The Architect’s Newspaper asked leaders in the AEC industry to discuss how COVID-19 has disrupted projects and the processes the industry was forced to alter or halt in response to state mandates. Below, they describe what course correction looked like and how new practices might be retained in the post-pandemic future. Shawn Basler Nicholas Leahy Andrew

Mass timber projects are sprouting up across the United States. From the Pacific Northwest and to the Southeast, timber buildings are growing in scale and complexity. Designed by Boston-based firm Leers Weinzapfel Associates (LWA), the John W. Olver Design Building at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is an examplar of that trend with a cross-laminated

Arte, a 12-story, ziggurat-shaped luxury condo building, stands on the beach of Surfside, Florida, like some kind of glossy totem. Slabs of travertine seem to float above one another with only large glass windows between them. The effect is both effortless and luxe, appropriate for this affluent stretch of the Atlantic coast between Bal Harbour and

Constructed in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood just a few blocks west of Lake Michigan, the expansion of the Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day primary school cuts a fine figure. The project, completed in 2019 and designed by Chicago firm Wheeler Kearns Architects, features a veil of light-beige brick draped over a rectangular volume and studded with vertically-oriented ribbons of glazing.

Resting in the Great Plains on the outskirts of Lawrence, Kansas, sits Capitol Hall Federal Building, the most recent addition to the University of Kansas’s School of Business. The building, designed by Gensler’s Chicago office and Kansas-based firm GastingerWalker&, is a response to the university’s growing enrollment and consolidates lecture halls from across campus. The massing of the project

Broadway is a competitive locale for any new tower. The avenue, running from Manhattan’s Bowling Green to the upper reaches of Westchester, is home to some of New York’s most recognizable and adored architectural treasures. The challenge for any firm completing a project in such a setting is to establish a unique identity whilst fitting in with

Tucked beneath a stately London planetree in Harvard Business School’s new quadrangle in the Allston area of Boston is a 4,168-square-foot contemporary structure that brings a laid-back, informal sensibility to the famously buttoned-up, McKim, Mead & White–designed campus. Outfitted with a gas-powered fire feature, a bar, and Adirondack chairs aplenty, the Schwartz Pavilion functions as a breakout space for large

A veritable spaceship has landed on the outskirts of the Botswanan capital city of Gaborone, its coppery carapace glinting in the unrelenting sun. This is the Botswana Innovation Hub, and while its form evokes the stylings of Battlestar Galactica, it is very much of this world. SHoP Architects was awarded the project in 2010 following an international

Robert Heintges is an influential architect and teacher who has advanced envelope design through his eponymous practice, Heintges & Associates, and through his teaching at Columbia GSAPP and Rice Architecture. This interview is part of my effort to document how different forms of specialized design expertise inform multiple architecture practices at once, and produce unstable forms of architectural authorship.

The South Central Regional Library, located in Louisville, Kentucky, is the second project realized through the Louisville Free Public Library’s 12-year master plan; dating back to 2008, the plan calls for the construction of three regional libraries within Jefferson County to accommodate underserved communities and a growing population. The nearly 40,000-square-foot project was designed by MSR Design—the

Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood is something of an idiosyncrasy; it’s avenues are lined with a hodgepodge of towers from the turn of the century onward, and the side streets are a mix of townhouses and walk-up tenements. There is no straightforward design methodology for contextual development here, but Toronto’s KPMB Architects raised the bar with an 83,500-square-foot expansion of

The new building for the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Costa Mesa, California, has spent a long time in gestation. Thom Mayne, of Morphosis, was announced as its architect back in 2008, and the building finally broke ground this past September. Now, everything is moving apace—pandemic notwithstanding—and the museum should have its long-awaited new

Fire stations are by their very nature pragmatic structures; multi-axle gargantuan trucks must be able to draw in and out of the facility with ease, and crews of firemen require what is essentially a multipurpose home during their shifts. This utilitarian bent, at-least from the midcentury onward, manifests itself in boxy and often architecturally laconic

Facadism, the act of retaining a historic facade whilst fundamentally adapting a structure’s interior, is often maligned by preservationists as relegating historic architecture to urban set pieces. Lost in such orthodox pedagogy is recognition of the functional demands of the client and the pragmatic reality that buildings evolve over time. Kliment Halsband Architects (KHA), a New

Hudson Yards, the mega-development reshaping Manhattan’s Far West Side, needs little introduction; it has been both praised and vilified for its gigantic scale and contentious urban ethos. Regardless of the controversy surrounding it, the project showcases some ambitious engineering. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) with Rockwell Group, The Bloomberg Building’s versatile ETFE cladding and mobile shell

The Chase Center, the new home for the Golden State Warriors, stands prominently in Mission Bay, San Francisco, and joins a nationwide shift from stadium and arena as standalone monoliths surrounded by acres of asphalt parking lots to those embedded within dense urban frameworks. The 11-acre project, designed by Kansas City’s MANICA Architecture, opened in the Fall

When 875 North Michigan Avenue, formerly the John Hancock Center, opened on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile in 1969, it signaled a departure from the all-too-prevalent trabeated Miesian skyscraper. Its subtly tapered 100-story form and iconic X-frame structure, designed and engineered by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan, respectively, demonstrated that beauty and structural performance need