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

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

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

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,

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

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

Over the past year and a half, several states, including New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, have adopted the measures of the 2018 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) for buildings in certain sectors. AN asked leading manufacturers and architects to describe what insulating and solar- factor performance benchmarks the code requires of glass in building facades. Below, they identify how

The City of London, the historic core and central business district of the metropolitan region, is a high-density patchwork of contradictory architectural styles dating from across centuries. 4 Cannon Street, a corporate headquarters designed by London’s PLP Architecture, recently joined this eclectic scene and succeeds in establishing a fine balance between past and present with articulated reddish-brown sandstone panels

DXA Studio, an architecture and design firm founded in 2011 by Jordan Rogove and Wayne Norbeck, is pushing forward with projects of increasing scale and complexity across New York City. One such project is The Maverick, a 20-story tower located on the northern border of Chelsea which recently wrapped up facade installation. The tower houses

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

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

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.

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

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

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