Source: ny1.com

We are pleased to announce that Vishaan Chakrabarti will join SHoP Architects as a Partner, effective March 5th, 2012. One of the world’s foremost urban thinkers, Vishaan adds to SHoP’s already diverse internal knowledge base and highlights the curiosity and creative thinking essential to good design. He joins a group of Partners committed to proving that intelligent, exciting, evocative design can be done in the real world, with real world constraints. We are extremely excited about what lies ahead for our firm and our profession, and look forward to sharing our progress with you.

Image credit: Casey Kelbaugh

Press Release PDF

In addition to including “Out of Practice” in their February book roundup (above), Surface Magazine reviewed SHoP’s new monograph on its website, saying: “…The now 16-year-old firm, based in Manhattan, has positioned itself as a band of amiable pragmatists in a field overcrowded with shallow corporatists, scholastic snobs, and ductile aesthetes. The office’s devotion to this unified practice is on full view in its new monograph, Out of Practice (Monacelli), which illustrates how principals Kimberley Holden, Gregg Pasquarelli, Christopher Sharples, Coren Sharples, and William Sharples have applied their backgrounds in design, construction, and development to projects of every scale, from their breakthrough winning proposal for the first-annual MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program to their upcoming Barclays Center sports complex in Brooklyn.”

-Ian Volner, Surface Magazine

On February 16 & 17, ShoP will be participating in “Creating the 21st Century Façade: How architects and fabricators are advancing curtain wall design in the digital age”, a 2-day conference which is being held at Pratt’s Manhattan campus. The event features a series of lectures on day 1 and a series of workshops on day 2. The conference’s purpose: to bring leading designers and fabricators together as a means to facilitate discussion as well as examine current work and the role technology plays in terms of making a design aspiration a reality.

SHoP Principal Jonathan Mallie will be leading a lecture on day 1 from 9:45 – 10:15 entitled, “Design and Implementation Through Collaborative Practice.” On day 2, John D. Cerone and Hashim Sulieman of SHoP will be leading a 2-part workshop entitled “Computational Design & 4D Sequencing.” The purpose is to focus on basic parametric-rule based modeling that allows design variations and tests the limits of form. The second session is a step by step 4D construction sequencing model process. The Software that will be used is as follows: Catia/Digital Project, Rhinoceros, Navisworks® Manage, Microsoft project, and Microsoft Excel.

The SHoP-designed Me + Ro jewelry store makes a cameo in this Capital One commercial with Alec Baldwin.

Above image by David Joseph.

SHoP’s first monograph, Out of Practice, will be available in bookstores a week from today – but it’s available for pre-order NOW!

SHoP's design for the Atlantic Yards development

Today, SHoP unveiled the design for the first of three new residential towers at the Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn. The new building, B2, will be the tallest modular building in the world.

The site of our Botswana Innovation Hub project from the air, November 2011.

IK / SHoP Architects

SHoP recently submitted a proposal  for a concept visitors center and offsite welcome center to  Spaceport America. The proposal brings space tourists and interested groups to the site in New Mexico of the soon to be completed Virgin Galactic Spaceport. The proposal creates a firsthand visitor experience of the next generation of space exploration balanced with local customs and the surrounding landscape.

Visitors Center

The Spaceport America Visitors Center will give the public its first real glimpse into the portal of personal space travel. The visitors center will reignite the aspirations  of exploration where only few have been, but which many have come to understand in text, photographs and film as the last and infinite frontier of man. In order to look forward,  we also need to get in touch with our primordial  past, to  free ourselves from preconceptions and release our imagination and aspirations.

The building is comprised of a landscaped green roof punctuated with crater-like oculi that are organized around the arrangement of programs and exhibition spaces inside. The shape of the building from the air takes the form of a square, with each side oriented to a particular moment on the site. On the west elevation,  an amphitheater with fire pit faces towards the El Camino Real (ancient Indian trails). On the north elevation,  two outdoor exhibition areas are carved into the building’s form for the display of vintage through modern spacecraft platforms with views towards Virgin Galactic’s Terminal Hanger Facility.  On the east elevation, an earthwork blends itself into the roof-scape for viewing towards the vertical launch sites. The entrance of the visitors center is on the south elevation with views towards the railway and highway.

The architectural vernacular of  the hacienda was used as a starting point to organize program in and around open and enclosed courtyards. Programs such as auditorium, rocket garden and centrifuge are located within the circular courtyards, which are surrounded by flexible exhibition, café/restaurant, gift shop, restrooms and support spaces.  The movement in, on and around the building is not prescribed, but is organized by directories that are meant to bring the visitor into various programmatic orbits.

The earthwork-like roof blends into the landscape allowing the public opportunities for watching rocket launches, take-offs and star gazing at night. The amphitheater is built around a fire pit for Native American dance ceremonies, campfire storytelling, and cookouts.

The building form is composed of concrete shells, taking advantage of the concrete batch plant on site. The concrete structure, in conjunction with the green roof will provide a good thermal mass against the high temperature fluctuations of the site.

Welcome Center

The Spaceport Welcome Center, will be the gateway into Spaceport America that will be located in the towns of Hatch and Truth or Consequences New Mexico. They will serve not only as ticketing and shuttle access to the spaceport visitors center , but also as possible retail venues for the towns. The building structure is defined by a solar array lattice that hovers over the parking and retail, ticketing and exhibition building and collimates into a tube  structure that forms the shuttle bus pickup and drop off area.