A San Francisco Giant—Years in the making—or decades, depending on how you’re counting—the eastern span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge finally opens today. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s John King runs down the design history of the bridge, talking to architects and engineers who supported and opposed the design of the self-anchored suspension bridge. Elsewhere in the paper, Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross describe how retail politics caused cost and deadline overruns for the project, to the tune of $6.4 billion dollars and 24 years, respectively. With the repairs finally behind the city—well, notwithstanding the two-dozen broken rods that will be repaired between now and December—the next phase of the project’s life begins: bitter recriminations. “Steve Heminger needs to be driven out of town by a lynch mob,” tweets @MarketUrbanism (Stephen Jacob Smith), of the Bay Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s executive director.
Whose Nokia House?—Microsoft has bought the Finnish company Nokia for $7.2 billion, ensuring that there will be a third mobile platform alongside Apple and Android. The Wall Street Journal reports on Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s efforts to cut costs at Nokia in advance of the sale. One of those cost-cutting measures was the December 2012 sale of the Pekka Helin–designed Nokia House headquarters, which Nokia today leases from another Finnish firm, Exilion. While reports in the Journal and The New York Times are discussing the sale as a difficult pill for Finland to swallow, it could open the way for a new Microsoft footprint in Scandinavia. As to what that might look like, consider the Microsoft headquarters designed by Henning Larsen for Copenhagen.
Remainders: Renzo Piano has been named a lifetime senator in Italy [AP]; the Met is looking for a curator of architecture and design [e-flux]; the worst in design, celebrated by Building Design‘s Carbuncle Cup [The Guardian]; a handsome Kate Downie exhibit at the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture [ArtDaily]; terrifying landscape-architecture-sculpture monsters [SmartPlanet].
For more news and views, sign up for the ARCHITECT Newswire, the best daily newsletter on architecture and architects.
Bay Bridge photo courtesy a Creative Commons license with Flickr user benjyfeen.
