New York based firm Archi-Tectonics has master-planned an eco-village in the heart of the bustling skyscraper district of Hangzhou, China, for the upcoming 2022 Asian Games. Integrated within the existing city fabric, this eco-village sits on a mile-long landscape of 116 acres with program and park fluidly integrated. Two stadiums, the Hockey Field and Table Tennis
The city of Guangzhou rests at the border of the Pearl River Delta and the South China Sea and is the capital of Guangdong, China’s most populous and prosperous province. As one of the largest economic centers and entrepots in the region—a role dating back to the formation of the Silk Road—the city has undergone
The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. was completed at the tail end of summer following nearly two decades of contentious debates ranging from budget disputes to the rhetorical broadsides of advocates for traditional civic architecture. The project, led by Gehry Partners, is located on a full-block site on Maryland Avenue just off of the National
COOKFOX Architects has been busy lately. The New York-based architecture firm has completed or is just wrapping up scores of projects across the city, ranging from twin-towered Ten Grand and One South in Williamsburg to St. John’s Terminal in Tribeca. Central to these projects is a fine-tuned understanding of context and unpretentious design cues that embed the structures within their setting.
Architectural preservation is often a continued struggle between human-made constructs and the inexorable forces of natural phenomena. Nowhere in the United States is this relationship more pronounced than in New Orleans, that polyglottal metropolis at the border of the Mississippi River Delta and the Gulf of Mexico. Located in the Picayune Place neighborhood, Trahan Architects’ under construction 309
Leading up to this week’s Facades+ West Conference on Thursday and Friday, AN caught up with its two co-chairs, Blair Payson and Alan Maskin, principals at Olson Kundig in Seattle. In preparation for the at-length discussions on these topics, Payson and Maskin shared some insights of theirs regarding kinetic design, historic architecture, and some interesting upcoming projects. AN: As a leading firm in the kinetic
A stroll through New York neighborhoods subject to feverish developments, from Downtown Brooklyn to Central Park South, reveals a design trend that has taken root and proliferated citywide: A seismic shift from unobstructed glass curtain walls to facades of ever-greater opacity. The trend is being driven by myriad forces, namely rising performance standards and shifting aesthetic tastes,
A black aeronautic mass is taking shape in Utah’s Wasatch Range. Dubbed the Dark Chalet, the project, designed by Los Angeles-based firm Tom Wiscombe Architecture (TWA), is a private residence perched prominently (and precariously) on Powder Mountain within the under-construction Summit Powder Mountain ski resort. The project is a demonstration of the firm’s characteristic playfulness
London’s Oxford Street is the primary commercial corridor of the West End, running for a mile between Hyde Park and Tottenham Court Road. A motley crew of architectural styles calls the boulevard home, ranging from the corybantic masonry of the Edwardian era to the streamlined forms of art deco, and, more recently, glaze-heavy modern structures and
From Southern California to the Puget Sound, the American West Coast is home to some of the nation’s leading architects, engineers, and designers. The impact of their work is not only felt across the country, but throughout the four corners of the world. On December 3, the online Facades+: Enclosure Innovations on the West Coast conference, co-chaired
Perched on the Tasman Sea in the South Pacific Ocean, Sydney is the largest city in Australia and the capital of New South Wales. Similar to many cities within the Anglosphere, Sydney’s urban morphology is centered on an ever-rising central business district surrounded by a ring of inner suburbs, which, in this circumstance, is crossed by two
Under present circumstances, the act of gathering through conferences and summits is a hazy memory. And while many pine for a return to those carefree days untroubled by the airborne transmission of particulates, perhaps the present freeze will allow for a moment of introspection on the role of conference and program centers within urban assemblages.
The decades-long decline of retail across the country has fundamentally reshaped real estate patterns in both suburb and city center. An unfortunate casualty of this trend is the early 20th-century department store, which, through high design and ebullient signage, sought to draw customers from both near and far. While many of such icons have met
When Interface Studio Architects designed XS House, they wanted to make the most of an extremely narrow site along the Vine Street Expressway in Philadelphia’s Chinatown neighborhood. While most of the expressway’s oddly shaped, leftover lots are used for surface parking, XS House adds urban density by making the most of a code variance through
The new Winter Visual Arts Building at Franklin & Marshall College was envisioned as a “pavilion on the park” by Steven Holl Architects (SHA). Rising between canopies of old-growth trees and their driplines in south-central Pennsylvania, the art center seemingly floats above the landscape of the campus and Buchanan Park. The 32,000-square-foot project is wrapped in
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, perched above a waterfall in the forests of southwestern Pennsylvania, presents a complex challenge for its conservators. Unusually among Wright’s works, the seminal 1937 house has been preserved for public viewing with much of its original artwork and furniture intact but the building’s extensive exterior glazing means that its aging interiors have been
New York City’s skyline is forever adapting, thrusting ever higher upwards as a jostling amalgam of evolving styles and forms. Although surpassed in height by more recent projects such as SHoP Architect’s 111 57th Street and KPF’s One Vanderbilt, Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s Empire State Building remains the city’s penultimate skyscraper and icon from the art deco era. The mooring mast,