New luxury resort casino will be regional draw for Shreveport, Louisiana area

New buildings in California must now be more sustainable under the state’s Green Building Standards Code, which took effect with the new year. CALGreen, the first statewide green building code in the country, requires new buildings to be more energy efficient, use less water, and emit fewer pollutants, among many other requirements. And they have the potential to affect LEED ratings.

Grubb & Ellis Company, a leading real estate services and investment firm, released its 2011 Real Estate Forecast, which foresees the start of a slow recovery in the leasing market for all property types in the coming year.

BIFMA International recently announced formal American National Standards Institute (ANSI) approval and release of the ANSI/BIFMA e3-2010 Furniture Sustainability Standard. The e3 standard represents a structured methodology to evaluate the "sustainable" attributes of furniture products and constitutes the technical criteria of the level product certification program.

Adrian D. Smith, FAIA, RIBA, is co-founder (with Gordon Gill) of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, Chicago. Previously, he was a design partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (1980-2003) and a consulting design partner from 2004 to 2006. His landmark structures include the Jin Mao Tower (Shanghai), Rowes Wharf (Boston), and Burj Khalifa (Dubai, U.A.E.), the world’s tallest structure. He recently collaborated with Gordon Gill to design the world’s first net-zero-energy skyscraper, Pearl River Tower, now nearing completion in Guangzhou, China. This account is based on his recent remarks at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Theater, music, and dance programs at Sam Houston State University have a new venue in the 101,945-sf, $38.5 million James and Nancy Gaertner Performing Arts Center. WHR Architects, Houston, designed the new center to connect two existing buildings at the Huntsville, Texas, campus.

The Hollywood/Vine Metro portal and public plaza in Los Angeles provides an entrance to the Red Line subway and the W Hollywood Hotel. Local architect Rios Clementi Hale Studio designed the portal and plaza to flow with the landmark theaters and plazas that surround it.

A new $90 million, 250,000-sf classroom and laboratory facility with a 450-seat auditorium for the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign is aiming for LEED Platinum.

Reserve Properties is transforming a 20th-century church into Bellefair Kew Beach Residences, a residential/retail complex in The Beach neighborhood of Toronto. Local architecture firm RAWdesign adapted the late Gothic-style church into a five-story condominium with 23 one- and two-bedroom units, including two-story penthouse suites. Six three-story townhouses also will be incorporated. The project will afford residents views of nearby Kew Gardens and Lake Ontario. One façade of the church was updated for retail shops.