COOKFOX Architects has been busy lately. The New York-based architecture firm has completed or is just wrapping up scores of projects across the city, ranging from twin-towered Ten Grand and One South in Williamsburg to St. John’s Terminal in Tribeca. Central to these projects is a fine-tuned understanding of context and unpretentious design cues that embed the structures within their setting.

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

Leading up to this week’s Facades+ West Conference on Thursday and Friday, AN caught up with its two co-chairs, Blair Payson and Alan Maskin, principals at Olson Kundig in Seattle. In preparation for the at-length discussions on these topics, Payson and Maskin shared some insights of theirs regarding kinetic design, historic architecture, and some interesting upcoming projects. AN: As a leading firm in the kinetic

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,

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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