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

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,

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

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

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

Mass timber projects are sprouting up across the United States. From the Pacific Northwest and to the Southeast, timber buildings are growing in scale and complexity. Designed by Boston-based firm Leers Weinzapfel Associates (LWA), the John W. Olver Design Building at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is an examplar of that trend with a cross-laminated

Constructed in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood just a few blocks west of Lake Michigan, the expansion of the Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day primary school cuts a fine figure. The project, completed in 2019 and designed by Chicago firm Wheeler Kearns Architects, features a veil of light-beige brick draped over a rectangular volume and studded with vertically-oriented ribbons of glazing.

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

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

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

With its first electrified underground railway constructed in 1890, London can boast the world’s oldest metropolitan transport system in the world. Snaking across the capital city, the labyrinthine network, like that of any underground system, relies on massive ventilation systems to extract warm air from below. The Bunhill 2 Energy Centre, designed by Cullinan Studio in collaboration with McGurk Architects and

Located in the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, the Biological Science Building is a dual-purpose building housing both a biological science program and a museum of natural history. The nearly 300,000-square-foot building, designed by Ennead Architects, was constructed in two phases—the academic spaces opened in 2018 and the museum in 2019—and enclosed with a corrugated terra-cotta rain screen and

The University of Oregon’s Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact is one of the most significant expansions to the Eugene campus following the construction of OFFICE 52’s Tykeson Hall and Hacker Architect’s Berwick Hall. The project is a collaboration between design architect Ennead Architects and architect-of-record Bora Architects, with Thornton Tomasetti acting as facade consultant, and will enclose state-of-the-art research

The design and construction of affordable housing in New York is a formidable task; between labor and material costs, and the hurdles of municipal zoning and housing regulation, even the grandest of projects are budget engineered into imitations of the original concept. Magnusson Architecture and Planning’s (MAP) St. Augustine Terrace, a low-income residential tower located in the Bronx, challenges

With an extensive private collection of contemporary art ranging from the large-scale sculptural work of Michael Heizer to the oil-on-canvas abstracts of Mark Rothko, the new Glenstone Museum addition—opened in Fall 2018 and located in suburban Potomac, Maryland, just 15 miles from the city center of Washington, D.C.—is a testament to the role of placemaking as a

Completed in December 2019, The Looking Glass is a four-story mixed-use renovation for developer Warenar Real Estate that offers a thoughtful solution for merging contemporary design within the centuries-old Museum Quarter of Amsterdam. Designed by Dutch architectural practice UN Studio, the approach addresses both the contextual and use demands of the site with finely curved glass panels and well-crafted

Over the last four decades, James Carpenter Design Associates (JCDA) has been a pioneer in advanced glass installations and facade design, with projects ranging from the Museum at the St. Louis’ Gateway Arch to the Fulton Center Sky Reflector Net. The new Nordstrom flagship store in New York is located at the podium of the Adrian Smith + Gordon