting. Although roughly similar, the PDF presented today included more detailed sections and floor plans than seen before.
By Henry Queen – Staff Reporter, Atlanta Business Chronicle
Populous is setting up shop in Atlanta after 30 years of local projects dating back to the 1996 Olympic Games.
The global design firm recently debuted here with five employees but could rapidly grow, said Jonathan Mallie, managing director of the Americas at Populous. The office is at 505 North Angier Ave. NE, where the Industrious at Old Fourth Ward coworking space is located.
Industry veterans Rob Svedberg and Lee Pollock were recruited from TVS and Jacobs, respectively, to lead the office.
“We’ve always had an eye on the Southeast,” Maillie told Atlanta Business Chronicle in a phone interview. “But for one reason or another, we never opened an office in the Southeast despite the number of projects we had. Taking a look at the amount of work, Atlanta makes the most sense in the world. You’re talking about an international hub; an incredible, vibrant city; and a place that we’re extremely excited to be a part of.”
The company’s portfolio of work includes Truist Park; Georgia Tech’s McCamish Pavilion; Nashville, Tennessee’s Geodis Park soccer stadium; and the renovation of Synovus Park, the new home of the Atlanta Braves’ minor-league affiliate in Columbus. Then known as HOK Sport, the company was also instrumental in planning out the venues and temporary infrastructure for the ’96 Olympics.
Ongoing stadium projects in the Southeast are Mobile Arena in Alabama and the University of South Carolina’s Williams-Brice Stadium, which is benefiting from approximately $350 million in upgrades.
Kansas City, Missouri-based Populous is also active at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport through its subsidiary Fentress Studios, which it acquired for an undisclosed sum in June 2025. That Denver-based architecture firm is working to create a more efficient lobby and security checkpoint at the north terminal.
Airports are similar to stadiums, Maillie said, in that they draw large crowds of people and are ripe for improving the customer experience.
The people that Populous recruited to head the Atlanta office are notable. Svedberg was involved in the initial design work at LaGrange Cricket Stadium, the 10,500-seat project that broke ground late last year. Other projects of his include the expansion of New York City’s Javits Center, Mumbai’s Jio World Centre, Nashville’s new Nissan Stadium and the rooftop expansion of the Colorado Convention Center in Downtown Denver.
Pollock brings 30 years of design experience, with projects located in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia.
Other team members include Jonathan Bartlett, Matt Friesen and Meredith Mejia.
Just last month, Populous opened an office in Austin, Texas. Headcount at its Los Angeles office, meanwhile, grew about tenfold since its opening, Maille said.
“We have every intention of growing the Atlanta office,” Maille said. “It can move quickly if things are going well.”
Populous has 35 offices across the world, employing more than 1,600 people.
Last year, the firm relocated its Kansas City headquarters in the Country Club Plaza area to Downtown’s 1400KC building, also home to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City.
Populous also recently launched a new real estate service focused on designing mixed-use districts around sports, entertainment and civic venues. Atlanta is a hotbed for that activity, as evidenced by The Battery Atlanta surrounding Truist Park and Centennial Yards rising in the shadows of Downtown’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium and State Farm Arena.
“We refer to them as experiential districts that are developing around venues,” Maillie said. “And those venues could be sports facilities, they could be purely concert venues. They could be airports, or they could be convention centers. [It’s] almost a movement right now.”
Curving surfaces that draw you from room to room, soft light, layered glass, walls in white and carpets in gray: perhaps SANAA projects ought to be understood not so much as separate creations than as the far-flung fragments of a single ethereal world. From this view, it seems fitting that the newest such fragment, a museum-cum-library in the Taiwanese city of Taichung, feels remarkably familiar—a continuation, in form, material, and concept, of much that has come before. Almost everything here is recognizable, from the formal conceit, an intersecting array of eight boxy, steel-framed volumes (see the firm’s 2022 addition to the Art Gallery of New South Wales), to the facades, many glazed, all wrapped in silvery aluminum mesh (see the 2008 New Museum in New York City), not to mention the winding ramps and staircases that jump from floor to floor, pavilion to pavilion (see the 2010 Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, among other projects). As a whole, the building takes its place in a longer series of projects that explore the mixing of the rational and irrational—the former represented by the rigor of a precise architectural vocabulary, the latter by the freedom accorded by the informal composition of elements.
In Taichung, this exploration unfolds against a specific urban context—emptiness. Initially designed as part of a 2013 competition held by the city, the building is an early element in the redevelopment of the former Shuinan military airport in western Taichung; today, it stands at the edge of a 165-acre park at the center of the new district, facing out toward vacant parcels of land that the city government is now in the process of selling to developers. Doubtless one of the city’s aims in undertaking the project, and in hiring a Pritzker Prize–winning architect, was to establish the area, bounded to the north by highways and to the west by an aircraft factory, as an attractive place of culture. The plan is by no means unrealistic. Just a few miles south, the Toyo Ito–designed National Taichung Theater (2016) anchors Taichung’s 7th Redevelopment Zone, a newly built district of gleaming offices, department stores, and luxury high-rises.
The majority of the volumes are lifted up on pilotis, opening up the building’s ground level to serve as a set of shaded, subtly graded plazas linking the park behind to the future neighborhood in front. Interspersed are entrances to various programmatic spaces—an escalator up to the main library lobby, a direct entrance to a children’s library, a twisting ramp to the museum galleries—and a set of round, one-story structures housing a shop, café, information booths, and a spiral stair down to underground spaces including an auditorium and a parking garage. Both the library and museum entries are accessed from an area that is enclosed in mesh; this space can be locked when the two institutions are closed, but the remainder of the ground floor will remain open 24 hours a day.
The building is officially called the Taichung Green Museumbrary—a portmanteau that sounds better in Chinese than English—and indeed its most distinctive programmatic element is that it co-locates the main branch of the Taichung Public Library system with the newly founded Taichung Art Museum. (Taichung has long been home to the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, but until now did not have a municipal art museum.) In keeping with the possibilities suggested by this combination, SANAA, working with architect of record Ricky Liu & Associates, has not limited either museum or library to a single volume. Instead, galleries and reading rooms are each distributed across different volumes, and visitors move freely across the complex: there is almost always more than one way to get from point A to point B. On two of the building’s six floors, floating walkways link the library and museum, enabling you to cross between them midway through a visit. The uppermost walkway, on the fifth floor, brings you outdoors into a mesh-enclosed box crisscrossed by ramps and dubbed the “culture forest,” an expansive space that does not yet, but ought to, have places to sit and relax.
For Sejima, the library and museum offer “two different ways of learning,” and placing both together raises the possibility of the programs’ shaping each other—from exhibitions in which books could be borrowed or library functions incorporating artworks to broader ways of “expanding our thinking and imagination.” At present, there is not much evidence of this happening. The museum and library remain separate: the reading rooms and galleries, as currently programmed, don’t stray from the modes of operation and organization that we have all learned to expect from these institutions.
For now, more immediate concerns dominate. At the complex’s fanfare-filled opening in December, Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-Yen voiced the hope that the Museumbrary “makes the world see Taichung, and places Taichung on the world’s stage”—a comment in which one can detect both familiar civic boosterism and a Taiwan-specific desire for the international recognition that the island has long been denied in the realm of politics. Not surprisingly, the galleries, all vast, flexible boxes designed before the museum was founded, seem best suited to sensational, Instagram-friendly installations of the sort associated with the global art circuit; and the initial set of exhibitions, which brings together a dizzying array of work from around the world with a vaguely environmental theme, only furthers this impression. The scale of the galleries was a “big challenge,” says museum director Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai, and some of the loveliest works on display, including a set of paintings of the transformed landscape of central Taiwan by the artist Hung Tien-Yu, feel minuscule by comparison.
I preferred the library reading rooms, with their curtain-filtered windows, intimate nooks, and snaking SANAA–designed tables and benches. These are spaces that reward wandering: an unexpected staircase transports you to a hidden terrace, a small exhibition teaches you about the history of encyclopedias. It’s all impeccably stylish. Meeting areas are encased in curving walls of acrylic. The soft hum of air-conditioning emerges from registers embedded in the bookshelves. Yet, as with so much of SANAA’s work, the effect is gentle, tranquil, rather than precious. Somehow, these architects again and again manage to create uncommon, daring, ultra-designed things that are nonetheless comfortable and unpretentious. There is something important about this that is not easy to put a finger on. I suspect that it relates to a certain attitude toward form-making. SANAA rose to prominence during the era of starchitecture and its formal acrobatics, and now Sejima and Nishizawa too are sought out by clients around the world looking to build signature buildings—hence the commission in Taichung. And yet, even as the shimmering, diaphanous Museumbrary fulfills the demands imposed upon it—that it attract the attention of foreign media, establish the legitimacy of a new district, and so on—it does so without the self-importance common with starchitecture; that is, without naively presenting itself as radical either in its formal inventiveness or its capacity to engender cultural change.
Perhaps this is where the understated frankness of Sejima and Nishizawa’s work comes from: an acceptance of the limits of what form can do. Where they find agency to intervene in the world of their own accord is neither in big, brash gestures nor in obsessively resolved details. Instead, it is in subtle, calibrated moves—in providing ample space for chance encounters and discoveries in the reading rooms, in treating the ground level as an unrestricted public space, in holding open the possibility for institutional boundaries to one day be blurred.
Image courtesy SANAA
Image courtesy SANAA
Image courtesy SANAA
Credits
Architect: SANAA — Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa; principals; Takayuki Hasegawa, Takashige Yamashita, Takayuki Furuya, Asano Yagi, Kota Fukuhara, Amira Ho, design team
After living and working in greater Los Angeles for 25 years, Steve and Kim Chase were eager to move back East. Natives of Montreal, they wanted a quieter life on a rural site, but without the bone-chilling Canadian winters. Lured both by their positive impressions of the region and the proximity of friends, they chose North Carolina as their new home.
There, on a wooded 60-acre site in the rolling hills near Hillsborough, they’ve built a striking 2,570-square-foot house that feeds the energy of the intensely creative couple while satisfying their high expectations for visual order and uncompromising design—a house that’s seemingly so simple, yet so nuanced.
Set among the towering pines, the Steeplechase House is a place of reflection and tranquility. (The moniker is a play on words, a reflection of the couple’s name and the fact that Kim has a long-standing passion for all things equestrian.) Two elemental forms—steep-roofed gabled boxes, each measuring 25 by 55 feet in plan—rest quietly among the trees, reflecting the landscape in broad expanses of mirrored glass while inviting the natural environment inside.
“I thought it was the right thing for that site, and it allows the building to extend into the landscape,” says Lawrence Scarpa, principal at Brooks + Scarpa of Los Angeles, who previously designed an office for Steve’s company, Reactor Films, that was completed in 1998. “In the summer, it’s almost as though it’s cloaked, where you don’t even see the house because it’s so dark.”
Clad in black corrugated steel, the two main volumes pinch toward each other on the west-facing side, forming a triangular courtyard that’s enclosed on the back by a low-slung loggia with floor-to-ceiling glass. While renting a place to live during their search for a building site, the Chases had come across an old board-and-batten chapel in Hillsborough and were drawn to its scale and simplicity. “We thought we could do something maybe that simple, but perhaps two of them—like a little compound,” says Kim.
The structure’s reflective glass and black exterior give the building an ever-changing presence through the seasons, receding into the forest’s dappled light in the summer and playing hide-and-seek among the tree trunks in winter. It’s well suited to the artistic couple, both of whom worked as art directors and have extensive photography experience. “We don’t get any high-angled light in this house,” notes Steve, a Clio Award–winning film producer, “so, in the early evening, it’s only the prettiest light. And when you get up in the morning, you get light filtering through the trees. It’s pretty cool.”
The two main volumes define the public and private zones of the house, with the transitional loggia housing the kitchen and dining area. As one steps from the loggia into the living area, the space explodes upward to an apex of 31 feet. Framed by a delicate steel grid, the view extends through the trees into a meadow carved from the forest.
Cabinets and shelves are built of plywood with a natural finish, providing warmth to the interior but maintaining an outdoorsy, cabinlike feel. The plywood finishes are complemented by French white oak flooring, which brightens the space.
The private side of the house is dominated by the light-filled primary bedroom, with its generous plywood-encased wardrobe and open walk-in shower and tub. Tucked behind is a laundry room and guest bedroom, whose Murphy bed is usually folded away so the space can be used as an office. (Future plans include a guest house on the site.)
A distinguishing feature is the house’s two projecting skylights—one on each of the pavilions. Playfully referred to by the Chases as “findows” (or finlike windows), the two rooftop registers allow changing displays of light and shadow that emphasize the sculptural form of the interior. The effect is subtly enhanced by the complex geometry of the two pavilions, whose walls are not parallel, just as the slightly angled spring lines of the gabled roofs are not horizontal. “It added some complexity, but also I think some interest, because the spring line inside is actually sloping,” says Scarpa. “It’s almost imperceptible, but you know it’s there.”
It’s all part of the visceral experience of living here, where shifts in weather drastically alter the personality of the house. One minute it can be bright and sunny, Kim says, and the next there’s a threatening black sky with the loblolly pines bending in the wind. Furthering this connection to nature, the couple also helped restore the site’s ecology, clearing eight acres and planting heritage grasses such as bluestem, switchgrass, and rattlesnake master.
Designing and building the house has been a labor of love for the Chases, who each applied a discriminating eye to help achieve its refined sense of craft. While they took a largely hands-off approach to the design process, their involvement in the construction is reflected in the finished product. Steve, for example, built a full-scale mock-up of the knife-edged concrete stair descending from the courtyard to help contractors envision how it should look. For her part, Kim refused to accept the county’s code requirement for unsightly floor outlets to be placed every 12 feet in the loggia. As an alternative, she designed elegant wooden floor grilles that conceal both the air ducts and electrical outlets and can be lifted out if power is needed.
“It was just important for us to get it right,” says Kim, acknowledging the luxury of living nearby and having the time to watch the house take shape day by day. The Steeplechase House is the singular outcome of that opportunity—the product of a creative collaboration between client and architect, with a minimum of artistic direction and an abundance of trust.
Angela Brooks of Brooks + Scarpa is a 2024 Women in Architecture Awards honoree. A celebration of this year’s winners will be held in New York City on October 1, following RECORD’s 2024 Innovation Conference. Registration information can be found here.
Christina Yao19 January 2026Photo by Rasmus Hjortshoj
Sydney Fish Market, which claims to be the largest fish market in the southern hemisphere and features an undulating 20,000-square-metre roof canopy, has opened its doors in “an underutilised harbour area” in Sydney.
Designed by Danish architecture studio 3XN‘s GXN arm, in association with BVN Architecture and landscape architects Aspect Studios, the market aims to become a major new civic landmark in Sydney, Australia.
“The new Sydney Fish Market is transforming an underutilised harbour area into a vibrant public realm filled with programs that attract both locals and visitors,” said Audun Opdal, senior partner at 3XN.
“The fish market uniquely blends a fully functioning commercial operation with high-quality public space, delivering an authentic market experience rooted in the context of its prime waterfront location while enhancing the entire surrounding precinct.”
It features an undulating roof canopy of 20,000 square metres. Photo is by Tom Roe
According to 3XN, one of the main goals for the market upgrade was to balance the operational needs of a working market with public accessibility for locals and visitors.
“We have turned an introverted industry inside out, putting the back-of-house operations on display and making the theatrics and intense choreography of seafood trading and movement part of the public experience,” said Fred Holt, partner and Australia director at 3XN.
“The recognisable SFM blue bins with fish on ice remain at the heart of it all, but now visitors can witness an authentic, behind-the-scenes performance of one of Sydney’s biggest attractions.”
Glazed facades open up the market to the harbour view
Twenty-six lifts connect the four levels of the market, which include an underwater basement, a wholesale market on the ground floor and retail and office spaces on its upper levels.
The publicly accessible wholesale market has doubled in size from its previous site to 12,200 square metres and will be occupied by fishmongers, restaurants, cafes and speciality vendors.
The roof design incorporates solar panelling and passive ventilation. Photo is by Tom Roe
Next to the wholesale market is an auction hall, separated from the market by glazed walls. Here, 160 buyers will bid for fresh seafood produce in daily auctions, and visitors will be able to watch the live action of the trade without disrupting it.
Full-size glazed facades connect the market interiors to the harbour view, while allowing passersby to peek inside.
The Sydney Fish Market will be accessed from amphitheatre-style steps leading from a new plaza with seating and views across the harbour.
The roof is comprised of 594 timber beams and 407 aluminium cassettes
The most identifiable feature of the building is its 200-metre-long undulating roof canopy. Comprised of 594 timber beams and 407 aluminium cassettes, it weighs 2,500 tonnes, floating above the market hall below.
The pyramidal shape of each cassette was arranged at an angle that maximises the flow of daylight into the building, while also providing shade.
The modular nature of the roof structure, in addition to its solar panel lining and passive ventilation, will help reduce the building’s energy consumption both during construction and operation.
The roof also supports two rainwater collection and filtration locations. Half of the rainwater collected by the roof will be reused, which, combined with a wastewater treatment plant, will cut the potable water consumption of the building in half, according to 3XN.
A series of steps around the building offer seating and views across the harbour
A series of integrated systems was developed to lower the environmental impact of the building, while also meeting its stringent humidity, hygiene and operational demands.
“The ambition was always to create a building that could carry both the weight of industry and the joy of public life,” said Catherine Skinner, principal of BVN.
“The project demanded a structure capable of managing salt water and air, humidity, cold-chain logistics and heavy machinery – all while welcoming millions of visitors a year. Achieving that balance of opposing pressures shaped every decision that was made,” she continued.
“This is a deeply technical building, but it never loses sight of its civic role.”
The auction hall is enclosed by glazed walls
The Sydney Fish Market forms part of the urban renewal of Blackwattle Bay and the redevelopment of Sydney’s harbour foreshore, connecting a series of the city’s iconic harbour sites, including Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge.
3XN GXN’s design for the new Sydney Fish Market was selected from an international design competition hosted by the New South Wales government in 2017.
The Sydney Fish Market is part of the redevelopment of Sydney’s harbour foreshore
Copenhagen studio 3XN was established by Kim Herforth Nielsen in 1986. It founded GXN, a strategic consultancy for the built environment, in 2007.
