IwamotoScott’s Cellular Origami transforms a San Francisco garage

While some may think that garage design is relevant only for showy car collectors and owners of detached single-family houses, the reality is that many garages are multistory parking structures in dense cities where car use is high. Of four finalists, San Francisco–based firm IwamotoScott won the design competition hosted by University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) to transform the

At Canoe Landing Campus in Toronto, the green roof becomes a fifth facade

Situated in downtown Toronto’s sprawling CityPlace residential district, Canoe Landing Campus is a mixed-use complex that brings life and a spot of color to a 3.3-acre lot that had sat empty for years. The $65 million, 158,893-square-foot compound introduces vertical community in a drastically different manner than the tall, blue-gray towers that have dominated the neighborhood since the

Edmonton’s Milner Library slices and dices with its Z-bar zinc facade

AZENGAR zinc-clad facade and window wall (Andrew Latreille) The Stanley A. Milner Library opened in late September of 2020 in downtown Edmonton, Canada. As the flagship branch for Edmonton’s public library system, the public was reasonably involved during many stages of design and construction. In fact, well after the project broke ground and install of the

WE3, designed by SPF:a, is the third building to land at the Water’s Edge creativity complex in Playa Vista, California (Mike Kelley)

SPF Architect makes a splash with corrugated metal at Playa Vista’s WE3 tech campus

Designed by Zoltan E. Pali, FAIA, and his Los Angeles-based firm SPF:a, WE3 is a six-story creative workspace in the commercially robust area of Playa Vista, California, colloquially referred to as “Silicon Beach.” It is the third and final building in a pre-existing commercial campus, Water’s Edge, that boasts 160,000 square feet horizontally expressed along

ODA’s cubic condominium complex brings dynamic form to DUMBO at 98 Front Street

  Dumbo, Brooklyn has seen a myriad of new development—mixed-use and residential alike—flood the neighborhood in the past few years. With glistening glass complexes for luxury housing and new odes to its industrial history, the area located between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridge is home to bustling activity on the waters of the Hudson River.

Pendry West sets a ripple through Manhattan’s Hudson Yards

A new hotel designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill landed at the beginning of 2021 on West 33rd Street in Manhattan’s still-rising Hudson Yards neighborhood. Pendry Manhattan West tops out at 21 stories and is part of a 5-building master plan that will bring new hospitality and mixed-use buildings to Tenth Avenue, adjacent to Hudson Yards. Wedged between One and Five

The Eisenhower Memorial awes with steel mesh and abundant light

The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. was completed at the tail end of summer following nearly two decades of contentious debates ranging from budget disputes to the rhetorical broadsides of advocates for traditional civic architecture. The project, led by Gehry Partners, is located on a full-block site on Maryland Avenue just off of the National

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Rubenstein Forum features gargantuan bird-safe glass curtain walls with zinc frames

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.

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

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

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

Installation of travertine panels at BIG’s twisting ‘The XI’ partially complete

Manhattan’s Far West Side is no stranger to development. Since the construction of the High Line in 2009, this Hudson River-bordered stretch of New York has undergone a feverish spate of construction, ultimately culminating with the city’s very own Dubai-on-the-Hudson (also known as Hudson Yards). However, just south of that sky-high cluster of glazed stalagmites, projects such

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

Leers Weinzapfel Associates’ UMass Amherst building mixes mass timber and copper-anodized aluminum

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

A closer look at Gensler’s Capitol Federal Hall for the University of Kansas

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

The new OCMA wants to be a good neighbor

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

Kliment Halsband Architects blends past and present at Friends Seminary

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