The Lavezzorio Community Center is the central hub in the heart of the SOS Children’s Village in Chicago, Illinois. This building was designed by architect Jeanne Gang to combine several social services and neighborhood amenities to serve  children and their families. The community center serves the nearby Auburn-Gresham neighborhood populated by foster-care families, women, and children in a mix of single family homes and apartments.

The interior of the structure makes use of expansive, open, and naturally lit spaces to encourage learning opportunities and social interaction. The ground-floor of the structure includes daycare classrooms and caseworker’s offices and counseling areas located on the second-floor.

Also on the second-floor is a large, multi-purpose community room which also includes similar lighting and usage of natural elements as the ground-floor.

The transitional spaces between the first and second floors was also carefully designed with the building’s use in mind. The structural staircases serves as a “mountain-like” landscape for playing, climbing, performing, and socializing.

The Lavezorrio Community Center is a significant structure as it demonstrates ways in which design allows a building with a specific intended use to reach its full potential while still remaining aesthetically pleasing.

Century Link Field designed by Ellerbe Becket ad was built between the 2000s and 2002. Century-link cost $360 million to build and is now home for the Seattle Seahawks. The stadium is one of the most beautiful sNFL stadiums in the country, located in downtown Seattle. It seats 72,000 people. Century link is also a sustainable building helping to reduce consumption and reserve and preserve energy.

Century link holds so much beauty not only is it a place to bring the community together, put on some American football, put on some soccer but it is also a place that resembles that anything is possible. There are built in reminders all over the stadium showing past people or accomplishments of old NFL players, soccer players, coaches, teams and a Super bowl Championship banner.

The stadium also has a built in sound meter measuring how loud the stadium gets. which i think is the coolest thing about the building. It shows how we can all come together and do something, how each voice matters, what we can accomplish when we work together. century link is known to be the loudest stadium in the country. Thats the true beauty of it all is that a stadium can bring that many people together to accomplish something so amazing.

The Space Needle designed by Edward Carlson, John Graham Jr. and Victor Steinbrueck opened April 21, 1962. The Space Needle took exactly 400 days to build and had cost $4.5 million dollars to build. Every year there are over 1.3 million people who visit the Space Needle. The Space Needle stands 605 feet up in the air and is one of the most beautiful and unique building in Seattle Washington.

I have lived in Washington  my whole life and I have only visited the space Needle twice. The reason fro that is it a place you an only visit so often or else the true beauty of the building fades away with each time you visit. The reason I love the space needle is so beautiful to me is not only because of the pure intelligence of the building itself, or the amazing  views surrounding it but because of the idea that once in you get into the elevator on the first floor it takes only 43 seconds to reach the top floor which is 520 feet int he air.

The idea of thinking I can go from zero feet off the ground to 520 feet off the ground in 43 seconds hits me deep. It opened my eyes to realizing that in 43 seconds anything ca happen, you could be up in the air, you could change your mind about something, you could meet someone or your life could change.

The Space Needle is famous for those 43 seconds and i completely understand why it truly is incredible and it has more meaning that what it is doing or given credit for.

Probably my favorite work by Heneghan, the Museum Tonofenfabrik in Lahr, Germany was an old clay factory that has been redesigned into a museum about the city of Lahr (Heneghan Peng architects). What I love so much about this building is the juxtaposition to all of the buildings around it. Especially since it is still connected to part of the clay factory, I feel that walking through the museum would lend itself to the feeling of walking back in time and then returning back to your current era. I am a sucker for minimalistic buildings with clean lines and sleek figures and this building does it perfectly. It is a relatively common shape, lending itself to looking like a parking garage or staircase, but it is done so elegantly that it becomes its own creature. A seemingly otherworldly figure surrounded by its ancestors from an earlier time.

heneghan peng architects. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hparc.com/work/stadtmuseum-lahr-germany

In stark contrast to the natural and warm aesthetic in the Airbnb EMEA office that Heneghan designed, Quellos Fitout, an asset management firm, is very minimalistic and rigid with simple color schemes. (Heneghan Peng architects). The lack of door handles and wall decor really allows the viewers eyes to wander throughout the entire space rather than focus on a specific object. The simple white and silver color scheme is very clean and professional. Instead of making work more like home, this building allows for a stark contrast between home life and work life.

heneghan peng architects. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hparc.com/work/office-fitout

Created in one of the few remaining classic Dublin dockands styled buildings, the Airbnb EMEA office designed by Heneghan is three floors and holds 400 people (Commercial). As you can see from the pictures, it utilized a lot of the styles we talked about in regards to high efficiency buildings. It uses a staircase as the focal point from a viewer but also as a centerpiece for the residents. It has large windows allowing tons of natural light to flow into the building during peak work hours. Furthermore, the open floor plan allows for easy collaboration as well as lets natural light travel further into the crevices and recesses of the building.

Commercial. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hparc.com/work/category/commercial

The Lighthouse in Glasgow, formerly a building for the Glasgow Herald that Mackintosh designed, is Scotland’s Center for Design and Architecture. It is truly an incredible building inside and out, it manages to work well at blending in yet standing out with its  surroundings. The way the design manipulates light is especially visible when looking down the spiral staircase. I would say this is an extremely interesting piece of architecture that i enjoyed researching.                                   

The next work I have selected is the Queens Cross Church in Glasgow. Why this is significant is because it was the only church built that Mackintosh designed. The theme seems to be mostly modern gothic which seems in tune with Mackintosh designs. While this used to be a former church of Scotland it was decommissioned in the 1970’s and now serves as the home of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh society. The site is currently open as a tourist attraction and I plan to visit when eventually go to Scotland.

The Glasgow School of Art is what primarily Charles was made an international presence from. Work began on this building in 1897 and was finished in 1909. In this building you can see his influence and what some could consider the start of modernism. The school is considered one of the leaders in design education as well as one of the cities most iconic landmarks. Unfortunately the majority of the building was destroyed in a fire in 2018. Overall I find this building extremely interesting, the design looked like something that would have been made in the 2000’s but to learn it was done in 1909 was surprising.

Announced in 1992 and expected to be finished at the end of this year, the Grand Egyptian museum, complete with sculpture gardens and an entrance marked with a huge statue of Ramses II, is going to be the largest archeological museum in the world (Sattin 2020). It is expected to attract over 7 million visitors a year. It makes use of a 162-foot elevation change between the Nile valley and the Giza plateau and is built on a slope. It is triangular in shape and grows as the visitors get closer to the pyraminds. The building is divided into four galleries and ends with large windows that look over the pyramids. There was an architecture competition to decide the design of the building and Heneghan won the competition. The main material used for the building is alabaster with supports of metal.

Sattin, A. (2020, January 16). Everything We Know About Cairo’s New Grand Egyptian Museum. Retrieved March 24, 2020, from https://www.cntraveler.com/story/grand-egyptian-museum-cairo-everything-we-know