Good afternoon and welcome back to another roundup of the day’s top news. Here’s what you need to know:
MVRDV reveals The Podium, a pink summer topper for Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut
For the 2022 edition of the Rotterdam Architecture Month Festival, hometown firm MVRDV has unveiled a temporary pavilion that will top the Het Nieuwe Instituut. Dubbed The Podium, the bright pink installation and accompanying staircase will allow visitors to walk up to the building’s roof and catch views of the surrounding city, and see themselves reflected in MVRDV’s adjacent Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen. The Podium will remain installed and publicly accessible from June 1 through August 17, and public programs will be held across the summer on the 6,458-foot event space.
The United Nations’ latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is increasingly dire
Two-hundred-and-seventy researchers from 67 countries collaborated on the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and the findings are dramatic—António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, called it a damning indictment of failed leadership.
Rising tides and temperatures, food insecurity, wars caused by scarce resources including water, and millions, if not hundreds of millions, of deaths are expected if drastic action isn’t taken to limit (or stop, essentially) the production of greenhouse gases immediately. While President Biden and the leaders of other major industrialized nations have, for the most part, pledged to keep average global warming constrained to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, we’re currently on track to hit 2-to-3-degree Celsius temperature rises before 2100.
H/t to the New York Times
Millennium Tower is now also sliding as it sinks and tilts
It’s a race against time for engineers to complete a fix for the sinking and tilting Millennium Tower in San Francisco. Even as the $100 million foundation stabilization scheme works to prop up the Handel Architects-designed luxury condo building, a new wrinkle has emerged only a month after reports that the tower was sinking faster than expected. It’s now come to light via documents provided to the city by engineer Ron Hamburger that the building has also slid an inch since it opened, leading to a large gap in the parking garage elevators. Hamburger reportedly doesn’t think the tower will slide any further during the repair process.
H/t to NBC Bay Area
The invasion of Ukraine could drive construction material costs even higher
The invasion of Ukraine by neighboring Russia has triggered a wave of protests by arts and architecture organizations and studios working internationally, but the ongoing conflict could also spell trouble for domestic construction projects. With Russia and Ukraine embroiled in a war, the prices of copper and aluminum, of which Russia is a major producer, are expected to rise even higher. Shipping traffic around the region has also ground to a halt, and with oil and gas from Russia shut off, the costs of transporting materials while the conflict rages on will only go up as well.
Germany will shift to 100 percent renewable power generation by 2035
With Germany’s plans to shutter all of its remaining nuclear plants by the end of this year in full swing and with the importance of weaning off of Russian natural gas more apparent than ever, the country is now shooting to produce all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2035, down from an original projection of 2040. Germany is already on track to produce 80 percent of its power from wind and solar sources by 2030.
H/t Reuters
