Magazine

11.12.2012

Building of the Week

Circuit of The Americas (COTA) is a new auto racing facility in Austin, Texas, that hosts events like the Formula 1 U.S. Grand Prix™. Architecture for motor sports runs the risk of being lost in the cars, crowds, and advertising, but Miró Rivera Architects' designs...


03.12.2012

Building of the Week

The winding Cumberland River cuts the city of Nashville, Tennessee, roughly in half, a situation that necessitates a number of bridges to traverse the waterway. A density of bridges occurs near downtown, including the Shelby Street Bridge, whose distinctive truss structure originally carried...


30.11.2012

Building of the Week

Located on the 185,000-square-meter site of a former ranch in Taikicho, Hokkaido, Même Meadows is a unique research facility for studying design responses to the region’s harsh climate. The environmental technology research institute based at the Meadows focuses on the collaborative...


26.11.2012

Building of the Week

Ohio is home to enough starchitect-designed buildings—by the likes of Coop Himmelb(l)au, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and SANAA—to make the state a must on any archi-tourist's radar. But cultural icons alone, like Farshid Moussavi's MOCA Cleveland, do not a city make....


19.11.2012

Building of the Week

The town of Bethlehem in eastern Pennsylvania was home to the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, which churned out steel for buildings, ships, and weapons for close to 150 years. The company went bankrupt in 2001 after decades of decline, selling its six plants two years later. This move led to...


12.11.2012

Building of the Week

Studio 804 is the final design studio for graduate students at the University of Kansas (KU) School of Architecture, Design and Planning in Lawrence, Kansas. While the design-build studio is typically focused on sustainable housing for disadvantaged communities, their latest undertaking is a...


05.11.2012

Building of the Week

Schwarze und weiße Rechtecke ergießen sich in einem regelmäßigen Muster über das Haus. Es erinnert an ein Schachbrett, hat aber auch etwas von den weiß verschneiten Bergen, die Innsbruck umringen.


05.11.2012

Building of the Week

The E.J. Ourso College of Business's new Business Education Complex is comprised of four volumes: a circular commons, a semi-circular auditorium, and two rectangular classroom wings. Facades of wood, glass, and bronze look upon a landscaped courtyard at the project's center. Ikon.5...


01.11.2012

Building of the Week

With its complex of halls and meeting spaces, the Kanazawa Umimirai Library, designed by Coelecanth K&H, serves as the core of a new community in the castle district of Kanazawa. Twenty-five pillars support the 45-meter-square, 12-meter-high space, lending it a sense of presence fitting to a...


29.10.2012

Building of the Week

In contrast to the "existing Beverly Hills clichés," as architect Dan Brunn calls them, Yojisan's quiet facade of cedar, Cor-ten steel, and glass greets passersby along North Beverly Drive, just steps away from Wilshire Boulevard. Inside, the home for Yoji Tajima's haute...


15.10.2012

Building of the Week

The form and construction of the Harvest Pavilion at Common Ground High School in New Haven, Connecticut, may be simple, but the result is a very appealing building whose character changes during the day and when open or closed. This responds to the pavilion's various uses: It serves to...


08.10.2012

Building of the Week

In what is common in many parts of the United States, Santa Monica, California's industrial buildings have been transformed into office spaces for replacement business, in this case for entertainment and tech companies. Many of these old industrial spaces near Los Angeles feature large...


01.10.2012

Building of the Week

Buildings for wineries have become one of the most unexpected typologies for high-profile architecture, resulting in designs by Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, Herzog & de Meuron, Steven Holl, and other household names. Yet flashy forms are not appropriate for all vitners. Studio B...


01.10.2012

Building of the Week

By digging into the terraced building site, architect Keisuke Maeda of UID created a living area that is protected from the elements yet strongly connected to the land. His “House on the Surface of the Earth” is not a pre-conceived structure simply set on the ground, but rather a...


24.09.2012

Building of the Week

For some time now Belgian architecture has been forging ahead as one of the most interesting in Europe. Following in the wake of more consolidated studios like Robrecht en Daem (2G N.55), Xaveer De Geyter or Stéphane Beel is a new generation of top-notch architects such as De Vylder...


18.09.2012

Building of the Week

Massachusetts' Cape Cod is famous for, among other things, the namesake style of residential architecture that started hundreds of years ago but has persevered in suburban landscapes across the country. The traditional form and construction was a response to the cape's harsh natural...


11.09.2012

Building of the Week

While every four years the Summer Olympics brings attention to the host city and the architecture built to serve the games and the athletes, the impact of the Olympics is geographically much larger. Taking into account the trials that determine which athletes are sent to compete is one such...


03.09.2012

Building of the Week

Architecture may result in buildings, but it is as much process as stable forms. This fact is evident in this house in Upstate New York designed by New York City's Grzywinski + Pons; what looks to be a design strongly determined by its skin is actually a result of factors beyond the...


30.08.2012

Building of the Week

Gradually, housing developers are beginning to respond to demographic change. The complex called “generations : housing on the mühlgrund”, which Hermann Czech, Adolf Krischanitz and Werner Neuwirth have recently completed, does something more. It is an attempt, using various...


28.08.2012

Building of the Week

In May the Brooklyn Botanic Garden opened its new Visitor Center, designed by architects WEISS/MANFREDI. Partners Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi actually live nearby, and maybe that proximity allowed them to craft a building that appreciates the existing characteristics of the place while...


20.08.2012

Building of the Week

The Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is not alone in having to deal with a lack of land, symptomatic of development in American cities and suburbs. Yet this condition is balanced by the growing trend of cremation and other above-ground burials, which has pointed the way for...


14.08.2012

Building of the Week

Almost half of the pig production worldwide takes place in China today. Until the 1990s, many families in the villages surrounding the cities produced pigs for their own consumption or for the local market. With the rapid urbanisation and the transformation of the villages into residential...


13.08.2012

Building of the Week

Part rain shelter, sunshade, and weather vane, the Cotillion Pavilion is also a contemporary means of making a public park a distinctive place. As architect Mell Lawrence describes in his answers to our Q&A about the pavilion, it is just one of many structures that the city of Dallas is...


06.08.2012

Building of the Week

The Middlebrook Studios are four sleep/work cabins south of San Francisco that benefit from views of the Pacific Ocean. Architect Cass Calder Smith designed the cabins to go above and beyond the local green-building requirements; most notable is a prefabricated steel canopy that straddles the...


30.07.2012

Building of the Week

Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital was founded in 1811, when the United States could boast of only two hospitals. Two centuries later that number exceeds 5,000, and medical facilities are one of the few building types booming during the economic slowdown. A small addition to Mass...


16.07.2012

Building of the Week

Previously, World-Architects featured the Covington Farmers Market, designed and built by the design/buildLAB at Virginia Tech. That structure reused wood from a warehouse whose site...


11.07.2012

Building of the Week

Vancouver’s Patkau Architects submitted a poetic and serene solution to last years annual Winnipeg Skating Shelters design competition for the City of Winnipeg. Winnipeg is a city of 600,000 residents located on the Canadian prairie. It is the coldest city of its size outside of...


09.07.2012

Building of the Week

Stefano Boeri is one of the few practices of international renown that has managed to overcome the difficulties intrinsic to the situation Italy presents for architecture studios and to make of these a virtue. His career as an architect has gone hand in hand...


09.07.2012

Building of the Week

Cookie cutter retail environments may promote brand recognition, but often at the expense of spaces that respond to their contexts. Anthropologie, like another company that starts with A, opts for unique stores that nevertheless convey the character of the brand. Fifteen of the stores have...


02.07.2012

Building of the Week

Portland Community College (PCC) is the largest institute of higher learning in Oregon, with close to 100,000 students enrolling every year. Three campuses serve the various needs of the students, while seven smaller centers make up PCC's Extended Learning Campus. Newberg Center opened in...


25.06.2012

Building of the Week

Time spent in high school chemistry class will no doubt make one realize that the name of this house refers to salt (Sodium Chloride). The white walls and cantilevered volumes certainly warrant the moniker, given that salt is marked by a cubic crystal structure. But it is not an arbitrary...


18.06.2012

Building of the Week

The Edge House marks itself in the mountains of Northwest Connecticut with two curved walls in vertical cedar boards, one gray and one red. The latter acts as the house's spine and its circulation, also sheltering the occupants from prevailing winds. The gray wall is broken by rectilinear...


11.06.2012

Building of the Week

At World-Architects.com, we are interested in the evolving nature of the workplace, especially in terms of technology's influence. Both the location of work and the design of its setting are changing as service-sector work relies increasingly on portable computing and wireless...


06.06.2012

Building of the Week

A wedding in China is an issue in which many aspects have to be considered. First one needs a lucky date, chosen by an expert, for the traditional family party. However, before the party takes place, the bride and groom need an official certificate issued by the Civil Affairs Department....


28.05.2012

Building of the Week

In 1947, two years after its founding, Roosevelt University moved into the historic Auditorium Building in Chicago's Loop, after buying the building for a dollar. Six decades later, in a downtown that has seen numerous transformations, including a developing cluster of nearby colleges and...


21.05.2012

Building of the Week

When a city opts to utilize prototype designs for public buildings, the results are often cheap and ugly; repurposed trailers or other modular units come to mind. But Houston, Texas has a recipe for good civic architecture in the first of what could be many police stations designed by Roth...