Construction image of the Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum announces itself with scalloped glass panels

The Denver Art Museum is undergoing a significant expansion and overhaul led by design architect Machado Silvetti and architect-of-record Fentress Architects. The project includes the restoration of Gio Ponti’s glass tile-clad North Building and the construction of an entirely new, elliptical-shaped welcome center defined by a scalloped structural glass curtainwall. The site of the welcome

Detail of a fluted granite facade at 277 Mott Street

Toshiko Mori Architect greets the Lower East Side with CNC-milled granite

Due to be completed in 2019, 277 Mott Street is a seven-story, retail infill project that offers a contemporary vision of contextual development in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Designed by the New York-based Toshiko Mori Architect—whose office is located just a few blocks away—the project features a custom-fabricated CNC-milled dark granite facade with vertical ribbons

Detail of an undulating, crooked facade

3XN’s Olympic House undulates with a parametrically designed glass curtain wall

Positioned adjacent to Lake Geneva and the Parc Louis Borget, the Olympic House is located on the outskirts of Lausanne, Switzerland. Opened in June 2019, the objective of the building’s scheme was to bring the International Olympic Committee‘s hundreds of employees, spread across the city, under one roof. The project—which began as a competition in 2012—was led

A pleated glass facade of the tower formerly known as Solar Carve

Studio Gang’s Solar Carve tower meets the sun with sculpted glass

The most recent addition to an already impressive collection of architectural characters inhabiting New York City’s High Line, 40 Tenth Avenue offers a sculpted massing that will maximize its solar exposure along the public park. The project, led by Studio Gang, is situated between the Hudson River and the High Line, with a primary west-facing orientation. To

NADAAA’s Daniels Building complements Gothic design with concrete and glass

Opened last spring on the periphery of the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus, the Daniels Building is an approximately 700,000-square-foot academic building for the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. The project entails a new three-story addition added onto a 19th Gothic Revival former theological school, clad in grey concrete panels and a glass curtain

Image of project forecourt

Amherst’s New Science Center outperforms with a facade material quintet

In October 2018, Amherst College opened the New Science Center on its historic Massachusetts campus. The new academic building, which replaced an aging science center that was failing to keep up with its contemporary academic needs, is a six-story structure offering a home for six different science departments. Designed by the Boston-based architectural practice Payette with aggressive energy

Details of a vertically banded metal mesh facade

French 2D enlivens a Cambridge parking garage with a graphic-printed mesh facade

The rapid development of urban areas across the country is leading to the reappraisal of the commonly found, and often maligned, parking garage. Boston-based architectural practice French 2D has joined this trend by invigorating a drab parking garage using a mesh facade with dynamic graphics intended to serve as a large-scale artistic canvas as well

Detail of concrete and aluminum

Boston University’s Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre takes center stage with concrete and aluminum

Commonwealth Avenue, snaking from the Boston Public Garden through the greater metropolitan area, is no stranger to significant cultural venues and institutional buildings. Boston University’s Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre and College of Fine Arts Production Center, by local firm Elkus Manfredi Architects, joins this assemblage with an angled glass curtainwall shrouded in a scrim of ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) and

DS+R and Rockwell Group’s The Shed opens its massive guillotine doors

Opened in April 2019, Rockwell Group and Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s (DS+R) The Shed is an eight-level, 200,000-square-foot art center located on the southern, 30th Street flank of Hudson Yards. The project has received acclaim for its operable features, notably its gliding ETFE-clad shell and multi-ton doors. Facade Manufacturer Cimolai S.p.A BGT Bischoff Glastechnik AG Bator

Birds eye view of Dune Museum

UCCA Dune Museum burrows into a Chinese beach

On a beach in northern China, light cannons emerge from the tops of a dune, hinting at a structure buried beneath the sand like a lost Courbusian villa. But the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Dune Museum (UCCA Dune) is neither lost nor buried, but carved into the sands of Bohai Bay by the Beijing-based

Congress Square splits past and present with fiberglass-reinforced plastic

Architectural preservation is often cast as a zero-sum game; historic structures are either painstakingly maintained or demolished in favor of contemporary development. Arrowstreet’s Congress Square, a 530,000-square-foot project in Boston’s Financial District, provides an alternative solution for this quandary with the restoration and consolidation of an entire block of historic structures that integrates a contemporary glass addition with a fiberglass-reinforced plastic (FRP)

SHoP’s Midtown supertall brings terra-cotta and bronze to new heights

Over the last two decades, SHoP Architects has pushed the envelope of facade design, leading a notable shift from predominantly glass-clad skyscrapers to supertalls incorporating a variety of materials. SHoP’s 111 57th Street is currently rising on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row—a stretch of dizzyingly luxurious towers. The tower stands out with a facade that incorporates three materials: terra-cotta, glass, and bronze ornamental

Steven Holl’s Kennedy Center expansion dampens sound with crinkled concrete

Steven Holl Architects’ (SHA) expansion of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.—titled The REACH—is expected to open to the public at the beginning of September.  The $250-million expansion consists of a 4.6-acre complex with three semi-submerged pavilions rising with bright-white cast-in-place concrete and opaque glass facades. Notably, SHA’s design features crinkled concrete sound-dampening walls that

Harvard updates skin of brutalist campus center for the 21st century

The Greater Boston area is home to a large collection of brutalist structures. Now, with these historic buildings passing their semicentennials, municipalities and institutions are reappraising their original designs and coming up with solutions to adapt them to contemporary needs. Harvard’s Smith Campus Center, a colossal academic building located on Massachusetts Avenue across from Harvard Yard, is an

NADAAA integrates past and present at Beaver Country Day

The Beaver Country Day School, founded in 1920, is located in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. The school completed three major expansions to its campus over the course of its near-century-long existence, and in 2017, NADAAA and facade consultant Studio NYL completed a project to bridge these accretions into a cohesive whole with a comprehensive revamp of the interior and an enclosure

German hotel meets the street with a sintered stone facade

Completed this year, the Flare of Frankfurt is a seven-story, mixed-use project of hotel rooms, residences, and offices located in the center of the German city. The 260,000-square-foot project, designed by German-Iranian architectural practice Hadi Teherani, is clad in three-dimensional slabs of sintered stone. The massing of the complex matches the cornice line of the surrounding historic building stock