Construction is scheduled to begin this spring for the new 12-story Center City Building for UNC Charlotte. Located at Ninth and Brevard Streets in downtown Charlotte, the new building will house the University's MBA program and other programs including graduate-level classes in the colleges of Engineering, Health and Human Services, Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Arts and Architecture's new master's program in Urban Design.  
 
The new building defines UNC as a vibrant addition to the central business district, providing a unique icon for the university while establishing a lively urban presence in the First Ward. Charlotte-based Gantt Huberman Architects, our close design collaborators on this project, are serving as Architect of Record.

The U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations announced yesterday that KieranTimberlake is among four firms selected to present designs for the new London Embassy Building in the Nine Elms district of London.

State Department Press Release 
 
The U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) announced that four architectural firms have been selected for the final phase of the design competition for the new United States Embassy in London. 
 
The four firms, KieranTimberlake; Morphosis Architects; PEI Cobb Freed & Partners; and Richard Meier & Partners, Architects presented the best qualifications to design the New London Embassy that will represent the highest international architectural standards. 
 
An OBO panel used a thorough and rigorous evaluation process to initially review 37 submissions in the first round of the design competition. The nine firms selected for the second round provided presentations over two days to a distinguished jury of American and British leaders in the fields of architecture, academics and diplomacy. The jury then selected four firms to move to the final phase of the design competition. 
 
This diverse group of finalists will explore the symbolism of the embassy, its image, and position in the cityscape of London. Their goal is to create a building and site complex that has timeless quality and represents the United States appropriately in the United Kingdom. 
 
In November 2009, the four firms will present their three-dimensional models to the jury. The winning firm's design will be developed for construction of the New Embassy in London on the Nine Elms site.  
 
The New London Embassy will speak to the time-honored relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom as strong and close allies. The building will reflect the values of the American people and reflect the spirit of our times. 
 
For further information, please contact Jonathan Blyth at BlythJJ@State.gov or on (703) 875-4131.  

After its debut at the International Builders Show in Las Vegas last month, the off-site fabricated home we designed for LivingHomes will be on display at the TED Conference in Long Beach. Designed to achieve LEED-Platinum certification, the two-story Kohler LivingHome features furnishings, materials, products and technologies that showcase the best in high design and technology with a low ecological footprint. Following the TED conference, the show home will remain open for public viewing from February 8 to February 21, 2009.

In January, we paid a visit to Melba and Baxter Barnes, the owners of KieranTimberlake's first completed Make It Right home—a safe, sustainable, affordable home designed for the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

KieranTimberlake has teamed up with LivingHomes, Profile Structures, and Color Design Art to create a modular show home for Builder magazine. The home will be on display at the 2009 International Builders' Show in Las Vegas, January 20-23. You can take a virtual tour of the project on the Builder website.

Boyce Thompson, Builder magazine's editorial director, writes: 
 

Next week, four semi-trailers will leave a factory in Southern California carrying the modules and panels that make up our show home for this year's International Builders' Show in Las Vegas. The convoy will idle across the street in a parking lot, waiting for the convention floor to open for exhibitors. Then, when the doors roll up at 12:01 a.m. on the morning of the 14th, crews will race the components to the floor and begin a mad, five-day race to ready the home for visitors. 
 
If you are going to the IBS this year, check out the Builder LivingHome. We've been working for more than a year on this super-sustainable ‘mod' home. The experience of navigating the nascent modular industry to line up a builder, an architect, a factory, and suppliers is an interesting story in itself. But it is sure to be eclipsed by the home itself, which speaks volumes about the trends that are likely to preoccupy builders for the next several decades.

 
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Cellophane House™ was designed for ease of assembly, disassembly and re-assembly. With the conclusion of the Home Delivery show at the Museum of Modern Art on October 26, the next phase of our experiment is beginning. Our intention is to disassemble and rebuild the house on a new location, with the aim of helping to offset the millions of tons of construction and demolition debris generated in the United States each year.

It was announced last week that Loblolly House is a winner of the second annual Lifecycle Building Challenge competition, sponsored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

On October 17, 2008, AIA Philadelphia held its annual Awards for Design Excellence celebration. We were honored to accept four awards that evening, including a Gold Medal for Cellophane House™, our second gold medal in a row from AIA Philadelphia.  
 
The Gold Medal recognizes only one built project of the most exemplary design quality, and is rarely given annually. Our heartfelt thanks go to the clients, design teams and consultants who made this honor possible.

Can we create a material that combines the ideal functions of a building envelope into a single product? We began exploring this question with SmartWrap™, a building envelope that has the potential to generate energy, control climate, and provide lighting and information display on a single printed substrate.

In a review of Cellophane House™ at MoMA, Andrew Blum of Wired says that “prefab's time has finally come.”  
 
Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York 
By Andrew Blum 
 
Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House™ is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap™, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.