Magazine

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...

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...

The women’s housing project [ro*sa] is a piece of applied utopia. After a lengthy, discursive incubation period Köb&Pollak Architektur, together with the developer WBV-GPA, have carried out a building that allows enough room for the individual as well as the community, Tailor-made...

The Levine Center for the Arts in Charlotte, North Carolina is made up of four downtown venues that instill culture in a city better known for banking, finance and racing. One such component is the Mint Museum Uptown, which houses a collection of art, craft and design and international traveling...

The Astronomy Department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts was created in 1901, housed in a building that now takes the name of school trustee and donor Sarah E. Whitin. A small expansion and restoration by Boston-based designLAB architects had to contend with a century of use and...

In recent years the countries of the former Yugoslavia have experienced a fascinating cultural transformation that has also affected architecture. Since it was founded in 2001 (following the split of the studio njiric+njiric), the work of the Croatian studio njiric+ arhitekti, led by Hrvoje...

Kunshan is a town in the Yangtze River Delta near Shanghai. Many of the old canals in the city are converted into six-lane streets. For local residents it is difficult to find an atmospheric spot which reflects the former close relationship between nature and the urban environment in the...

Architects Kathryn Ogawa and Gilles Depardon note that Wabi-Sabi – the concept of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature – influenced the design of this 11-story building in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Imperfection here is clearly found in the Cor-Ten steel...

Strongly informed by site conditions, both locally and regionally, inform Studio created a stunning branch for the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) that is rooted in its place. The building acts as a bridge over an internal roadway to accommodate parking and protect the site’s landscape...

A radiating plan that reaches towards the water defines this house designed by Connecticut-based Centerbrook Architects and Planners. Further an embedding of natural features (rocks, logs) gives the project its distinctive blend of modernism and nature. The architects answered some questions...

According the U.S. General Service Administration (GSA), “border station architecture is an emerging building type [that] did not exist until the early decades of the 20th century.” This century’s post-September 11th climate means more and more border stations are being...

Described by The New York Times five years ago as “the next cool New York City neighborhood,” Bushwick was a low-income area of Brooklyn that has undergone transformation via the influx of artists, then students, and now middle- income residents. One physical sign of this...

Since its foundation in 2006, the work done by Ábalos+Sentkiewicz, has stood out on the Spanish and international architecture scene for its original synthesis of technical rigour, formal richness and its integrating of architecture, landscape and environment. 2G issue number 56...

De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop is one of the recipients of The Architectural League’s 2011 Emerging Voices, an award that “spotlights individuals and firms with a distinct design ‘voice’ that has the potential to influence the discipline of architecture,...

On January 15 the Museum of the Moving Image opened an expansion that doubles its size to approximately 100,000 square feet. The museum renovated its landmark 1920’s building—appropriately a film studio originally—and added a striking pale blue volume at the rear, covered in...

SUE Architekten have transformed a dilapidated corner building on the market square in Ottensheim into an open local authority building in which old and new form a perfect symbiosis. The beauty of the historic vaulting, frescoes, wood ceilings and inlays in the renovated existing building has...

The Beijing-based magazine World Architecture celebrated its 30th anniversary this autumn. Every second year the magazine organizes the WA Chinese Architecture Awards. The jury for the award in 2010 selected three prizes and five honorable mentions. Two school buildings in remote areas and a...

Los Angeles may be a city known more for its sprawl that its urban core, but downtown is home to a density of high-profile contemporary architecture by the likes of Frank Gehry, Rafael Moneo, and Morphosis. Across the street from the last’s Caltrans District 7 Headquarters is the Los...

A more fitting moniker for this project – a mix of condos, artist’s work spaces, and retail – might be “The Green Lofts,” owing to the striking rainscreen that covers part of the façade. Front Studio Architects answered some questions about their design...

The International Living Building Institute’s Living Building Challenge could be described as extreme green; it “defines the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment possible today.” BNIM’s Omega Center for Living is one of the first buildings...

Architects John Beard and Dale Riser describe their designs as "uniquely Southern," modernist takes on the region's vernacular buildings. That quality is apparent in this house in Mississippi, a design in two parts that reads like it was built at one time for one family. The...

In Istanbul, prisms of glass and mirrors form a kaleidoscopic geometry that reflects people’s movements with a distortion of gravity. Human activity is thus transformed into representation.

Brick and wood overlap in the curves that give this Midwestern house its moniker. Kansas City’s Hufft Projects crafted these and other materials—in many cases doing the fabrication themselves—into an embracing, sustainable modern residence. The architects answered some...

Located in the "hidden canyon" of LA's Glassell Park neighborhood, the Hidden House by Standard embodies the best of that cities residential architecture. It recalls the houses of R.M. Schindler and other European expatriates who embraced the landscape with their expressions of...

Once in a (great) while, Italy’s public institutions succeed in getting things done! After the slow passing of administrative time, Rome has received two new museum buildings that open the city to contemporary times: the MAXXI and the MACRO.

Citygarden is a new "urban oasis" in downtown St. Louis, on axis with that city's popular Gateway Arch. A hybrid between a sculpture garden, botanic garden and city park, the design was spearheaded by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, with two buildings designed by local...

KPF answered some questions about their One Jackson Square project in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, described by the architects as "a ‘found' object, like a rock in a rushing stream that influences the shape and form of the water flowing over it."

The redesign of the Domplatz is intended to extend the lively inner city atmosphere of the Hauptplatz in Linz in a southerly direction. The core of this urban conversion project is a new hotel that mediates with sovereign flair between the various eras of the buildings around the Domplatz.

Slow Food's focus on local food and culinary tradition has been embraced all over the world since the organization's founding in Italy over twenty years ago. Architects Sagan Piechota answered some questions about their design of a pavilion for Slow Food that embodies the...

The original proposal of the Prefecture of Santo André (São Paulo) required that a children's science museum, associated with the public school network, be built inside one of the city's parks. The project presented expands the initial program and proposes a wing to house...

While anything but uninspired, the single-family house that Albert Ortis and Reinhold Weichlbauer have built in Laufnitzdorf is a clear departure from conventional notions about inspiration.

The commission called for new uses and meanings to be given to a space in the historic center of Guadalajara. Its essential features were to be respected, in order to reverse the process of degradation and to convert the area into a catalyst of the urban context that will emerge with the complex...

Together with Wolfram Mehlem and Jesper Bork Wolfgang Tschapeller has built an exceptional house in St Andrä/Wördern, close to the Danube The sharp-edged spatial tube made of fair-faced concrete hovers lightly on an elevated foundation above the expanse of the plain. Freely shaped...

Things are there and one doesn't notice them until one day one's gaze slips and one sees, explores, and is dazzled. That's how it was for me with La Oca, which wasn't La Oca but actually the Aeronautical Museum (formerly Palacio de las Artes), which I hadn't noticed, even...