Happy Friday and welcome to today’s edition of the Daily Digest. Below are a few noteworthy news items that the AN team has been tracking this week, ranging from horse park renovations to lauded libraries to superlatively tall Miami towers. And if you’re on the East Coast, stay cool this weekend—it’s going to be a hot one.
Miami’s first supertall set to be completed in 2026
Towering 1,049 feet over Biscayne Boulevard, the planned Waldorf Astoria Miami will be the first Floridian supertall skyscraper and the tallest residential tower south of New York City when completed circa 2026 per developer PMG. (Pending “imminent” approvals, construction is slated to kick off laster this year.) As recently reported by Dezeen, the 100-story tower, a boxy affair comprised of nine glass-skinned offset cubes stacked high into the clouds, is designed by Miami-based Sieger Suarez Architects in collaboration with Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott, who explained: “The concept was to make an iconic sculpture that defied the laws of gravity situating the different blocks in different positions, which in addition created unique views from each space. The very slender volume requires a central core to deal with torsion caused by the strong winds of the area.”
In addition to a five-star hotel, the tower will feature 360 private residences, a 10-story parking garage tucked into the base of the structure, and a slew of view-heavy amenities including restaurants, a spa and fitness center, and more. Interiors will be designed by San Francisco–based studio Bamo. Currently, the tallest completed building in Miami and Florida is the mixed-use, Moshe Cosicher–designed Panorama Tower, which topped out at just under 870 feet in 2017. PMG, along with JDS, is also the developer of the SHoP Architects-designed 111 West 57th, a 1,428-foot supertall in Manhattan.
H/t to Dezeen
One of America’s last surviving urban horse parks is getting a $8.9 million revamp
Atlanta’s Chastain Horse Park, a facility first established in 1939 and operating in its current form as a private nonprofit since 1999, has launched a $8.9 million Healing Through Horses Capital Campaign that will enable the organization to renovate and expand its aging facilities at Chastain Park (located in Buckhead, it’s Atlanta’s third largest city park) and better provide the public with “world-class equine-assisted activities and therapies.” As noted by Urbanize Atlanta, the facility is considered one of the last remaining urban horse parks of its kind in the United States.
As noted on the campaign page, the current Chastain Horse Park facilities “were not originally designed or constructed to meet the needs of current commercial operations and therefore limit the organizations’ ability to scale their business. Existing structures have neared the end of their life expectancy and new structures, or major repairs, must take place. Additionally, the current utilization of scarce flat land does not provide for enough outdoor space for their most valuable partners: the horses.”
Working in collaboration with local architecture firm TS Adams Studio and general contractor Macallan Construction, the nonprofit plans to build a new Chastain Horse Park Therapeutic Horsemanship Center, a new covered therapeutic arena, and additional outdoor paddocks for our horses. Accredited by PATH (Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship), the nonprofit conducts more than 5,500 therapeutic sessions per year, working with people from all backgrounds “with a broad range of physical, cognitive, and emotional abilities, including victims of physical abuse and children with autism,” as Urbanize reported. As of this writing almost 90 percent of the fundraising goal has been reached.
H/t to Urbanize Atlanta
The AIA and ALA recognize library design excellence
On May 17, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the American Library Association (ALA)/ Library Leadership and Management Association bestowed five exceptional community media repositories with the 2022 AIA/ALA Library Building Award. The honors are conferred annually to U.S. libraries that “demonstrate design achievement, including a sense of place, purpose, ecology, environmental sustainability, and history.” Some of the recognized projects, which include double atheneum wins for Phoenix-based studio Richärd Kennedy Architects, will be familiar to AN readers. They are:
- Adams Street Library, Brooklyn, New York | Work Architecture Company (WORKac)
- Asante Library, Surprise, Arizona | Richärd Kennedy Architects
- Cruzen-Murray Library, Caldwell, Idaho | Richärd Kennedy Architects
- Indian Creek Library, Olathe, Kansas | Gould Evans
- Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C. | OTJ Architects (Executive Architect), Mecanoo (Design Architect)
“BIG” real estate news in Brooklyn Heights
In Big Apple real estate news, the New York Post reported this week that Danish architect Bjarke Ingels has closed on a two-level penthouse apartment at Brooklyn Heights’ storied St. George Tower for a cool $2.1 million. Per the Post, the “raw” penthouse space has been on and off the market since 2010, and Ingels has reportedly been scoping the property for some time. In 2019, he submitted plans to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, hoping to embark on a rooftop addition to the historic tower, including an ersatz water tower that would house a new elevator shaft, a raised roof deck, and a swimming pool. “I have a massive self-interest because I hope to make it my home,” he told the commission of the project at the time. Designed by Emery Roth and located within the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, the St. George Tower is an art deco landmark completed in 1929 as an addition to the older Hotel St. George, which was once the largest hotel in New York City.
Ingels also owns a penthouse duplex at 205 Water Street in nearby DUMBO, the same Brooklyn neighborhood where his eponymous global architecture firm maintains its NYC headquarters.
London’s Camden Highline is one step closer to becoming a reality
An ambitious (but obviously not unprecedented) vision to transform a roughly three-quarter-mile-long stretch of a long-disused railway viaduct in North London into a linear park celebrated a major milestone this week when the nonprofit Camden Highline submitted an application for the first phase of the project to planning officials. Set to link Camden Town with Kings Cross when eventually completed over several phases (the initial phase submitted this week stretches from Camden Gardens to Royal College Street), the Camden Highline is designed by an international design competition-winning team that includes two elevated urban park pros: James Corner Field Operations and Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, both on the core design team of New York City’s High Line alongside Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Joining JFCO and Oudolf are local firm vPPR Architects along with Street Space, Hew Locke, Speirs + Major, Pentagram, AKT II, Atelier Ten, Tony Gee, and RLB. Camden Highline Team, which won an international design competition held last year,
As noted by the Architects’ Journal, landscape architect James Corner has said that the roughly $44 million greenspace project will “celebrate and amplify the unique characteristics of the railway viaduct, dramatizing movement and discovery, set within a sequence of woodlands, meadows, and gardens.”
