LJWorld.com / Magazine names 7 architectural wonders

Archive for Thursday, March 27, 2008

Associated Press

March 27, 2008

New York — From the tall tower in Dubai to a contemporary art museum on New York’s Lower East Side, noteworthy architecture is springing up around the globe. Conde Nast Traveler’s April issue picks seven designs as the “new seven wonders of the architecture world.” They are:

• Cumulus, an exhibit hall at Danfoss Universe, a science and technology museum in Nordborg, Denmark. The building has an irregular roof, all curves and angles, like a bite taken out of a cloud.

• Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building, which is under construction in the Middle East and is already more than 1,700 feet tall. The final height is a secret, but its developer, Emaar Properties, has previously said it will stop somewhere above 2,275 feet and will exceed 160 floors.

• London’s new Wembley Stadium, which seats 90,000 with no obstructed sight lines. A massive 436-foot-tall, 1,000-foot-long single arch braces the retractable roof. The stadium will be a centerpiece of the 2012 Olympics.

• New Museum of Contemporary Art, designed to resemble an off-kilter stack of silvery rectangles, located on the Bowery on Manhattan’s once-seedy, now-trendy Lower East Side.

• Kogod Courtyard, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., a curved roof made from a patterned grid of glass and steel above shallow pools in the courtyard of the Old Patent Office Building, also known as the Reynolds Center and home to the American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.

• Red Ribbon, Tanghe River Park, in Qinhuangdao, China, about 180 miles east of Beijing, a steel bench that runs a third of a mile through a riverbank garden and ecological oasis.

• The Crystal, a controversial new entryway and exhibit space at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, whose sharp, even jagged angles have not been universally loved by the locals. It was designed by Daniel Libeskind.