SITIO welcomes Brooke Kervi to our team! Brooke joins us from Montana, bringing a variety of architecture experience from past internships while completing her studies at Montana State University. New to Philadelphia, Brooke is excited to explore this city and others along the east coast. In her spare time Brooke is a soup aficionado and enjoys cliff jumping when back home in Bozeman.
We’re excited to see City Hall’s Courtyard brought into the spotlight! As one of the City’s most iconic locations, the Courtyard is the obvious next public space to add to the recent revival of Dilworth Park and the soon to be completed Love Park. While at WRT, SITIO’s Antonio Fiol-Silva was Principal-in-Charge and Karen Blanchard was Project Architect of this project that produced a historical report and proposed a design vision for this unique space. Additionally, Fiol-Silva also served as a juror for the place-making grant from Southwest Airlines. For more information click here.
SITIO’s Antonio Fiol-Silva, as faculty member of the Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use, collaborated with the National League of Cities and the Urban Land Institute to study equity in development of public land in Grand Rapids. The national experts spent the week in Grand Rapids to learn more about community plans and programs, local development tools, and conducted interviews with key stakeholders. As part of their investigation they sought to answer: How can Grand Rapids align its community and economic development policies, practices, and incentives to achieve a more equitable city? Antonio Fiol-Silva remarked that there is broad recognition that inequities exist in the city “In this community, all need to have access to opportunity for the community to succeed.”
For more information on this collaboration click here.
The Rose Center for Public Leadership, jointly operated by the National League of Cities (NLC) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI), is working this week with Grand Rapids Mayor Rosalynn Bliss to explore new and innovative ways the city can best utilize public land and finance incentives to support the community’s vision of vibrant neighborhoods with high-quality parks, a riverfront recreation trail, more mobility and housing options and economic opportunity for people from all walks of life. The Rose Center's mission is to encourage and support excellence in land use decision-making by providing public officials with access to information, best practices, peer networks and other resources to foster creative, efficient, practical and sustainable land-use policies. Each year, the center's Daniel Rose Fellowship program invites the mayors of four large U.S. cities to select a team with land use decision-making authority to receive technical assistance on a local land-use challenge. More information can be found by clicking here.
On April 5th SITIO’s Principal Karen Blanchard will join an esteemed panel of female executives for the BISNOW Power Series : Women of Influence in Commercial Real Estate – A Celebration of Philadelphia’s Brightest Stars. By representing all walks of the Philadelphia built environment and real estate community, this panel discussion will create a unique opportunity to confer new trends, present current projects, and discuss opportunities and challenges of expanding the boundaries in a traditionally male dominated industry.
The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence (RBA) has named the SteelStacks Arts and Cultural Campus as one of the five finalists for its 2017 Gold and Silver medal prizes. Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, RBA is a biennial design award recognizing transformative places that contribute to the economic, environmental, and social vitality of American cities. Seventy-eight projects in 27 states have been honored since its founding. Finalists and medalists are chosen by a nationwide committee of urban experts through an in-depth evaluation process involving input from the award application, site visits, interviews with project participants and community members, and committee discussions. Next month the RBA staff will begin site visits to each finalist project in preparation for the committee’s selection of the medal winners in June. More information on all of the finalists can be found here.
“Over the past 30 years, the Rudy Bruner Award has honored a diversity of pivotal places, from Seattle’s Pike Place Market to Project Row Houses in Houston to New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, bringing to light their contributions to improving the quality of life in America,” says RBA Founder Simeon Bruner. “After 3 decades, we’re still discovering and recognizing new ways that public and private ingenuity and design can make our cities more accessible, inclusive, and beautiful for everyone.”
The SteelStacks Arts and Cultural Campus is truly a transformational project created by the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Bethlehem under the leadership of Executive Director Tony Hanna, that continues to enhance the historical Bethlehem Steel site with a vibrant arts and cultural community at both a local and regional level. SITIO's Antonio Fiol-Silva lead the SteelStacks Master Plan, The Levitt Pavilion, and the Hoover-Mason Trestle projects as Principal-In-Charge and Planner, and Karen Blanchard was the Design Architect. We’re excited to share this fantastic project with the jury.
This January SITIO’s Antonio Fiol-Silva, Chair of ULI Philadelphia and a member of the Philadelphia Historic Commission, moderated the panel discussion “Preserving the Past and Building the Future”. Fiol-Silva was joined on the panel by Jackie Buhn, president of AthenianRazak; Bobby Fijan, principal of Cross Properties; and Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance and former general manager of Reading Terminal Market. Click here to find more about the discussion in the latest issue ULI's international publication UrbanLand.
The SteelStacks campus was recently named Architect’s Newspaper 2016 Best of Design in Architectural Lighting. The jury noted the thoughtful attention of team collaborator L’Observatoire International to detail and the theatrical approach to lighting that illuminates the structure from within and behind to better highlight its volumes—emphasizing the drama of Bethlehem’s industrial heritage as a dynamic backdrop for both the Hoover-Mason Trestle and The Levitt Pavilion.
Additionally, team collaborator Blue Cadet recently won a W3 Best In Show Award for the interactive website and app developed for the Hoover-Mason Trestle. The W3 Awards honors creative excellence on the web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award websites, videos and marketing programs.
SITIO's Antonio Fiol-Silva lead the projects as Principal-In-Charge and Karen Blanchard was the Design Architect while at WRT.
SITIO’s Principal Karen Blanchard has been named the AIA Philadelphia 2017 President-Elect. Karen has been the Co-Chair of the AIA Philadelphia Women In Architecture Committee since 2013 and their Steering Committee since 2010, a member of the AIA Urban Design Committee, and currently sits on the AIA Philadelphia Board of Directors and their Executive Committee. In addition, she was presented the AIA Philadelphia Young Architect award in 2010 for past accomplishments and future promise.
“I look forward to represent and promote the value of the growing architecture community of Philadelphia” said Blanchard, “I believe we can further expand the opportunities to engage our membership - connecting allied, emerging, and established professionals in our Chapter.”
Taller Puertorriqueño celebrated the grand opening of El Corazón Cultural Center, a 25,000-square-foot cultural hub in North Philadelphia on December 7th. Occupying half of a city block, the new building is articulated into several finely scaled volumes that are assembled into one aggregate building. As a result, El Corazón Cultural Center fits into urban fabric while embracing the neighborhood scale; this can be seen in the multi-colored panels on the façade which reference the colorful palette of many Puerto Rican households in the surrounding community.
The new center includes performance space that can be subdivided into drama, dance and tutoring classrooms; an art gallery to showcase the work of local and national artists; a bilingual book and gift shop; and multiple classrooms that will allow for the expansion of art and information technology programs and after school activities. Two commercial grade kitchens support a meal service for after-school programs and summer camps allow for a gourmet café serving Puerto Rican cuisine to the community.
“The realization of Taller Puertorriqueño’s new Cultural Center is a dream long in the making,” said Antonio Fiol-Silva, Founding Principal of SITIO, the building’s architect working in partnership with WRT “All the elements are in place for the new building to become a vessel for the extraordinary array of offerings and programs that are destined to make El Corazón Cultural Center the cultural heart of our region’s Latino community.”
SITIO’s Antonio Fiol-Silva and Karen Blanchard are honored to jury the 2016 AIA Eastern Pennsylvania Design Awards. Awards of Excellence, Merit, and Special Citations will be presented to the winners at the President’s Night and Design Awards Presentation in Allentown on December 8th. Through this awards event, AIA Eastern Pennsylvania promotes and recognizes design excellence among its members and fosters public awareness of the Architect’s role in shaping the built environment.
This week Antonio Fiol-Silva joins mayors from four cities — Anchorage, Alaska; Grand Rapids, Michigan; San José, California and Washington, D.C., at the National League of Cities’ annual City Summit in Pittsburgh. This summit convenes more than 3,000 mayors, council members and other officials to explore and find solutions to the most pressing challenges currently facing cities. Topics to be discussed include economic development, technology and data use, sustainability and climate change, transportation, community relations and leadership development. The Rose Center for Public Leadership is a program of the National League of Cities in partnership with ULI, to foster creative, efficient, practical, and sustainable land use policies by providing public officials with access to information, best practices, peer networks, and other resources. Fiol-Silva has served on this National Advisory Board since 2011.