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Adjaye Associates and Studio Zewde will overhaul the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center campus in Brooklyn

New York governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled the winning proposal for the 7.2-acre redevelopment of an underutilized portion of the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center campus in East Flatbush. Adjaye Associates and Studio Zewde are helming the design of the $400 million affordable housing complex that will replace it.

The newest Commission of Fine Arts is sworn in, with Billie Tsien as its chair Prefab start-up wunderkind Katerra shuts down

Katerra, the modular prefabrication start-up and timber innovator that acquired Michael Green Architecture and Lord Aeck Sargent in 2018, went bankrupt and was forced to shut down. According to internal communications released on June 1, the company had to let its thousands of employees go and drop its construction projects.

Donald Judd’s Architecture Office in Marfa severely damaged by fire

For the first time in its 111-year history, the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., has a female chair. The commission voted at its monthly meeting on June 17 to make architect Billie Tsien its new chair and Howard University educator Hazel Ruth Edwards vicechair, effective immediately. A two-story commercial building at 102 North Highland Avenue in Marfa, Texas, best known as the Architecture Office of Donald Judd, caught fire on June 4. The interior of the building, which was empty at the time and is currently undergoing an extensive renovation led by SCHAUM/SHIEH, was damaged.

OMA will build out the first American Pompidou Center in Jersey City Counterspace’s Serpentine Pavilion opens at Kensington Gardens (and elsewhere across London)

Three years after OMA was selected by the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency to design a new museum in Journal Square, it was revealed that the building would be home to none other than the Pompidou Center’s first North American satellite: the Centre Pompidou × Jersey City. The museum will be housed inside the redeveloped 1912 Pathside Building.

The world’s deepest pool opens in Dubai, complete with subaquatic ruins

Designed by Johannesburg, South Africa–based collaborative architectural studio Counterspace, the 20th Serpentine Pavilion is currently on view at its customary location: an expanse of lawn at the Serpentine Galleries in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, London. Fragments of the main structure can be found elsewhere across the city.

Police precinct at the center of 1967 Newark Rebellion will be converted into a social justice museum

Dubai is now home to the world’s deepest swimming pool, with a depth of 197 feet. Dubbed Deep Dive Dubai, it’s the world’s deepest pool for diving and features the ruins of a graffiti-covered forsaken city so massive that it can be fully explored only over the course of several dives. On the 54th anniversary of the July 1967 Newark Rebellion, Mayor Ras J. Baraka unveiled plans for the Newark Community Museum. The new institution, designed by Gensler, will grow from the same building that served as the flash point for those events: the city’s infamous Fourth (now First) Precinct police station.

SWA Group’s permanent Sandy Hook memorial in Connecticut, The Clearing, will break ground this August Richard Meier retires as his eponymous firm changes its name and restructures

The Clearing, a meditative memorial site designed by SWA Group to remember the 26 lives lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School on the morning of December 14, 2012, was recently approved by voters in Newtown, Connecticut. Construction on the $3.75 million landscape, sitting on a donated 5-acre site in Newtown, will begin in August. Richard Meier & Partners Architects—now known only as Meier Partners—announced that its founder, Pritzker Prize–winning architect Richard Meier, has retired from the New York firm. Dukho Yeon, a firm veteran of 30 years, is now partner and lead designer, while George H. Miller was named a partner and chief operating officer.

Quentin Tarantino buys L.A.’s historic Vista Theatre

Quentin Tarantino is best known as the director of Pulp Fiction, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, and other award-winning films. But he’s also a preservationist with a side hustle: buying and operating historic movie theaters.

Tarantino is also something of a design critic, with strong opinions about trends in the design and layout of contemporary cinemas, particularly those that feature “LaZ-Boy” seating and keep the lights on during movie showings.

In July, he revealed that he had purchased the Vista Theatre, a 1923 single-screen, art deco movie palace at 4473 Sunset Boulevard in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The Vista is one of a dwindling number of vintage movie theaters that haven’t been twinned or converted into churches. The theater has been closed since last year owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a “To be continued...” message plastered on its marquee.

“I bought the Vista,” Tarantino announced on the July 5 episode of Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s Armchair Expert podcast. “We’re going to probably open it up around Christmastime.”

Originally known as the Lou Bard Playhouse, the Vista was designed by Lewis A. Smith and initially had 838 seats. The owners later removed every other row to give patrons more legroom, dropping its capacity to 400. It’s a local landmark, and the interior has an Egyptian motif. The theater’s forecourt features the handprints and footprints of celebrities whose films have been shown there over the years, including Spike Jonze, Martin Landau, and Barry Bostwick. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

The Vista is the second vintage movie theater Tarantino has purchased. In 2007, he bought the New Beverly Cinema at 7165 Beverly Boulevard, a 300-seat theater in a building that also dates from the 1920s, to save it from redevelopment.

The New Beverly is a revival theater where Tarantino mostly shows classic or notable older movies, often from his own collection, on film, not via digital projection. It was also closed during the COVID-19 pandemic but reopened last month.

With the Vista, he told Armchair Expert, there will be a slight twist.

“Again, only film,” he said. “But it won’t be a revival house. We’ll show new movies that come out, where they give us a film print. We’ll show new stuff. It’s not going to be like the New Beverly. The New Beverly has its own vibe. The Vista is like a crown jewel kind of thing. And so it’ll be like the best prints. We’ll show older films, but they’ll be older films and you can hold a four-night engagement.”

Tarantino also weighed in on theaters that aren’t reopening after the pandemic.

“I never like any theater closing,” he said. “But some of these exhibitors who are going, they [effing] deserve to go. They’ve taken all the specialness out of movies anyway, some of these chains, where they’re showing commercials all through it, they don’t turn the lights down, everything is stadium seating, plastic shit. It’s all about popcorn and watching a movie at [effing] Chuck E. Cheese.”

Exhibitors who don’t pay attention to presentation may be hurting their own chances of survival, Tarantino warned.

“There used to be even a tad of presentation going on,” he said. If “those guys shut down, they’ve been writing their own epitaph for a long time, but they just figured the business would take you along. It’s been crazy during my whole career to see how the film experience is lessened for the viewer. Like every five years, it’s lessened by another big jump.”

Tarantino said he believes certain “boutique cinemas” are poised to thrive now that COVID-19 restrictions are being relaxed.

But he clarified that “I’m not talking about the La-Z-Boy, order nachos and margaritas.”

“Actually, I like the Alamo Drafthouse [a cinema chain that offers in-movie food and drink service] a lot, but I’m not really down with that whole layout. I’ve got a living room. I want to go to a movie theater. I don’t want to re-create my living room.”

Tarantino said he has no intention of saving the Cinerama Dome, however, another vintage theater in Los Angeles that closed during the pandemic and faces an uncertain future.

Part of the ArcLight Cinemas chain that in April disclosed that it was ceasing operations, the Cinerama Dome opened in 1963 and was designed by Welton Becket & Associates with a curved screen and a geodesic dome for its roof. Some fans have been hoping Tarantino might buy it and preserve it, because he featured it in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, but he said he thinks someone else will come along.

“It’s not like they are going to demolish the Cinerama Dome,” he said. “Somebody’s going to buy it. There are so many different options that could work out. I’m not that worried about it, to tell you the truth.” Ed Gunts

Read more at archpaper.com