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,
London, as a millennia-old metropolis and the former gravitational center of the world’s first industrialized imperial power, is a city of great juxtapositions in scale and style, a setting all the more pronounced by a labyrinthine network of streets crisscrossed with rail lines and disused canals. The Brunel Building, designed by Fletcher Priest Architects and located in
The Billie Jean King Library is an impressive civic monument located in Downtown Long Beach, California, just a few blocks from the mouth of the Los Angeles River and the bustling Port of Long Beach and joins the rapidly growing nationwide trend towards mass timber construction. Designed by SOM’s Los Angeles office, the pagoda-like structure in many ways harkens back
As one of the oldest cities within the United States, Boston is, unsurprisingly, home to a vast collection of historic neighborhoods and buildings. The Boston Commons, whose founding dates back to the early 17th century, serves as something of a nexus point for the city’s historic core. The Little Building, located on the southern corner of The
Resembling both a cartoonishly large paperweight and a monumental mirror, cube berlin doesn’t look the part of a typical office building. The new 62,300-square-foot building forcefully anchors Washingtonplatz, a stone’s throw from Berlin’s central train station, and dazzles passersby with its fully glazed, double-skin facade, all while coyly concealing its true function. “For many people
Houston is a city of contrasts where, because of a dearth of zoning codes, shimmering high-rises dwarf anonymous strip malls and suburban bungalows abut oil refineries. Sandwiched between the Rice University campus, Hermann Park, and a tangle of highways, the Museum District is no less idiosyncratic, even if it is more high-brow in its aspect. The district itself
The Portland Building, located in the downtown of its eponymous city, is hard to ignore. Designed by Michael Graves Architecture (MGA) and completed in 1982, the tower is something of a monument to the Postmodern architectural movement and served as a stepping stone for Grave’s larger body of work across the country. The project’s facade
It is difficult to conjure a more challenging setting than Antarctica for the design and construction of structure suitable for habitation and scientific research. Designed by Brazilian architecture firm Estúdio 41, the recently completed Comandante Ferraz Station accomplishes just that with a sleek design to boot, and is clad with dark turquoise polyurethane sandwich panels. The approximately 53,000-square-foot project is
In the decades following World War II, countries across the globe embarked on campaigns of residential construction, and for reasons of economy and time, many reached for an off-the-shelf, modernist solution: “Towers in the park” ringing an existing urban core. Few municipalities were as gripped by this building fever as the Greater Toronto Area, which eventually amassed