Restoration of the Empire State Building’s Art Deco crown nears completion

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,

Fletcher Priest Architects and Arup bring structure to the fore at the Brunel Building

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

SOM blends mass timber and High Modernism with the pagoda-like Billie Jean King Library

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

3XN’s cube berlin harnesses natural ventilation with a planar double-skin glazed facade

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

Steven Holl Architects tames the harsh Houston glare with clever massing and opaque tubular glass

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

DLR Group reestablishes Michael Graves’s vision at the Portland Building

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

Estúdio 41 keeps the cold out of this Antarctic research station with sandwich panels and structural thermal breaks

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

The Tower Renewal Partnership retrofits Southern Ontario’s concrete high-rises for a sustainable and affordable future

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

Architects and manufacturers discuss glazing and new code requirements

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

Beyer Blinder Belle returns Washington, D.C.’s Carnegie Library to splendor with intensive masonry repair

As the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., is chock full of seats of government, monuments, and civic spaces, all the more monumental when placed at the intersection or terminus of the city’s diagrid of triumphal boulevards, or within one of the many historic parks dating back to the 1791 L’Enfant Plan. Located within Mount Vernon Square, the

BNIM’s glass-shrouded Fine Arts + Design Studios settles into the Great Plains

Overland Park, Kansas, is a small city located squarely between Lawrence and Kansas City, just south of the meandering Kansas River and dissected by the I-435 and I-35. This being the Great Plains, the city is marked by an overwhelming horizontality carved with a gridiron grid populated with the winding routes of suburban subdivisions. However, this

WEISS/MANFREDI’s new building for Tulane makes the most of clear glass

For The Commons, Tulane University’s new campus hub, WEISS/MANFREDI designed a glass facade that avoids clichés despite using some conventional materials. The angular, building shimmers in the New Orleans light, its mirrored surface broken up by chunky stripes and iridescent hues. It’s hardly a typical glass box, but the building’s distinctive look belies its use of a humble material:

Behnisch Architekten’s Adidas World Sports Arena balances views and shading with an aluminum veil

Herzogenaurach is a small Bavarian town located just outside of Nuremberg, comprised of steeply-pitched half-timber structures, cobbled streets, and a green belt of agricultural land. While the setting of Herzogenaurach is tied to a pastoral present and past, the town, being the home of both Adidas and Pumas, is inexorably tied to the all-encompassing network of global

PLP Architecture stitches together past and present with a stone-faced precast facade

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

AEC leaders discuss how they are pivoting through COVID-19 realities

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