Renaissance Design, Historic Location Fuse New D.C. Restaurant

Randall Stout’s Art Gallery of Alberta Loops Together the Arts, Nature, and Time Itself
Contemporary forms reaffirm the creative vitality of all design languages
With the circular ribbon of steel that runs through Edmonton’s Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) in Canada, Randall Stout, FAIA, has arrived at a powerful symbol of the eternal vitality and continuum of creation of the arts, culture, and the natural world. The museum preserves much of the urbanistically aloof, original concrete facility while adding new galleries and a large glass atrium across which a curving, continuous ribbon of stainless steel moves thought the interior and exterior like a piece of string threaded through the surface tension of a soap bubble, gradually morphing from structure to sculpture and back again. The steel ribbon is looped, with no beginning and no end, though its circuitousness is occasionally lost in its folded, abstracted sculptural presentation.

Morphosis Dominates 2008 GSA Design Excellence Awards
Some of the most formally daring examples of federal architecture have nearly swept the General Service Administration’s 2008 Design Excellence Awards. Morphosis, a firm once considered too avant garde to build until they started building en masse for the federal government, won five honor awards and one citation for their Wayne Lyman Morse United States Courthouse and San Francisco Federal Building. The jury (chaired by Mehrdad Yazdani, Assoc. AIA) also selected Kliment Halsband Architects’ United States Post Office and Courthouse in Brooklyn for an honor award in preservation. However, the jury’s report expressed disappointment with entries for lease construction, urban design and landscape architecture, and interior design and environmental graphic design. A bright spot was this year’s crop of Land Port of Entry buildings, which, through careful contextual references to site conditions, regional culture and economy, won four citation awards.