St. Michael’s Grammar School, situated in the heart of St. Kilda Melbourne, is a private school renowned for its culture of creativity and innovation. Like its surrounding community, the school is both historic and cosmopolitan.
The Triple Bridge Gateway establishes the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s 42nd Street Bus Terminal as a premier example of urban placemaking and identity lighting, by reenvisioning a structural rehabilitation to the bus ramps spanning Ninth Avenue in the district known as Hell’s Kitchen.
Port Authority of New York & New Jersey Engineering Department, PKSB Architects, Leni Schwendinger Light Projects
Casa da Música in Porto, Portugal, is the Rem Koolhaas-designed concert hall space that houses the Casa da Música cultural institution and its three orchestras. Built as part of Porto’s project for European Culture Capital in 2001, it was finished in 2005 and immediately became a cultural icon in the city.
As part of its efforts to continually engage new audiences and show off the hall’s non-concert spaces, Casa de Música invited several designers and artists to create installations, providing them with a €5,000 budget for production.
Established in 1908, the University of Alberta celebrated its centennial anniversary in September 2008. The original campus master plan was developed in 1910 when the Montreal architectural firm Nobbs and Hyde was hired to design the campus and its buildings. Campus development was interrupted for many years due to World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, and the original architectural vision was essentially lost during the post-WWII building boom.
Gottschalk + Ash International, Terry Heard Designers, Verburg & Associates
Rosalie Winard has produced dramatic images of America’s majestic wetland birds in more than a decade of travel worldwide. The Utah Museum of Natural History’s Wild Birds of the American Wetlands exhibit showcases 53 of Winard’s photos, creating a space that blurs the distinction between art and nature.
The rehabilitation of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City included a new signage system to guide and inform the 15 million annual visitors to the park, one of the oldest and largest in Latin America. Design proposals were subject to the approval of forest management, private investors, project managers, users, and the government.
Grupo de Diseño Urbano (urban landscaping)/Diseño Neko (signage)
In a high-rise apartment building in Shenzhen, China, the lobby is an important buffer zone between the outside world and the interior, and also sets the tone for the design style within.
One Plus Partnership Ltd. envisioned the lobby of the Mellon Town building as a container for the spirit of Chinese culture. The lobby evokes bamboo, that ubiquitous icon of Chinese culture, with a dramatically green palette, flooring, lighting, and residents’ mailboxes. The design team also used the green/bamboo theme to stimulate thought about sustainability and green design.
The St. Vincent de Paul Free Dining Room in San Rafael, Calif., has offered 350 meals a day, 365 days a year, for more than 25 years. Relying on monetary donations, volunteer help, and donated food, it offers its clients a warm meal in a safe environment, augmented with basic necessities such as counseling, clothing, and emotional support.
Operating out of a run-down Gold Rush-era building, the facility had poor lighting, holes in the floor, outdated amenities, and an overall depressing environment.
