The design and construction of affordable housing in New York is a formidable task; between labor and material costs, and the hurdles of municipal zoning and housing regulation, even the grandest of projects are budget engineered into imitations of the original concept. Magnusson Architecture and Planning’s (MAP) St. Augustine Terrace, a low-income residential tower located in the Bronx, challenges
One Vanderbilt, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), is not a subtle project; the tower topped out in September 2019 and rises from an entire city block with a behemoth massing to a height of just over 1,400 feet. The tower is visible across the metropolitan region, from the New Jersey Meadows to the Bronx-Queens
The International Spy Museum presents a striking figure in the relatively staid streetscape of Washington, D.C. The building opened in May 2019 and was designed by London-based Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) in collaboration with architect-of-record Hickok Cole, and replaced the original home of the Spy Musem that was constructed in 2002. The project is a demonstration of high-tech
The Pavilion at Great Northern Way, a florid timber, steel, and glass structure designed by Perkins and Will and fabricated by Canadian timber specialist Spearhead, anchors a new public plaza in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia. The 2,000-square-foot space, which was completed in 2019 and will be home to a coffee shop, abuts the Perkins and Will–designed
With an extensive private collection of contemporary art ranging from the large-scale sculptural work of Michael Heizer to the oil-on-canvas abstracts of Mark Rothko, the new Glenstone Museum addition—opened in Fall 2018 and located in suburban Potomac, Maryland, just 15 miles from the city center of Washington, D.C.—is a testament to the role of placemaking as a
Completed in December 2019, The Looking Glass is a four-story mixed-use renovation for developer Warenar Real Estate that offers a thoughtful solution for merging contemporary design within the centuries-old Museum Quarter of Amsterdam. Designed by Dutch architectural practice UN Studio, the approach addresses both the contextual and use demands of the site with finely curved glass panels and well-crafted
Opened in December 2018, the American Water Headquarters is the most recent significant addition to Camden, New Jersey’s, Delaware River waterfront and sits directly across from Philadelphia’s Center City. Designed by New York’s Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA), the corporate project articulates the former industrial character of the Rust Belt with an aluminum composite facade
Set to open in mid-March, 2050 M Street is a novel commercial project located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. REX, an architecture and design firm based in New York, is the design architect for the project. In contrast to the imposing massing of Beaux-Arts, Brutalist, and droll mid-century Miesian bootlegs that dominate the capital,
Over the last four decades, James Carpenter Design Associates (JCDA) has been a pioneer in advanced glass installations and facade design, with projects ranging from the Museum at the St. Louis’ Gateway Arch to the Fulton Center Sky Reflector Net. The new Nordstrom flagship store in New York is located at the podium of the Adrian Smith + Gordon
Los Angeles’s Broadway is home to one of the finest assemblies of Commercial Style buildings in the country, consisting of steel structures with box-like massing, clad with richly ornamented terra-cotta or cast-iron, and lightened with large rectangular and divided windows. Constructed over several phases starting in 1908, the Broadway Trade Center, initially known as Hamburger’s
Located just south of San Francisco’s Financial District and blocks away from the bay, MIRA Tower is a housing development that grabs your attention with a highly detailed geometric form. The project joins a spate of recently completed and under construction towers in the Transbay Development Zone, including Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects’ Salesforce Tower and the Heller Manus Architects’ 181
The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (MBVB), located in Rotterdam’s 10-acre Museumpark, is receiving a striking new addition designed by MVRDV. Depot will house up to 125,000 of the museum’s artworks not currently used for exhibitions, with over 70,000 of the pieces being made accessible to the public in a semi-curated format. In response to the site and the
The Cleveland Museum of Art, constructed of white Georgian marble in 1913, is a remarkable demonstration of Neoclassicism in America and serves as the lynchpin of surrounding Wade Park. Servicing the museum and the surrounding grounds requires extensive upkeep, and over the years a haphazard assembly of buildings was erected to service those needs. These have been
Midtown East is a competitive Manhattan neighborhood to design a new tower; the skyline is crowded with an assembly of jostling skyscrapers and landmarks constructed over the last century. Completed in 2019, The Centrale is an 803-foot-tall residential tower designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects and developed by Ceruzzi Properties. The building strikes a middle ground between the
The waterfront surrounding Brooklyn’s former Domino Sugar Refinery continues to rise at a dizzying pace and, similar to DUMBO to the south, this spate of growth is led by Two Trees Development—ongoing projects include PAU’s reinvention of the Domino Sugar Refinery and the recently announced BIG-designed towers. Unlike other sections of the Williamsburg waterfront which are dominated by swaths glass
Providence, Rhode Island’s, College Hill is home to one of the finest collections of historic structures in the country, ranging from formal Federal to the ostentatious English Baroque. Both the campuses of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) are based in the historic district and have over time absorbed numerous buildings in the
With a permanent art collection of approximately 3,500 pieces hailing from the 20th and 21st centuries, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University is arguably the most prestigious curatorial institution in Pullman, Washington, and joins a string of art museums founded by the Schnitzer family across the Pacific Northwest. The project opened in 2018
The neo-Georgian Tammany Hall located on the northeastern corner of Union Square has assumed multiple identities over the course of its nearly century-long existence: It has been the home of the notoriously corrupt Society of St. Tammany, a union headquarters, and a theater and film school. Now, BKSK Architects and BuroHappold Engineering are leading the conversion of the building into a
The Safdie Architects–designed Jewel Changi Airport is a 144,000-square-foot toroidal-shaped glass-and-steel pavilion looping around the world’s tallest indoor waterfall. After four years of construction, the $1.3 billion project opened its doors in April 2019 as a bid to deliver a “paradise garden” amid the cacophony of Singapore’s largest airport. The structural system of the canopy is based on a highly complex
The Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, houses one of the world’s largest collections of zoological specimens and geological samples—counting over half-a-million for the latter. Beginning in 2015, Rotterdam-based architectural practice Neutelings Riedijk Architects led a significant expansion of the facility to accommodate the merger of the Zoological Museum and National Herbarium into the Biodiversity Center. The
New York’s leading art galleries are in a figurative arms race; buildings upwards and outwards to accommodate museum-sized curatorial ambitions. In September, the Pace Gallery, led by Marc and Arne Glimcher, joined the fray with the opening of its new 75,000-square-foot gallery in West Chelsea. The project, designed by Bonetti/Kozerksi Architecture with facade consultancy by Studio NYL, is
New York-based architectural practice CetraRuddy is no stranger to designing residential skyscrapers in Manhattan, with a body of work differing from typical contemporary glass stalagmites thanks to the inclusion of significant swathes of stone and metal. ARO, a slender 62-story tower located in Midtown West that wrapped up this year, continues this trend with a facade of
The Citizens Bank Corporate Campus in Johnston, Rhode Island, is not a subtle complex—it’s composed of five sprawling buildings across a 123-acre site. Designed by Boston-based architectural practice Elkus Manfredi, the project serves as a new facility to accommodate approximately 3,000 financial services employees and all five buildings are predominantly clad with ultra-high-performance concrete and low-E glass laid over zig-zagging forms.
Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Yards is undergoing a massive redevelopment by Brandywine Realty Estate that will bring half-a-dozen new buildings, totaling approximately six million square feet, into the center of the city. Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), is joining the fray with JFK Towers; a duo of cantilevering, offset mixed-use buildings clad in terra-cotta and aluminum. The