Tips and tricks to help you specify the right building-products and design better buildings.
A new name, an eponymous new typeface by Chester Jenkins of Pentagram, and a landmark headquarters r enovated and reimagined by a complex array of design professionals signaled last December’s long-awaited $91 million reopening of America’s official museum of global design excellence, The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. The design team included Gluckman Mayner, Beyer Blinder…
On March 12, 2015, the architecture and design world lost one of its greats: Michael Graves, whose w ide-ranging practice included pioneering Post-modernism to popular products for the likes of Alessi, Target and J.C.Penney. With some thousands of design to his name, Graves is gone but certainly not forgotten, and his legacy will endure both in…
Forget Apple’s sleek new headquarters in Cupertino — if any building might represent the iPhone in a rchitectural form, this is it. Today sees the opening of the new contemporary art wing of the Corning Museum of Glass. The client for this major civic project in upstate New York, Corning Inc., produces Gorilla Glass, used for…
China’s economy might be slowing a bit, but it is still in relative boomtimes, growing at a ra te of 7.5% in 2014. The last decade has thus seen development happening at astounding rates, including speculative projects that were never really necessary, or perhaps will not be necessary for many years. In addition to ghost towns,…
When Gustave Eiffel completed his tower for the 1889 World Fair in Paris, the observation deck typol ogy was truly born. The success of that structure – it remains the most visited paid monument in the world – illustrated the power of the humble viewing platform to transform a city’s economic fortunes and its architectural identity…
Dan Kiley was no ordinary gardener. His landscape designs alongside Mid-century masters such as Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, I.M. Pei, and Kevin Roche were, by many accounts, the beginning of Landscape Modernism. His distinct brand of design took the fundamentals of French garden design to new places, giving them a Modernist sensibility, free from the…
While utopias are products of an immanently positive act of design, dystopias have the potential to use failure to inform our architectural and social reality.
With the its local scene gaining momentum, the Chicago Architecture Biennial is threatening to steal some of the Venice Biennale’s thunder. (Please don’t give me concrete shoes!) One of the most exciting things in Chicago — and part of what is fueling the momentum of the Biennial — is the schools there. They have a…
During my lifetime, the only notable new construction in my hometown has been a basketball arena, th e KFC Yum! Center. Sure, we have the late Michael Graves’s Humana Building, but since its debut in 1985, Louisville’s architectural legacy has barely moved past postmodernism. The new millennium bore the promise of the REX-designed Museum Plaza, a…