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

Over the last two decades, as the ownership of American and European-produced cars has proliferated in China, car manufacturers have pushed to establish a prestigious presence in the country in the form of showrooms and high-designed office parks. Designed by Gensler, The Cadillac House Shanghai is an exemplar of this trend and joins the scene with a

It should come as no surprise that Harvard University’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as it was founded nearly four centuries ago and is the oldest university in the United States, inhabits scores of historic structures that require methodical maintenance and programs of facade restoration. Harvard Hall, constructed in 1766, is one such building and recently

The form of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is suggestive and shape-shifting, not unlike the popular media to which the nascent institution is dedicated. Under construction since 2018, the curvilinear 290,000-square-foot museum is beginning to animate the entire western edge of Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, a 160-acre park opposite the University of Southern California. The project, which

Computer-aided manufacturing has revolutionized the field of facade production over the last decade. Dana K. Gulling, author of Manufacturing Architecture, describes the overall trend as one of “custom repetitive manufacturing,” which reestablishes a level of customizability in industrial processes and facilitates fruitful collaboration between architects, facade engineers, and manufacturers from the design-assist phase to completion. To

In designing the Charles Library at Temple University in North Philadelphia, Snøhetta wanted to make a contemporary statement that would integrate harmoniously into the pedestrian core of a leafy, architecturally diverse urban campus that is still largely defined by historic stone masonry edifices. The resulting building, a research library clad in stone, wood, and glass and topped with one of Philadelphia’s largest

High-end ceramic retailer Centura, based in Toronto, opened a new showroom and warehouse on the outskirts of Quebec City in May 2019. Located in a 45,000-square-foot former printing house, the goal for the retailer was to realign the design of the utilitarian structure to one in keeping with the showroom’s inventory of ceramic tiles and cladding. To this

As the decades roll on, public appreciation of post-war office buildings continues to wane, and owners are often stuck with a depreciating asset with poor energy performance to boot. The usual course of action is wholesale demolition and the construction of an entirely new structure on the site. In contrast, a design team consisting of Gensler,

Chicago’s Printers Row, located in the South Loop neighborhood, is home to a large collection of former warehouses and factory lofts built at the turn of the century. Built of steel-frame construction and wrapped in richly detailed brick, terra-cotta, and stone, the area is one of many zealously protected historic districts in the city. The challenge

The Heights, located in Arlington, Virginia just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., is a new academic campus that complements the relatively low-slung and conservative architecture of the context, and offers an compelling approach to public space. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in collaboration with architect of record LEO A DALY, The Heights consists

From South Williamsburg to Long Island City, the formerly industrial waterfront of Brooklyn and Queens is undergoing an exhaustive spree of development delivering thousands of residential and commercial units. 420 Kent, a project developed by Spitzer Enterprises and designed by New York-based architecture firm ODA, continues that trend with three mixed-use towers that establish a

Located in Washington, D.C.‘s centrally located and historic DuPont Circle neighborhood, 1701 Rhode Island Avenue serves as a demonstration of the aesthetic and performative impact of retrofit strategies. The project, designed by local architecture and interior design firm Hickok Cole, is an extensive overhaul of a 40-year-old former YMCA facility into a LEED Platinum Class

Detroit is undergoing something of a revival; the center of the city is registering consistent population growth and with it has come a spate of high-profile building projects including SmithGroup’s Little Caesars Headquarters and SHoP Architects’ Hudson Site tower. Rossetti, a Detroit-based firm with an expertise in sports and entertainment venues and a local and national footprint, has continued this