The $500-million Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will raise the curtain this September on an eye-popping museum and theater complex that honors the past, is designed to resist future seismic forces and appears to defy the laws of gravity.
Returning a two-story section of a corner facade to its 1912 Beaux Arts look sounds simple enough: Remove the modern replacement and install a precast concrete replica of the original.
On the contrary, there was nothing simple about the elaborate storefront job.
The $250-million, 2.4-acre multilevel public outdoor space, which replaces an old Hudson River pier in Manhattan, uses precast concrete components, deep pilings and MEP systems in innovative ways. Says its project executive: "When I started working on the project, we weren't really sure if it could be built."
The project will connect more than four million Buenos Aires citizens to sewers via a network of collector tunnels, a wastewater treatment plant and an outfall.