PlanPhilly's Eyes on the Street reported recently on our adaptive reuse project at Ortlieb's Bottling House, the former bottling plant of a brewery that will be home to our new studio in 2014. Writer Ashley Hahn spoke with James Timberlake about plans to make use of natural ventilation and daylighting in the historic 1948 building, and to monitor the work spaces for comfort once we move in.

At Keeling Apartments, a residence hall on the University of California, San Diego campus, the exterior and interior walls, floors and ceilings are exposed concrete, constructed with intense focus on composition, formwork, and craft. The exterior is clad with precast concrete panels hung in front of the structure as rainscreens, supplemented by cement board cladding and window infill at the open bays of the concrete frame. Given their large size, the precast panels must be anchored to the building frame from the interior, before the weatherproofed back-up wall behind is installed.

According to a survey conducted by the Smithsonian Institution, Philadelphia has more public art than any other American city. Dilworth Plaza will be no exception. The transformation of the space adjacent to City Hall includes an installation called Pulse that will trace the paths of the three major transit lines in columns of orange, blue, and green illuminated mist.

A fourth volume of Vision+Voice, compiled by the federal government's Design Excellence Program, features interviews with architects working to fulfill the environmental sustainability mandate for federal building projects.

AIA's Committee on the Environment (COTE) Top Ten Green Projects program “celebrates structures that use a thoroughly integrated approach to architecture, natural systems, and technology to provide architectural solutions which protect and enhance the environment.” Entries are considered for the following factors: design and innovation, integration with the community, land use and effect on site ecology, bioclimatic design, energy and water use, approach to light and air, materials and construction, long-life considerations, and feedback loops.  
 
We were pleased that our Keeling Apartments at the University of California at San Diego was named among the top ten this year.

Philadelphia's Center City District has installed a construction camera atop the Centre Square East office tower at 1500 Market Street to record the construction process at Dilworth Plaza and make it easy for Philadelphians to check its progress in real time.

Our latest experiment with building sensor networks—undertaken as part of the retrofit of Building 661 (The Building Energy Sciences Center) for the Energy Efficient Buildings (EEB) Hub, one of three innovation clusters created by the Department of Energy in 2011—has yielded some interesting results.

Through a week-long "Architecture as Catalyst" workshop at the University of Minnesota, KieranTimberlake researchers Billie Faircloth and Ryan Welch challenged architecture students to recast whole material assemblies as "fast" weather probes. Using low-cost wireless sensor technology developed by our research group, students were able to align their materials and construction know-how with real-time studies of the environment and open a discourse on how real-time environmental feedback can influence design practice.

NPR's Tanya Ballard Brown asks whether U.S. embassies can be safe without being unsightly—addressing one of the many requirements involved in designing the New London Embassy, scheduled to open in the Nine Elms district in 2017.

The new U.S. embassy in London has sparked a wave of urbanization in a gritty industrial zone on the South Bank, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A Diplomatic Breakthrough 
By Ruth Bloomfield 
 
Nine Elms, a neighborhood along the banks of London's River Thames, is an urban wasteland, scarred by railroad tracks and littered with idle factories and vacant parking lots. 
 
It's also an unlikely hot spot in London real estate right now, with some two dozen developers investing well over $15 billion in new hotels, offices, retail space and as many as 16,000 high-end homes.