Magazine

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...

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...

Seven rivers wend their way across Nebraska toward the Missouri River. Pollutants in the rivers have led the University of Nebraska at Omaha to construct research stations on their banks to monitor and study their contamination. The first station, designed by local architect Randy Brown, has...

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...

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...

In an effort to involve the public in exhibitions and discussions about architecture, local AIA chapters are increasingly opting for a storefront presence. Examples include the Center for Architecture in New York's Greenwich Village (2003) and now the recently completed exhibition and...

Creative responses to practical constraints are one mark of good architecture. This is evident in the curving section of the Shield House in Denver, Colorado, which responds to bulk plane restrictions. Offset by a rectangular volume, the curving wall also acts as a light scoop and provides...

Cleveland, like many American cities with an industrial past, has plenty of brownfield sites that are ripe for creative redevelopment. These 27 Townhouses, developed by Adobe Modern Lifestyle Developers and designed by DIMIT Architects, occupy a brownfield site east of downtown Cleveland,...

An existing maintenance building was renovated into the administrative center for the Claremont University Consortium, which provides services and programs for eight colleges in the Los Angeles area. The mundane nature of the original is transformed in LTL Architects' remarkable design...

One of the bright spots in architecture and construction during the recession is health care, stemming from the industry's growth to government spending and other factors. While this sector is highly specialized, the best medical architecture is cognizant of the way it fits into the urban...

In 2009 the first section of the High Line's transformation from a railway viaduct to an elevated park opened to the public, followed two years later by the second section north of 23rd Street. This 21st century park that threads its way through and alongside old industrial buildings has...

Santa Monica, California's Brooks + Scarpa Architects is internationally renowned for innovative, environmentally sustainable architecture. Their most prized work is at two diametrically opposed poles: affordable housing and high-end single-family homes; yet each is treated equally by the...

The New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects recently announced the recipients of 2012 Design Awards. One of the Honor Awards went to the Clyfford Still Museum by Allied Works, previously featured here as a

Parking garages may make for striking architecture in places like Miami, but ultimately they are occupy a realm below other building types because they house automobiles rather than people (minus some retail space tucked into the ground level of many). But this project in Juneau, Alaska by...

The Greater Texas Foundation "supports efforts to ensure all Texas students are prepared for, have access to, persist in, and complete post-secondary education." With this mission it's not surprising their new headquarters is located in Bryan, a small town near Texas A&M...

Rising on the southeastern quadrant of the University of Utah campus, the Natural History Museum of Utah is covered in a variegated pattern of copper panels that roots the building in the surrounding mountainous landscape. It is literally built into a footfhill slope of the Wasatch Mountain...

Charter schools, while part of the public education system, offer alternatives to traditional public schools. Many are started by non-profits and provide curriculum specialized in a certain area. The United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) works towards improving the Hispanic neighborhoods in...

Located in Easton, the seat of Northampton County, Pennsylvania, the Sigal Museum is one of four museums operated by the Northampton County Historical & Genealogical Society. It is home to "significant collections of pre-European settlement artifacts, decorative arts and textiles,...

The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University covers the art and science of ceramics through its two divisions: the School of Art & Design and the School of Engineering.The former recently expanded with a two-story building that is appropriately clad in a ceramic tube...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 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....

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...