Magazine

With a professional career of more than twenty years behind them, French architects Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal continue to pursue their own coherent, personal approach to architecture. Lacaton & Vassal have constructed a discourse of their own that, although seemingly simple,...

A living wall wrapping around the front door of the Little Owl Preschool is the first sign that something unique is afoot. The green surface is echoed in the second-floor roof terrace, but sustainable strategies extend to daylighting and ventilation, all contributing to a building geared to...

A series of roof vaults defines the various distinct yet interconnected volumes that comprise this large residence south of San Francisco. This distinction is increased by the use of various claddings -- concrete, stone, rainscreen systems -- towards breaking up the house into smaller parts...

Site - The property is located on a site with a slight incline, continuing towards a large valley, having trees around its perimeter as it was used for agricultural purposes. Description - The house project is an extensive area that is set out in a lineal manner, with all...

When a massive tsunami hit the northeastern coast of Japan this March, the city of Rikuzentakata in Iwate prefecture suffered catastrophic damage and lost near all its functionality as a city. In the aftermath temporary housing was built at a local auto-camp site. The detached houses, constructed...

The Great Sichuan Earthquake on May twelfth 2008 killed at least 69,000 people. Alone in the administrative district of Deyang, one hour north of Chengdu, more than 17,000 people were killed. Due to poor construction and corruption in the building industry at least 7,000 schoolrooms collapsed in...

Cleaning the facade of their own office building in the midst of an industrial area in a cyclically repeated rhythm is a representative outdoor exercise for the staff of a cleaning business. With its all-around glazing, the immaculate surface of this cubic building is the projection surface for a...

The University of Toronto Mississauga campus was founded in 1965 as Erindale College. The largest building back then was the megalithic concrete South Building by architect Raymond Moriyama. The satellite campus now includes multiple architecturally significant buildings by Kohn Shnier,...

An impressive lakeside vista in New York's Adirondack Mountains is preserved by spliitting this retreat into two volumes, each tucked into the hillside and covered with grass. One building groups the garage and master suite about a courtyard, while the larger structure situates a gym,...

On a large rural property in upstate New York, overlooking the Hudson Valley and the Catskill Mountains, sits the Won Dharma Center, "a spiritual community, where people from all walks of life study, ... live and work together." The beautiful setting is enhanced by the new buildings...

The plot of land for this project is adjoined to a large lake in a small town a few hours from Mexico City. In order to maximise the relationship with its setting, a system of long, rectangular structural shapes were decided upon, with one side completely open looking towards the lake. The...

The King County Library System is in the midst of a ten-year Capital Improvement Plan that has contributed a number of high-quality green buildings to Western Washington state. One such library, recently completed, is located just north of Seattle in suburban Kenmore, in a context of...

The Civic Center area of Denver, Colorado includes a number of governmental and cultural institutions. In the latter camp are the Denver Public Library (Michael Graves, 1995) and the Denver Art Museum (Gio Ponti, 1971 and Daniel Libeskind, 2006), and now the small but substantial Clyfford...

When what is called the “local character” of a town or village has to be defined by legislation, then something is seriously wrong. A living culture of building cannot be decreed by law. Daniel Fügenschuh has proven this once again in a subtle and innovative way.

This house on Higgins Lake in central Michigan adroitly balances various considerations of site: lake views, sunlight, winds, and so forth. An openness towards the lake on the upper floor is countered by a partially buried lower floor which receives light by one of two courtyards, the other...

Cloud 9's office building for the new 22@ district has won the top prize at this year's World Architecture Festival.

From the street this house has an unassuming appearnace, its low volumes converging towards the driveway. Yet a water feature, a large scupper extending from the garage, hints at the rest of the house’s delights. From the front, the two bars split to create an intimate open space while...

The Chinese artist Lei Yixin designed the newly opened Martin Luther King Memorial at the National Mall in Washington DC in the manner of Socialist Realism. The controversial question in the public was not so much the stylistic expression but more the fact that a Chinese artist got the commission...

Toronto’s Atelier Kastelic Buffey designed an elegant open-plan getaway for a ski-fanatical family with a taste for contemporary art.

Located between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the White River, 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park is a large outdoor canvas for exploring the relationship between contemporary art and nature. This happens via site-specific commissions, educational programs,...

Located on a former railyard in the South Bronx, the Mott Haven Educational Campus is easily the largest of fifteen new school buildings that opened in New York City in 2010. At over a quarter-million square feet the huge project appears smaller, due to a significant drop in grade from the...

While the SCI-Arc/CalTech team finished sixth (out of 19 teams) in the 2011 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, they created a house whose form and skin belie our assumptions about green building today. By wrapping the angular house in insulation pillows, it puts on display what is...

This house built by students at the University of Tennessee, College of Architecture and Design may recall other educational design-build programs of late, but the project looks back 75 years for inspiration. Sited amongst the historical Norris Homes of the Depression-era Tennessee Valley...

In the United States, a growing number of architecture schools are integrating design-build programs, where students collaboratively design and construct a building to gain experience about how a building goes together and how ideas translate into reality. A number of the programs follow the...

The international airport and the new deep-water port of Shanghai are located in the district of Nanhui, which is part of Pudong New Area. This suburban area with its huge infrastructure is the perfect place for production of export goods. Many factories are scattered across the former...

The Winona County History Center in southeastern Minnesota is located in a former National Guard Armory from 1915. This historic brick structure helped determine much of the Laird Norton Addition’s contemporary design, which occupies a surface parking lot immediately to the south....

The influence of Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006) on Japanese architecture can be seen in the work of Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima and numerous young studios. However, Shinohara's work is scarcely known in the West, in large part due to the very tight control that the architect exerted over the...

Even as other parts of the world build taller than the New York City and the rest of the United States, skyscrapers still get most of the attention in Manhattan. Yet low-rise buildings on an island defined by blocks and blocks of structures reaching for the sky can also offer architectural...

As Austin, Texas-based architect Vincent Snyder attests, at first glace the Ottmers Residence looks fairly traditional—recalling a barn or some other farm structure—but for its Hill Country context the architecture is quite modern. The house can be seen as rectangular box with a...

As green building becomes the norm rather than the exception, green features in a design can read like a laundry list of the same components and systems: low-e glazing, lo-flow toilets, recycled materials, etc. These features are certainly good, but they have become relatively easy to...

In the United States, a push for small class sizes and therefore small schools has reoriented educational architecture towards, among other things, campuses rather than megaschools. This approach results in projects—like the Marysville Gretchell High School north of Seattle—with...

Architecture is art of compromise. We learn form of building does not exist without context of its surroundings. It is not easy to create valuable space with a balance between elements. Even more, it is difficult to enrich the space with new elements in order to maintain its continuity of...

Tougaloo College is “a private, historically black, liberal arts institution” founded in 1869 on the northern edge of Jackson, Mississippi. The Bennie G. Thompson Academic & Civil Rights Research Center is the first building to be constructed on the historic 500-acre campus...

Retrofitting suburbia is a 21st-century concern in America as buildings created for short life spans now require attention. The infill and improvement of suburban sprawl towards more sustainable ends includes projects like this office building, located in a business park near the New Jersey...

Peters Park occupies a plot of land in Boston’s South End that was actually water before the city was built up in the 19th century. The park coincides with the Neck to the Shawmut Peninsula, a historic location without a trace of its watery past. Local residents formed the Neck Art...

Cheered on by a large, chic crowd gathered from the worlds of design and fashion into Harbourfront Centre, Azure magazine editor Nelda Rodger unveiled her Toronto-based journal’s first AZ Awards for excellence in international architecture and design one hot evening a couple of weeks...