Practice

Changing a wall landscape to increase storage or display new decorative objects is not only time-con suming, but tedious. But there are alternatives to the nail-and-hammer method for those who are less handy or who don’t want to waste time and energy plying out drywall anchors and patching up holes, among other messy tasks: A growing…

As New York City planners and developers continue to develop the long-neglected waterfronts along th e East River, a new proposal begins to take shape. In North Brooklyn, the former industrial site that was home to the Astral Oil Works refinery has finally been secured by the city after a contested battle to purchase the last…

“Architects should sketch. I am convinced of this,” says Bob Borson of MMB Architects. “I haven’t ev er — I mean EVER — personally met an architect who I thought was a good designer who didn’t sketch.”

Within the last decade, mixed-use and multifamily residential projects have been on the risearound t he world. Substantial movements toward urbanism and new solutions to housing supply shortages in cities like Los Angeles have spurred the need for denser, bigger housing. But while these projects have had a positive impact on the industry as a whole…

“We were a part of defining the project, not merely the creative problem-solvers.”

“For as long as architecture has been reduced to a service to society or an ‘industry’ whose ultimat e goal is only to build, there have been others who imagine it instead as a field of intellectual research: energetic, critical, radical,” states Giovanna Borasi in her essay “Another Way of Building Architecture.”

When New York City–based equities trader Laurence Cohen purchased one of the three floor-through uni ts in Obsidian House, he also heeded signs to treat the new home as a blank canvas. The 38-year-old had spent the previous decade in a low-ceilinged postwar apartment building in Greenwich Village, and Obsidian House’s Tribeca location, history of innovation…

Earlier this month, a popular Washington, D.C.–based architecture commentator took to one hometown n ewspaper to mull local developers’ propensities for all-glass new construction. Was the material’s popularity, combined with limitations like the city’s famous height moratorium, producing look-alike buildings? The thought piece imagined differentiating future projects with traditional materials or higher-flying design. And while these…

New York is a city full of aging buildings, manufactured in brick, terra cotta, cast iron and other materials vulnerable to time, erosion and gravity. Therefore, it represents a significant market for architects working in preserving, restoring and evaluating the resilience of historic architecture. “Because of the density and because of the amount of people…