Architecture

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In the lush, green landscape of Kottayam, this residential project seamlessly blends traditional Kerala architecture with contemporary design elements, offering a unique and refreshing approach to residential living. At first glance, the residence appears to be a typical Kerala-style home, with the layout surrounding a central courtyard and its pitched tile roofs. However, a closer look reveals a unique approach to spatial design that challenges conventional norms. It's a quintessential Kerala house layout – rooms surrounding a central courtyard – and quite literally "exploded" it.

© Justin Sebastian architects: Thomas Parambil Architects Location: Kottayam, Kerala, India Project Year: 2024 Photographs: Justin Sebastian Area: 7500.0 ft2 Read more »

For Greek philosophy, "Ataraxia" is synonymous with imperturbability. The vital objective of the Greeks was to achieve a state of mind that allowed them to live calmly, and thus they discarded any negative feelings that worried them and kept them from that spiritual goal. Ataraxia seeks tranquility and inner serenity, peace of mind. The residence is located in Querétaro, Mexico, and has 450m2 of construction distributed over 2 levels.

© Cesar Belio architects: MEM Arquitectos Location: Av. Paseo de los Claustros 300 - 36, El Campanario Residencial & Golf, Querétaro, Mexico Project Year: 2024 Photographs: Cesar Belio Area: 450.0 m2 Read more »

In collaboration with Politecnico di Milano, Henning Larsen unveils Growing Matter(s) at Milan Design Week (Via Bonardi 9) - a pavilion exploring bio-based materials and new design aesthetics. This interactive installation showcases the potential of mycelium as a living, evolving building material. The pavilion is composed of 80 mycelium spheres, each uniquely shaped by the material's natural growth process. Unlike traditional materials such as concrete or steel, mycelium defies uniformity. Its form is shaped by environmental conditions, resulting in textures and imperfections that challenge conventional design standards and celebrate the intelligence of living systems.

© Zoey Kroening architects: Henning Larsen Location: Milan, Italy Project Year: 2025 Photographs: Zoey Kroening Photographs: Piercarlo Quecchia Photographs: DSL Studio Photographs: Studio Laura Elise Area: 259.0 ft2 Read more »

The project involved the renovation with extension of a secondary dwelling in the residential suburb of Ascona. The district in question is located close to the lake and is characterised by detached residential buildings surrounded by vast, lush green spaces. Originally, it was a single-family dwelling organised on two levels with a one-storey secondary volume attached to the building, which included storage rooms and a car park. A quite inconvenient feature of the old building was that the two levels were not connected internally, but one always had to go outside to move from one floor to the other. Initially, the plan was to build a multi-family building, but since both the market, the investment required, and the urban structure hardly lent themselves to a large volume, we turned to a radical and complete renovation of the old house. The intervention consisted of reorganizing and extending the living spaces, regularizing the volumetry and fragmenting the architectural volumes, in such a way as to distinguish the various bodies, built at different times, both in terms of genesis and function.

© Simone Bossi architects: Atelier Rampazzi Project Year: 2024 Photographs: Simone Bossi Photographs: Atelier Rampazzi Read more »

How is it possible to maximize livability in small spaces? What design decisions contribute to functionality and the fulfillment of the inhabitants' essential needs? Over the past decade, small-scale architecture has gained prominence in the quest to find new ways of living in connection with nature and in pursuit of relative self-sufficiency, among other reasons. From minimal homes or tree houses to fine carpentry solutions and sculptures, the Portuguese design studio Madeiguincho is dedicated to developing timber-based projects with the aim of promoting knowledge of wood craftsmanship as both a raw material and a building medium.

Ursa Tiny on Wheels House / Madeiguincho. Image © Junior Carranca How is it possible to maximize livability in small spaces? What design decisions contribute to functionality and the fulfillment of the inhabitants' essential needs? Over the past decade, small-scale architecture has gained prominence in the quest to find new ways of living in connection with nature and in pursuit of relative self-sufficiency, among other reasons. From minimal homes or tree houses to fine carpentry solutions and sculptures, the Portuguese design studio Madeiguincho is dedicated to developing timber-based projects with the aim of promoting knowledge of wood craftsmanship as both a raw material and a building medium. Read more »

Walbrzych, a picturesquely located city at the foot of the Sudetes, selected the design of the urban viewing tower in an open architectural competition. The tower stands on a park hill dominating the city's old town and, thanks to its height, offers a remarkable panorama of the surrounding mountains. Walbrzych is a historic city with a strong mining tradition, which was the main inspiration for the project.

© Maciej Ławniczak architects: ISBA grupa projektowa Location: Jan III Sobieski Park, Wałbrzych, Poland Project Year: 2024 Photographs: Maciej Ławniczak Photographs: Julia Śliwka Area: 600.0 m2 Read more »

Zaha Hadid Architects has just revealed that the Shenzhen Science & Technology Museum, located in the Guangming District, has officially opened. Designed as a platform to highlight scientific research and technological innovation, the institution will explore the role of science in shaping the future. Adjacent to Guangming Station on Shenzhen's metro network, the design responds to its location as a solid, spherical volume facing the city, defining the southeast corner of the new Science Park. The museum aims to provide a space for public engagement with current developments in science and technology.

Shenzhen Science & Technology Museum Shenzhen, China. Image © Virgile Simon Bertrand Zaha Hadid Architects has just revealed that the Shenzhen Science & Technology Museum, located in the Guangming District, has officially opened. Designed as a platform to highlight scientific research and technological innovation, the institution will explore the role of science in shaping the future. Adjacent to Guangming Station on Shenzhen's metro network, the design responds to its location as a solid, spherical volume facing the city, defining the southeast corner of the new Science Park. The museum aims to provide a space for public engagement with current developments in science and technology. Read more »

The Villa 95 project is located on an irregularly shaped plot within Altos de Valderrama, in Sotogrande. From the beginning, the main premise was to maximize the relationship between the dwelling and the natural environment, seeking to blend daily living with the place. The site has a slight slope, allowing for a great depth of landscape.

© Fernando Guerra | FG+SG architects: Fran Silvestre Arquitectos Location: Sotogrande, Cádiz, Spain Project Year: 2024 Photographs: Fernando Guerra | FG+SG Area: 1255.0 m2 Read more »

The Sharjah Architecture Triennial has announced Vyjayanthi Rao as the curator for its third edition, scheduled to take place in 2026. Rao, an anthropologist, writer, artist, and curator based in New York and Mumbai, will be joined by Tau Tavengwa, an architect, curator, and publisher from London and Cape Town, as associate curator.

Left: Vyjayanthi Rao. Photographed by Alfonse Chiu. Image courtesy of Vyjayanthi Rao. Right: Tau Tavengwa. Photographed by Samer Moukarzel. Image courtesy of Tau Tavengwa.. Image Courtesy of Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2026 The Sharjah Architecture Triennial has announced Vyjayanthi Rao as the curator for its third edition, scheduled to take place in 2026. Rao, an anthropologist, writer, artist, and curator based in New York and Mumbai, will be joined by Tau Tavengwa, an architect, curator, and publisher from London and Cape Town, as associate curator. Read more »

Uzbekistan has revealed the latest photographs of the pavilion for Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, after the recent opening. Designed by Atelier Brückner and realized by NUSSLI, the pavilion aims to showcase the country's vision for the future under the Expo's broader theme, "Designing the Future Society for Our Lives." Composed of modular, reusable wooden elements, the pavilion's architecture will later be reconstructed in Uzbekistan, serving as a studio, workshop, or school.

Uzbekistan Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Exterior View. Image © Josef Šindelka Uzbekistan has revealed the latest photographs of the pavilion for Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, after the recent opening. Designed by Atelier Brückner and realized by NUSSLI, the pavilion aims to showcase the country's vision for the future under the Expo's broader theme, "Designing the Future Society for Our Lives." Composed of modular, reusable wooden elements, the pavilion's architecture will later be reconstructed in Uzbekistan, serving as a studio, workshop, or school. Read more »

In recent weeks, cities around the world have introduced new policies, recovery efforts, and infrastructure projects that reflect growing pressure to adapt to climate realities. From Southern Europe to South America and the United States, these urban updates address both immediate challenges and long-term shifts in how the built environment is governed, designed, and inhabited. Some initiatives focus on regulation, tightening building codes in fire-prone areas or reforming aging safety systems, while others spotlight large-scale investments tied to global events such as COP30 and the Venice Architecture Biennale. This edition of Architecture Now gathers a selection of city-led actions and collaborative efforts that point toward a more resilient, responsive future for architecture and urban life.

View of the Rialto Bridge spanning the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. Image © Shutterstock via Jerome LABOUYRIE In recent weeks, cities around the world have introduced new policies, recovery efforts, and infrastructure projects that reflect growing pressure to adapt to climate realities. From Southern Europe to South America and the United States, these urban updates address both immediate challenges and long-term shifts in how the built environment is governed, designed, and inhabited. Some initiatives focus on regulation, tightening building codes in fire-prone areas or reforming aging safety systems, while others spotlight large-scale investments tied to global events such as COP30 and the Venice Architecture Biennale. This edition of Architecture Now gathers a selection of city-led actions and collaborative efforts that point toward a more resilient, responsive future for architecture and urban life. Read more »

Conveniently located in Auburn Village, Newburgh Light House presents a highly sustainable housing solution, accommodating up to 21 people over 10 levels, on an almost unbuildable 150m2 site, right on a historic train station. With no street access and a north facade directly abutting VicTrack land, complicated fire, building methodology, acoustics, equitable light, and stability requirements dominated much of the design process.  The response was a mini tower typology with a full level for each residence, using glass block as a key material to achieve fire and light requirements.  Conceptually, the translucent facades, combined with reflective finishes throughout, form a lantern to the public realm, whilst creating an ephemeral effect within the residences.

© Timothy Kaye architects: Splinter Society Location: Auburn Village, Melbourne, Australia Project Year: 2025 Photographs: Timothy Kaye Read more »

The Remy Global Office Interior Design redefines the conventional office typology by integrating production, creativity, and social interaction within a spatial organization that emphasizes flexibility, openness, and dynamism. Rather than conceiving the office as a purely functional space, the design envisions it as an experience-oriented, user-centric environment. This approach fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, supports creative processes, and encourages meaningful interaction among users.

© İbrahim Özbunar architects: KAT73 Location: Maslak, Istanbul, Türkiye Project Year: 2024 Photographs: İbrahim Özbunar Area: 245.0 m2 Read more »

In the past, AI-generated images often resembled psychedelic experiences—filled with strange, sometimes unsettling colors and forms. But recent advancements in artificial intelligence have transformed that landscape. Today, we are surrounded by images whose origins are often unknown. From playful mashups to portraits turned into works of art, it's undeniable that Artificial Inteligence has become a lasting part in our visual landscape. As Yuval Noah Harari noted in a 2023 interview with The Economist, "AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language — whether through words, sounds, or images. It has, in effect, hacked the operating system of our civilization."

© Image generated by ChatGPT, based on a user-defined prompt In the past, AI-generated images often resembled psychedelic experiences—filled with strange, sometimes unsettling colors and forms. But recent advancements in artificial intelligence have transformed that landscape. Today, we are surrounded by images whose origins are often unknown. From playful mashups to portraits turned into works of art, it's undeniable that Artificial Inteligence has become a lasting part in our visual landscape. As Yuval Noah Harari noted in a 2023 interview with The Economist, "AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language — whether through words, sounds, or images. It has, in effect, hacked the operating system of our civilization." Architecture, naturally, has not been immune to this. Prompt-based image generators have flooded the virtual environment with renderings that span from surreal to hyper-realistic: futuristic cities, organic skyscrapers, and utopian cabins perched on idyllic cliffs. Most of these are created with general-purpose tools that prioritize visual novelty over design logic. But not all platforms follow this path. Gendo, for instance, was built specifically for architects and designers — offering finer control over parameters like scale, material, and spatial intent. Its goal isn't just to generate images, but to support design thinking. Still, these more intentional tools remain exceptions in a broader sea of generic, decontextualized imagery. Read more »

To explore the significance of Maiji Mountain culture and art, we must first consider the influence of Buddhism, and design begins from here. Circumambulatory structures are the most common and primitive form of space used for ceremonial and commemorative purposes after the awakening of human consciousness, corresponding to the Buddhist concept of reincarnation. All living things, if they do not seek 'liberation', will forever be in the cycle of life and death in the 'Six Paths', with no end. Of course, these concepts and annotations have undergone changes through cultural integration in the long river of history, especially in the process of communication and integration with the native culture of the Han ethnic group, and even in the process of modernization. They have surpassed the original meaning of Buddhism and have a more contemporary interpretation, which will foreshadow the realistic power of sustainable development and affect our life experience.

© Arch-Exist architects: BIAD architects: ZXD Architects Location: Tianshui, Gansu, China Project Year: 2024 Photographs: Arch-Exist Photographs: Xiangdong Wang Photographs: Hanmo Vision Area: 16154.0 m2 Read more »

The name In-Between House draws from its very form—a composition of four cuboid volumes arranged with deliberate gaps in between. These interstitial spaces are where landscape is invited in: pockets of greenery, planters, and water features that soften the geometry and activate the voids. It is in these "in-between" spaces that daylight pours in, casting shifting patterns across interior surfaces and creating conditions for planting to thrive. These voids not only connect the masses visually and experientially, but also serve as spatial buffers, providing a sense of privacy from adjacent neighbors while still drawing in light and ventilation deep into the home.

© Finbarr Fallon architects: Super Assembly Location: Singapore Project Year: 2025 Photographs: Finbarr Fallon Area: 600.0 m2 Read more »

Located in the town of Chacras de Coria, Casa Flecha is a contemporary retreat immersed in a natural setting, conceived as a space for gathering where architecture establishes a fluid dialogue with the landscape. Set on a wooded plot, the house is composed of a series of gabled volumes built with a metal structure, forming a fragmented composition that defines different areas of use and reinforces the connection with the surroundings.

© Luis Abba architects: Mora Hughes Arquitectos Location: Luján de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina Project Year: 2024 Photographs: Luis Abba Area: 3757 ft2 Read more »

Renowned design firms Ennead Architects, KSS Architects, and G&A celebrated the opening of the Jean & Ric Edelman Fossil Park & Museum of Rowan University in Mantua Township, New Jersey on March 31, 2025. Situated within a 65-acre fossil park, the 44,000-square-foot museum is one of New Jersey's largest public net-zero carbon emissions buildings. It integrates immersive exhibits within a highly sustainable structure that connects visitors to the site's rich prehistoric past. Visitors can explore nature trails, dig for fossils in a four-acre former marl quarry, and uncover insights into the events leading to Earth's fifth mass extinction.

© Brett Beyer architects: Ennead Architects Location: Mantua Township, United States Project Year: 2025 Photographs: Brett Beyer Area: 44000.0 ft2 Read more »

This blog wrapped in early 2024, though it continues as a Substack newsletter with the same name: archidose.substack.com

I'm breaking my blogging silence to do two things: Alert readers to the fact I am still writing reviews of architecture books under the title A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books, but over at Substack, not Blogger. Put a new post at the top of this blog so I don't have to look at those photos of me every time I come here to find an old post that I want to link to. That is all.

After 25 years of running this blog under various names — all of which can be lumped under the "Archidose" monicker — I've decided to shut it down, moving this hobby, this labor of love, to Substack, which I have used since mid-2021 and where I will continue to send out weekly newsletters focused on architecture books, but in a new format. (You can subscribe to my newsletter here or on Substack.) So, this isn't "goodbye" as much as it is "see you in your inbox." Grayer and hopefully wiser: me, John Hill, from the mid-1990s until today Besides thinking something along the lines of, Wait! 25 years?, you also may be wondering, Why stop now? The now, January 2024, is because I happen to like fives, it turns out — so much so that every significant thing related to this blog has occurred in five five-year intervals (this is by chance, not by design, I swear): 1999: Started A Weekly Dose of Architecture (with a post about the Kimbell Art Museum) 2004: Started A Daily Dose of Architecture (with a post about the World Trade Center Memorial Design Competition) 2009: Started working with World-Architects and got my first book deal (I was out of work at the time, so the writing that I began doing as a hobby in 1999 turned into my primary focus as of 2009) 2014: Stopped A Weekly Dose of Architecture (complete with five bullet points on why) 2019: Started A Daily Dose of Architecture Books (five more bullet points!) 2024: Stopped Archidose In terms of the why, I've thought of that question a little bit, and outside of it just feeling like it's the right time, here are a handful (again!) of reasons: Very few people read blogs anymore (true, that was also the case 10 years ago, but I kept at it until now, as I liked doing it) More people subscribe, open, and read my Substack newsletter than those who click on the links to this blog or find their way here in some other manner to read my posts (the logical step, therefore, is to put everything in the newsletter...but not behind a paywall, mind you) Blogger is outdated, with infrequent updates; its themes/templates are buggy; adding content is frustrating (this list could go on near endlessly) Substack’s formatting is much easier and more elegant than Blogger (see next bullet point, too) This blog takes up too much of my time, time I'd rather spend on other things (the new newsletter will be easier to produce than this blog, but hopefully it will be helpful and therefore worth people's time in opening it and reading it) But stopping this blog also makes me wonder what it amounted to, if anything. Is there enough good content on this blog to put some of it on paper, to make it a more permanent thing? Or is the content simply of its time and therefore best to leave here in the digital ether? I don't know, to be honest, and when I dig back through some of the posts I veer from thinking the things I wrote were really good to thinking they were garbage ... okay, not quite garbage, but not special enough for a bound volume tucked away in a library somewhere. The truth is somewhere between these poles, I reckon, so hopefully I'll come up with a way to make sense of this side project, this 25-year undertaking, and turn what I did into something else even more rewarding.

Instead of digesting a new book or diving into a novel, something others do often but I do rarely, I spent my holiday break reading a five-year-old book about a trio of intertwined topics I'm particularly fond of: drawings, exhibitions, and New York City. Drawing on Architecture: The Object of Lines, 1970-1990 by Jordan Kauffman, published by The MIT Press, 2018 (Amazon / AbeBooks) As the book's subtitle indicates, Drawing Architecture covers a two-decade period — the 1970s and 80s — when architectural drawings produced by contemporary architects increased in popularity: with architects, with museums, and with the wider art market. These decades, especially the 70s, are known for its so-called "Paper Architecture," which arose due to architects encountering a glut of commissions and offsetting it through theorizing and exploring ideas on paper. Although Jordan Kauffman, a researcher at MIT when he wrote the book and now an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham, does not restrict himself to New York City, much of the book takes place there, given the city's role as the epicenter of the art market, the numerous art galleries holding exhibitions of architectural drawings, and the willingness of local architects to promote themselves through those galleries. These display spaces included Judith York Newman's Spaced: Gallery of Architecture, the Leo Castelli Gallery, and the Max Protetch Gallery. There were also a number of museums and other institutions in and beyond NYC — CCA, DAM, MoMA, Getty — that increased their holdings of architectural drawings, in turn increasing value of such drawings until around 1990. Then, as architects found themselves with more projects and computers entered the realm of architectural drawing, the two-decade trend came to an end. I missed Kauffman's book when it was released in 2018, though I have to disagree with George Baird's review published in Architectural Record at that time. He finds the thorough documentation and explanation of this important moment in recent history "not completely satisfactory," due to the inability to grasp the individual drawings in the numerous photographs of gallery shows reproduced in black and white, as in the one below. Baird did appreciate the reproductions of individual drawings that are almost as numerous as the gallery photographs, but not enough to give the book a ringing endorsement. I'd counter that, since the book is about the galleries and institutions marketing and collecting the drawings rather than the drawings themselves, the illustrations selected for the book are ideal. They capture the seminal shows that led to the phenomenon that is the subject of Kauffman's book; without them, readers would be frustrated and have to rely on the author's extensive descriptions of the displays — descriptions that are important for the historical record but stultifying for narrative flow. (Kauffman also separately lists each piece in each seminal show, complete with values ascribed to the individual drawings.) Another review, by Paul Emmons at EAHN, is more gracious toward the book, calling it "a primary resource on the history of the commodification of architectural drawing." Installation view of "Architecture I" exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1977 (Image source) Being a scourer of used bookstores and having a strong interest in the period explored by Kauffman, many of the museum exhibitions and gallery shows described in the book as "seminal" were known to me before I cracked it open last month. For example, the three "Architecture" shows held at Leo Castelli Gallery every three years between 1977 and 1983 were each accompanied by catalogs: the first one is short, unpaginated and stapled, but the second and third were published by Rizzoli, the publisher of choice for American postmodern architecture in the 1980s. Even though I'm familiar with these shows — and others, including Arthur Drexler's The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts (MoMA, 1975) and The Drawings of Antonio Gaudi by George R. Collins (The Drawing Center, 1977) — through their printed companions, Kauffman is able to elucidate considerably more information about the exhibitions themselves as well as how they relate to the publications. Architecture I, the catalog, would lead us now to assume that just a few drawings were in Architecture I, the exhibition, for each of the seven included architects (Raimund Abraham, Emilio Ambasz, Richard Meier, Walter Pichler, Aldo Rossi, James Stirling, Venturi and Rauch), but Kauffman reveals how misleading this assumption is, by describing the circumstances of the show, illustrating it through gallery shots like the one above, and exhaustively documenting what was on display. In this sense, Emmons' description of the book as "a primary resource" is spot-on. Covers of catalogs for three "Architecture" series exhibitions — "Architecture I," "Houses for Sale," "Follies" — held at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977, 1980, and 1983, respectively While I found it rewarding to learn more about these and other exhibitions I had previous awareness of, Drawing on Architecture was not short on revealing new information to me. Take, for instance, Spaced, the gallery run by Judith York Newman, a name considerably less familiar all these years later than Castelli, Protetch, and the like. The first iteration of Spaced was located on the Upper West Side between 1975 and 1983, making it the first gallery in the city to display architectural drawings and therefore leading the way toward other art galleries doing the same. Although Newman was integral to the reception of architectural drawings in the period, as were Martha Beck, Barbara Jakobsen (aka B.J. Archer), and Pierre Apraxine, their names border on the forgotten, at least relative to the more famous gallerists mentioned above as well as Phyllis Lambert (CCA), Heinrich Klotz (DAM), and Kristin Feireiss (Aedes) outside of NYC. Drawing on Architecture therefore serves, in its focus, to give them much-deserved attention. The shift of architectural drawings toward art and as architecture in and of themselves can also be found in Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association, the exhibition and companion publication from 2015 about the drawings collected by Boyarsky when he was head of the AA in London. Although Boyarsky's two-decade directorship overlapped almost exactly with Kauffman's book, he is only touched on briefly. Instead, we learn a good deal about fellow Londoner Ben Weinreb, "the most eminent antiquarian bookseller of architectural books, prints, and drawings," per Kauffman. Not only did he buy and sell drawings (many of them to Lambert at the CCA), making him relevant to Drawing on Architecture, he produced 58 catalogs over the course of four decades: catalogs that "set new standards for cataloging and connoisseurship," in Kauffman's words. The value of Drawing on Architecture is in discovering about Weinreb and other lesser-known players, carried out through exhaustive research and scholarship, but it is also found in the vivid portrait of 1970s/80s New York, when the architecture and art scenes overlapped and converged, unlike any times before then or since.

For the fifteenth and last time on this blog, I'm highlighting my favorite books of the year, selected from the many books I reviewed or featured as "Book Briefs" on this blog, and the few titles that I reviewed at World-Architects. From the 86 books I featured in 2023, 15 (or 16) books made my list of favorites, organized into three categories: history, monographs, and exhibitions (the books are alphabetical by title within each category). As in previous years, not all of these books were published this year, given how slow I can be at digesting books and my departure from the annual spring/fall cycle of publishers. This last aspect, the timing of the books I draw attention to, will change next year, as I shutter this blog and transition it into something else — details on that will be announced next month. Until then, warm holiday wishes! 6 HISTORY BOOKS: Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986: How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City (2023) by Thomas Leslie, published by University of Illinois Press — Thomas Leslie's followup to his 1871-1934 history of Chicago skyscrapers is even better than its predecessor, not only because the buildings covered are by Mies and other modern architects, but because the research is meticulous and the stories are really interesting. The Japanese House Since 1945 (2023) by Naomi Pollock, published by Thames & Hudson — The latest by Naomi Pollock, who has written numerous books on Japanese houses, benefits from a wide-ranging chronological presentation of nearly one hundred such houses but also the input of the architects and, most valuably, the people who lived in them. Lost in America: Photographing the Last Days of our Architectural Treasures (2023) by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, published by CityFiles Press — In the right hands, archives can yield insights, themes, and presentations that are educational and unexpected, as in photo historians Richard Cahan and Michael Williams digging through the 90-year-old HABS archive at the Library of Congress to show Americans the wonders they have lost over that time. Mies van der Rohe: The Collective Housing Collection (2022) by Fernando Casqueiro, published by a+t architecture publishers — As I pointed out in my review at World-Architects, this book has some flaws in its graphics and text, but they don't detract from the comprehensive presentation of the apartment buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe in the middle of last century. Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism before Globalisation (2022) by Stylianos Giamarelos, published by UCL Press — Architects who appreciate Kenneth Frampton's theorizing of critical regionalism starting in the 1980s should read Stylianos Giamarelos's scholarly book that explores and recenters the formulation of critical regionalism by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre ahead of Frampton. Urban Design in the 20th Century: A History (2021) by Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye, published by gta Verlag — This carefully organized, beautifully presented, abundantly illustrated, and thoroughly cited history of urban design in the 20th century came out of a course taught by the authors at ETH Zurich, but it really should be a standard textbook for other schools, too. 5 (OR 6) MONOGRAPHS: A Book on Making a Petite École (2023) edited by Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample and MOS, published by Actar Publishers — There are very few practicing architects who produce books as an extension of their practice, and even fewer who do that extremely well. MOS is one of them and this is their latest. (Curiously, I saw an even larger, atlas-sized version of this book on display at Harvard GSD's Frances Loeb Library as part of The Book in the Age of ... exhibition in September.) Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1 1990–2005 (2022) and Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 2 2000–2012 (2023), published by MACK — Released a year apart (will volume three follow a year from now?) but reviewed on my blog in February and December of this year, this monograph series on Caruso St John is stunning: beautifully made but also expressive of the words and images that inspire Adam Caruso and Peter St John in their quiet, poetic creations. Living in Monnikenheide: Care, Inclusion and Architecture (2023) edited by Gideon Boie, published by Flanders Architecture Institute — This book is about Monnikenheide, a residential care center for people with mental disabilities in Zoersel, Belgium, and the numerous buildings that have been designed there since the early 1970s. The book is beautifully produced and reflective of the place's myriad qualities. M³: modeled works [archive] 1972-2022 (2023) by Thom Mayne and Morphosis, published by Rizzoli — Fifty years of Thom Mayne and Morphosis are presented in more than 1,000 pages: a brick of a book centered on the models that the studio is known for, from the early models in wood and resin to the 3D-printed models they still produce. Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual (2023) by Bryan Cantley, edited by Peter J. Baldwin, published by Routledge — Architects my age will have flashbacks to Neil Denari, Peter Pfau, Wes Jones, and other machine-minded architects from the nineties when perusing Bryan Cantley's image-saturated monograph. The name says it all: page after page of speculative coolness, vague projects impeccably delineated. 4 BOOKS FROM EXHIBITIONS: Another Breach in the Wall: The City as a Common Good (2022) by Davide Tommaso Ferrando and Daniel Tudor Munteanu, published by Solitude Project — This two-volume book serves as the catalog to Another Breach in the Wall, the main exhibition of the Beta 2022 Timișoara Architecture Biennial in Romania, which focused on projects and actions in cities that subvert the norm. The book does that to some degree, too, with a foldout map serving as a wrapper for the two paperbacks and an elastic band holding the whole together. An Atlas of Es Devlin (2023) by Es Devlin, edited by Andrea Lipps, published by Thames & Hudson — It's hard to believe it, but the first monographic exhibition and monographic book on Es Devlin, the artist/designer behind sets for Adele, Beyoncé, and Cyrus (comma Miley) arrived this year, nearly thirty years after she launched her career in London. This big, expensive book is more artist book that exhibition catalog, and a highly revealing look at her creative process. Bernd & Hilla Becher (2022) by Jeff L. Rosenheim, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art — A "captivating tribute to the renowned German photographic duo known for their systematic documentation of industrial architecture," according to ChatGPT, but in my words it is simply a "beautifully produced catalog" of the 2022 exhibition at The Met. For a duo who treated books as an integral extension of their photography, this catalog of their work is equally valuable. Yasmeen Lari: Architecture for the Future (2023) edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, Marvi Mazhar and Architekturzentrum Wien, published by MIT Press — In early March, an exhibition on architect Yasmeen Lari, usually described as Pakistan's first woman architect, opened at Az W, and the following month the Oxford-trained architect won the Royal Gold Medal, RIBA's highest honor. Needless to say, the major exhibition and honor were justified for an architect who pivoted from commercial buildings for companies with money to houses and other zero-carbon buildings for the poor. The book is thorough, with essays and interviews accompany the numerous projects.

Just as last week's Places in Time III post featured a trio of books that were initially listed in my earlier holiday gift books post, two of the three monographs featured here were also on that list. As happened when I wrote this post, each book begins with a rhetorical question pertaining to monographs. This post features the last reviews of the year. A week from today I'll have a year-capping roundup of my favorites from the many books featured on this blog in 2023. An Atlas of Es Devlin by Es Devlin, edited by Andrea Lipps, published by Thames & Hudson, December 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Is it possible to love a monograph on a designer whose work you're largely indifferent to? Es Devlin is a phenomenally famous artist and designer who is best known for creating the sets and backdrops for U2, Adele, Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, and other big-name musicians, and for such events as the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show. Her London studio's designs for these and other performances, such as plays on London's West End, are provocative and attention-getting, befitting their spectacle nature ... but they're just not my thing, they don't strike my fancy. Her immersive installations, on the other hand, though I've yet to experience one, resonate more strongly with me; these include Forest of Us in Miami and Memory Palace from 2019. And while I like the design and the labyrinthine layout of the monographic exhibition now at the Cooper Hewitt that is also called An Atlas of Es Devlin, the appeal of her work to me is just fractional: yes on installations, no on the rest. But reviewing a book or exhibition or some other creation is not about taste and personal preference; it's about judging the thing on its own merits and determining how good or bad it is relative to similar creations. For books, monographs are a genre in and of themselves, and some are better than others; some are notable for being hybrids. Though big, expensive, and with a print run in (I imagine) the tens of thousands, An Atlas of Es Devlin — the first Es Devlin monograph — is as much an artists' book as it is a monograph and exhibition catalog. The spreads displayed here give a taste of the way Devlin, editor Andrea Lipps, who also curated the Cooper Hewitt exhibition, and book designer Daniel Devlin veered from the typical construction of a book — they cut circles in the pages, inserted smaller page sizes and even smaller gatefolds into the binding, used a variety of papers, etc. — to give it an artists-book feel, but on a considerably larger scale: the book is more than 900 pages, though given the atypical nature of the book it's nearly impossible to count the exact number. It is so big it comes in a specially made orange cardboard box for storage and protection. Just as the exhibition features an "iris" formed by overlapping and shifted circles cut into the gallery wall, the hardcover book opens with ten pages with circular cutouts that frame a photo of Devlin on the floor of Memory Palace. The circular openings are rung with statements apparently in Devlin's hand, and radiating from the circles are complex, layered timelines of her studio's prolific output — the last a sign of how in-demand an artist and designer she is. But, befitting an artists' book, these pages go even further, adding raised dots and lines that accentuate parts of the timeline, veer from it entirely, and/or push us to find some meaning amongst the information saturation. The book then shows some full-bleed photographs of her studio's output before launching into the process-based presentations that comprise the largest chunk of the book. The presentation is chronological, moving from "A Student's Sketchbook" (spread above) that spans from 1985 to 1995 to the designs for plays, performances, and installations she is known for, one after the other for at least 250 pages. After those come conversations Devlin had with fellow creatives during COVID lockdown, then more projects, then another 250 or so pages of completed projects in color photos. The book is packed, fully. The parts that make me appreciate the book so much are the process-oriented project presentations. Very few projects are presented simply; most are accompanied by a smaller inserted page and/or a gatefold — something that requires readers to do extra "work" that heightens their awareness and increases their absorption of Devlin's creative process. Each project, furthermore, is keyed to one of the color photographs in the last half of the book, requiring more flipping-back-and-forth "work" and providing a peek at the finished products. Put another way, it's impossible to nonchalantly flip through this book. The design and construction of the book force a slow movement and entice a steady gaze. One gains so much in handling the book that they need not read every description of every project to understand a lot about Devlin as an artist and designer. I can't think of a more ambitious goal for a monograph than the way An Atlas of Es Devlin gives readers such an intimate understanding of her creative thinking. Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 2 2000–2012 by Caruso St John, published by MACK, October 2023 (Amazon) Is it better for a monograph to have project descriptions written by the architect or by an external writer? The first type ideally give readers some insight into the architect's creative process, though at times these descriptions can read as promotional materials aimed at potential clients. Descriptions of the second type benefit from some objectivity and most likely a critical position, but they might suffer from a lack of information and the sense, on the reader's part, of not learning enough about the illustrated projects. Most monographs fit into one or the other, including the two other monographs in this post: Es Devlin's monograph features project descriptions in her words, while the latest monograph on Jones Studio was written by curator Marilu Knode. Like the first volume of Caruso St John Collected Works, put out last year by MACK but reviewed on this blog in early 2023, Volume 2 has a mix of project descriptions written by the architects and coming from magazines and other external sources, the latter often years earlier and outside of the context of the book. If we look at the "Chicago and Milan" chapter, one of seven chapters in Volume 2, two projects are presented: Nottingham Contemporary, the UK gallery completed in 2009; and the Europaallee Mixed-use Building built in Zurich in 2013. The words of the architects, Adam Caruso and Peter St John, are used for Nottingham Contemporary, in which we learn about the intentions behind their winning competition scheme and the inspirations for the lacy pattern on the facade's concave panels. The longer, more in-depth presentation of Europaallee is accompanied by an article by Ellis Woodman from a 2014 issue of Architectural Review. The architects' mixed-use building is part of the Europaallee development west of Zurich Hauptbahnhof, which was master planned by KCAP and is made up of low- and mid-rise buildings organized about a pedestrian street; Caruso St John's building is at an important spot at the western end of the street, adjacent to a square and near a new pedestrian bridge that connects this main part of Europaallee to a sliver of the development on the north side of the railway tracks. I've seen their building on trips to Zurich, though I can't say I paid much attention to it, as the whole Europaallee project — with buildings by Gigon/Guyer, Max Dudler, David Chipperfield, and others — is characterized by unrelenting grids of windows. It's a bit like Tativille come to life. The Caruso St John building is in line with the rest, though Woodman admits that the narrowing of the piers between windows as the building rises — an element in the competition scheme that would distance the building from the earlier "joyless" building by Dudler — "came to present a significantly less austere image than was suggested by the initial renderings." Although Woodman is primarily positive in his assessment of Caruso St John's Europaallee Mixed-use Building, it makes me think that very few architects would actually incorporate critical texts like this in their monographs. That Caruso St John did so here is following from the format of Volume 1, in which texts by critics about the architects' projects are included, as are texts by others — architects, critics, historians, etc. — as long as they pertain to the issues explored by the architects in some way or serve as some theoretical foundation for their work. So Louis Sullivan's "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered" first published in Lipincott's Magazine in 1896, is also found in the "Chicago and Milan" chapter, as is "The Existing Environment and Themes in Contemporary Practice," an essay by Ernesto N. Rogers from a 1954 issue of Casabella; these two essays give the chapter, which otherwise just features the two projects in Nottingham and Zurich, its name. Although the essays are presented without comment, the relationship between them and Caruso St John's work can be grasped without difficulty, as Sullivan's essays coming a few pages before the "tall" 13-story building at Europaallee attests. Even without an awareness to such ties, I greatly appreciate the inclusion of inspirational and important texts; it is one element that sets this series of monographs apart from others. In addition to the projects spanning from 2000 to 2012 and the inclusion of articles and essays written by others outside of the context of the monograph, the book also features texts by Adam Caruso and Peter St John. Befitting the series, these texts come from other publications, from lectures and interviews, most of them within the years covered by the volume. An example is Peter St John's "Aldo Rossi's Gallaratese Housing," first published in Building Design in 2012. The architect first experienced Rossi's famous building in 1980, when he was a 20-year-old student on a scholarship, also seeing the buildings of Terragni and catching the The Presence of the Past, the inaugural Venice Architecture Biennale. He recounts his first impressions of the building, discusses it relative to Rossi's famous texts The Architecture of the City and A Scientific Autobiography, and revisits the building to find it "more charming than before." A few pages later we read Caruso and St John's text on Pasticcio, a composition of fragments of classical architecture in Sir John Soane's Museum in London, and see their installation of the same name at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. That is followed by restoration work at Soane's Museum, a new chancel for St Gallen Cathedral in Switzerland ... the whole book unfolds in this manner: one unexpected piece after another, adding up to a thorough and varied portrait of the duo's quiet and occasionally timeless architecture. STRIVE: Jones Studio Adventures in Architecture by Marilu Knode, edited by Oscar Riera Ojeda, published by Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, November 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Should monograph present many projects in just a few pages, or very few projects across more pages? Two years ago, Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers put out Jones Studio Houses: Sensual Modernism, a monograph billed as "a self-imposed limited look at the 40-year-plus career of Eddie Jones." The thick, square book limited itself to houses (minus Jones Studio's own "house") and featured just ten of them, highlighted by Prairie Raptor, a stunning house in Oklahoma whose sculptural peak was inspired by Herb Greene's "Prairie Chicken" built in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1954. Digesting the book with its many photographs and drawings accompanied by short blurbs by famous names lauding Jones's architecture, it was clear the book was an incomplete portrait of the studio run by Eddie and his brother and first partner Neal Jones — a first course, if you will, to a larger, more well-rounded presentation of their work. With more than 40 built and unbuilt projects spanning more than 40 years, STRIVE is that main course. If a food analogy for an architecture monograph feels a bit contrived, note that three of the book's five sections take on "Family Table" titles. Instead of a literal family coming to the table to eat, the "family" is made up of Jones and the other architects in the studio, and the "table" is a collaborative work surface about which everyone's desks are arrayed. "Family Table #1," as it's called in the book, was in an office building in downtown Phoenix designed by Alfred Newman Beadle in 1978. In 1984, Eddie moved the studio he had established in 1979 (Neal joined in 1986) from his house to the Beadle-designed building, and years later he expanded within it to create the open-plan family-table office space. (Some further synergy between Beadle and Jones can be found in the fact both of them relocated from the Midwest to Arizona: Beadle from Minnesota, Jones from Oklahoma.) Jones Studio stayed in the Beadle building for 32 years, moving into the purpose-built "Home and Studio" in Tempe that begins the book's "Family Studio #3" chapter. The floor plans in STRIVE show how the literal table in the Beadle building is also at the heart of the now seven-year-old Jones Studio Office; the table and branching desks are described in the book as the "nerve center" of the studio and an "open mosh pit of ideas." So, you might be asking, what about "Family Table #2"? This is the most interesting of the trio, at least in the context of the book, and in two ways. First, for the exhibition southwestNET: Jones Studio, Inc. that took place at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006, the studio moved its operations into the gallery for its three-month duration, from May to September. Indeed, the studio — the family — literally became the exhibit, sitting at custom-designed desks that converged to form "Family Table #2." Photos in the book show a somewhat typical architecture office, with computers, phones, and lots of papers in the middle of a gallery with drawings on the wall, drawings suspended from the ceiling, and museum goers taking in the scene. The second thing of interest is that the exhibition was curated by Marilu Knode, who considers it "one of the most exciting of my career." She was later approached by Jones Studio to tell the story of the firm in what would become STRIVE. Her writing and consistent voice detached from the making of the projects help make this monograph so good, especially compared to the many monographs that are written in-house and read like marketing copy and therefore lack firsthand insight. People who actually read Knode's words that accompany the buildings will learn A LOT about the studio's process and what makes each project so interesting, beyond the obvious skill with which they've been designed. Having looked at numerous architectural monographs, I've come to the conclusion that the project that occupies the middle section of a monograph is often the most important — both for the architect and for the book itself. The five chapters of STRIVE start with "Jones Studio: The Early Years" and end with "Focused Future," chronological bookends for the three "Family Table" chapters. Given this structure, the second of those, "Family Table #2," sits in the middle of the book's nearly 500 pages. While the firm was working at the southwestNET exhibition, they submitted an RFQ for the Mariposa Land Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona. In 2007, Jones Studio got the job, which became a "colossal, firm-altering undertaking." While Knode's words partly reinforce my hypothesis for middle-project importance, the project's documentation in photos, drawings, and numerous texts over more than 40 pages cement it. The building, completed in 2014, is also found on the cover — another sign of the project's importance in the impressive Jones Studio portfolio.

This third and most likely last installment in the inadvertent "Places in Time" series looks closely at three books: the first about Chicago from the Great Depression to the mid-1980s; the second one about the broader American built landscape over roughly the same period of time; and the third jumping to Switzerland and tracing the urban development of Schlieren, near Zurich, over a 15-year period this century. All three of the books were in my roundup of holiday gift books a couple of weeks ago. The first two Places in Time posts looked at Detroit/Chicago/St. Louis and Paris/Indonesia/Flanders. Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986: How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City by Thomas Leslie, published by University of Illinois Press, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) In my holiday gift books roundup a couple of weeks ago, I wrote that, of the four pieces in the subtitle to Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 — "technology, politics, finance, and race" — technology is the most prevalent throughout the book. That assertion was based on just a cursory look through the book, all I could manage at the time, but also on its relationship to architect and educator Thomas Leslie's previous book, Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934, published ten years prior. If I were doing that roundup now, having had more time to delve into the new book, I would write that politics and finance were, if not the most prevalent, the most illuminating and thoroughly discussed aspects in the book's presentation of skyscrapers over fifty years last century. Indeed, many of the drawings and photographs focus on the technical and technological aspects of skyscraper design and construction (just look at the cover!), but the stories of how certain skyscrapers came about and were shaped are rooted in Chicago's political machine, money, and the developers that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, SOM, and others worked for. An example is in order. If any architect jumps to mind in the period covered by the book, it is Mies, who reshaped Chicago through his glass-and-steel towers but also who, through the replicable nature of their designs, reshaped cities around the world. To this day, his most notable tall buildings in Chicago are 860-800 Lake Shore Drive, the Federal Center, and the IBM Building, all boasting steel structures and glass curtain walls. But before that trio of towers (860-880 came first, in 1952) there was Promontory Apartments, completed in 1949 near the University of Chicago. Structured in concrete, not steel, and with windows sitting on brick spandrel walls rather than on the floor slabs or hung as curtain walls, Promontory is often seen as an anomaly or an awkward step toward the more refined glass boxes that would follow. But, Leslie tells us, concrete was "selected over steel because of postwar supply problems" and the brick spandrel wall was mandated by code as a means of stopping the spread of fire. Furthermore, even with the windows sitting on knee-height walls, lenders balked at their size, wondering "how people can live with so much glass" and making it hard for the developer to gain financing. One year later, in 1950, "Chicago's progressive building code eliminated the masonry spandrel wall requirement," leading to 860-880 LSD and other glass-sheathed towers designed by Mies and others. The book's nine chronological/thematic chapters are full of similar political and financial information that greatly helps put the many notable skyscrapers (as well as quite a few apparently insignificant ones) into context. For example, chapter five, "Daley's City: Commercial Construction, 1955-1972," tackles the most powerful political player the city saw in the half-century covered by the book, Mayor Richard J. Daley. In a flip from his predecessors, "'Daley's City' sprung from investment capital," Leslie writes, "wedded to a regime intent on gaining and exercising raw power to tip the market's balance wherever it could." Early on, Daley oversaw the creation of the Central Area Plan (1958), discussed at some length in the book, and during his lengthy tenure he saw the erection of many commercial and residential towers in the Loop. But the Daley era is also when the Chicago Housing Authority shifted to high-rises and built them as segregated enclaves primarily on the South and West Sides, just about all of which have been torn down in recent years for low-rise developments. As such, the race aspect of the book makes up a good chunk of chapter six, "High-Rise Housing in the 1960s," though the subject is present throughout the book, just not to the same degree as the other three subtitled terms. Oddly, Leslie's book ends with a lengthy discussion of Helmut Jahn's State of Illinois Center, the 17-story building in the Loop that opened in 1985 and was renamed in 1993 as the James R. Thompson Center, for the governor who championed the project and oversaw its realization. I say "oddly" because the squat, rotund building is hardly a skyscraper, at least not in my mind. It is shorter than most buildings around it as well as others being built at the same time, such as Jahn's own 40-story One South Wacker, and does not have the vertically of most towers. So why include it? I think, in part, because it was the climax of postmodern architecture in Chicago in the 1980s, but mainly because it is a case study where technology, politics, and finance converge to the utmost degree; it's a fascinating story deeply and ably recounted by Leslie. It comes at the end of the last chapter, "After Sears," and spreads across four three-column, image-free pages; only on the last spread do we see the building, but only its exterior, not the stunning atrium it is known for. While this ending leaves something to be desired in terms of page design and illustrations, it captures the incredible amount of research Leslie managed to put into this second installment in his skyscraper history of Chicago. I'm hoping there is a next one and that it is already in the works, so it doesn't take ten more years for the rest of us to hold it in our hands. Lost in America: Photographing the Last Days of our Architectural Treasures by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, published by CityFiles Press, November 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) As an architect who writes primarily about contemporary architecture but who is increasingly cognizant of the importance in saving and reusing old buildings, even going so far as to preferring adaptive reuse over new construction, I have a love/hate view of "Lost ___" books. The ones in my library tend to be about places where I've lived: Lost Chicago by David Garrard Lowe, for instance, and Lost New York by Nathan Silver. Looking at page after page of black-and-white photos of buildings that will never be again is to be transported in time, which I like, but all to often the captions border on the finger-wagging: "How could you tear down this glorious building?" they seem to be telling me, even though I played no part in their destruction. Yet, as Thomas Leslie's skyscraper book featured above reveals, even buildings loved by later generations were often not appreciated in their day. Leslie writes that Henry Ives Cobb's 1905 Federal Building "suffered from grave planning and environmental deficiencies that led to calls for its replacement almost immediately after opening." Lowe, who put the domed interior on the cover of the 2000 edition of his book, calls it "an awesome feat of engineering" with "one of America's supreme interiors." "This magnificent edifice, the most notable example of civic architecture in Chicago," he summarizes, "was wantonly demolished in 1965–66," making way for the three-building Federal Center designed by Mies van der Rohe. While Leslie helps us understand something of why the building was demolished, Lowe looks at it through rose-colored glasses, making its destruction a scar on modern-day humanity. Photo historians Richard Cahan and Michael Williams are a bit more balanced in their description of Cobb's Federal Building, one of the one hundred buildings and bridges they gather from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) for Lost in America. They give some background on how Cobbs designed the 1905 building in the Beaux-Arts style "that was all the rage in Chicago and across the nation following the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition," where Cobbs had designed seven of its buildings. And the authors paint the picture in the 1960s, when the "once-majestic courthouse and post office had become lost in the canyons of skyscrapers" and was "covered by decades of city grime." They don't make demolition excusable, but their matter-of-fact description — of this building and the 99 other places in the book — tell interesting facts and appealing stories that do an excellent job in helping readers understand the photographs and the value of HABS. In this case, the photograph is, like the Lost Chicago cover, of the domed interior, taken in 1964 by Harold Allen, who "climbed high to the base of the dome to take this shot." Although Lost in America is limited to one photograph per structure, the descriptions invite readers to dig further into the HABS archive at the Library of Congress, where many of the photographs dating from 1933 to the present are digitized. In 1965, the dome atop the Federal Building was seen better than ever, we read, when neighboring structures were razed and opened up views unavailable before; Allen captured one such view, when one of Mies's glass boxes was already in place behind it. HABS was created in 1933 during the Great Depression and is considered the nation's first federal preservation program. In the ninety years since, the program has documented thousands of structures in the United States through photographs — all b/w large-format film photos, even to this day, it should be noted — drawings, and other materials, all of them archived in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress alongside the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) and Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) collections, which were created in 1969 and 2000, respectively. Why, you might be thinking, was Henry Ives Cobbs's Federal Building, which was completed in 1905, not documented until 1964? From the beginning, when Charles A. Patterson, an architect at the National Park Service, drafted a proposal for what would become HABS, the intent was to document antique buildings that were "diminish[ing] daily at an alarming rate." So photographing, measuring, drawing, and documenting them otherwise often took place when a building was threatened or demolition was imminent. The cover of Lost in America shows one instance where the act of demolition was actually captured by the photographer: Jack E. Boucher at the Ulysses S. Grant Cottage in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1963. Cahan and Williams selected the structures and compiled them in a way that the book climaxes, for lack of a better word, with buildings like Grant's cottage, which are partially demolished — photographed just a bit too late. It's a sobering end to a sobering but excellent book that shows how the unfortunate flip side of American progress is erasure and forgetting. Urban Change Over Time: The Photographic Observation of Schlieren 2005–2020 Reveals How Switzerland Is Changing edited by Meret Wandeler, Ulrich Görlich and Caspar Schärer, published by Scheidegger and Spiess, October 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Although I've been to Zurich many times since I started working with World-Architects more than a dozen years ago, I've yet to visit Schlieren, the municipality on the western edge of Zurich. It's certainly an oversight, given that the town, which sunk into a post-industrial malaise from the 1980s onwards, "suddenly" turned the tide this century and "grew dramatically, attracting new residents and architectural tourists." This according to Caspar Schärer, one of the editors of the two-volume Urban Change Over Time, who drives the point home in the next sentence: "Architectural tourists!" How bad was the situation in Schlieren before the fifteen-year turning of the tide the book encapsulates? One newspaper, in a report from Schlieren, was titled "Life in the Cantonal Trash Can" (Schlieren is part of the Canton of Zurich), per another text in the book. So, how did things change, how did Schlieren get through this "difficult phase"? Proximity to Zurich and the town's location along a train line connected to the city surely helped, but much of it can be attributed to planning. In 2005, the town implemented the Schlieren Urban Development Concept (STEK I), which would determine where and how growth would occur, instead of letting it happen "uncontrolled and uncoordinated." STEK I became the basis for a photo project by Meret Wandeler and Ulrich Görlich, who decided on a 15-year timeframe — not shorter — as necessary for being able to see how the urban plan would physically take shape and impact the town. By 2020, when the project was done, the town had already moved on to STEK II, a new plan based on a reevaluation of STEK I in 2015/16, but the photographs nevertheless revealed that change in many parts of the Schlieren was dramatic. The first of the two volumes, which are packaged in a sleeve bearing the cover shown above, is a 152-page landscape-format book with spreads devoted to the 69 locations in town that were documented in photographs over the fifteen years, typically every two, odd-numbered years (some gaps are found in some places). The consistency of the photographic framing is exceptional, owing in part to the hiring of professional photographers after the initial photos were taken by the authors. The locations are keyed to maps in the back of the book, one for 2005 and one for 2020; seen together, the photographs and map illustrate the districts where STEK I was focused, where change was most pronounced. The town is basically bisected by the east-west rail line that connects it to Zurich; the most apparent change and increased density is visible to the north, while areas close to the train tracks on the south side were also filled in. Given the broad swath of the town documented by the project, it's interesting to see places where change is not immediately evident, akin to a real-life version of those find-the-differences cartoons. The second volume consists of essays, additional presentations of some of the photographs (focusing on typologies, on STEK I districts, the town's "building boom," etc.), and in-depth maps that help to give outsiders some orientation while also focusing on the development areas. These many pieces are presented beautifully across 480 pages in portrait format. The wide-ranging essays, which discuss the town, the project, "rephotography," and myriad other subjects, are particularly helpful but also, in the commendation of the book by the jury of the 2023 DAM Architectural Book Award, "very careful not to waste the reader’s time." The repackaging of some of the photographs from volume one is in some ways more helpful in understanding the town's urban change, since the authors use the photographs in ways that turns them into essays in their own right. The "Typologies" section, for example, groups photos of building entrances, parking lots, playgrounds, alleys, stores and restaurants, and garages, while "A New Town," which concludes the book, hones in on the places that would draw architectural tourists. Many of the photos in volume two are considerably larger on the page than the static format of volume one, accentuating one interesting quality of the photographs: they are devoid of people and other living beings, though not of signs of life. This rigorous approach, no doubt an impressive technical achievement, gives the project a strong anthropological quality and reveals that, while planning may be at the heart of the town's evolution this century, the shaping of the lives of the residents via planning was paramount.

This year's roundup of books to give to discerning architects for the holidays is presented in pairs. While at least one book in each pair is new, the other one isn't necessarily so — new, old, or not-so-old, it is related to the first in some manner, as explained in my descriptions. A few of these books will receive longer reviews next month. In the meantime, with this lengthy post and Thanksgiving coming up later this week, I'll be taking next week off, resuming regular posts the first week of December. HEADY STUFF FOR BRAINY ARCHITECTS AND ARCHITECTURE HISTORIANS: Architecture after God: Babel Resurgent by Kyle Dugdale, published by Birkhäuser, February 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Inhabited Machines: Genealogy of an Architectural Concept by Moritz Gleich, published by Birkhäuser, February 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Exploring Architecture is a new series of books from Birkhäuser that are focused "on thematic subjects [in architectural history and theory] that are relevant to contemporary architectural and urban discourse and practice." It aims to include "new and unexpected readings of built work, the analysis of the discipline's discourse and historiography, the study of architectural representation and media, and the consideration of socioeconomic and cultural-political forces on urban transformation." The peer-reviewed series, created under a six-strong advisory board chaired by Reto Geiser, launched in early 2023 with two books: Moritz Gleich's Inhabited Machines followed by Kyle Dugdale's Architecture after God. The pair of books indicate a serious tone for the series but also production values that are on par with monographs, found in the quality paper selection, quality image reproductions, page size that is slightly larger than the norm, and solid cover and binding. Having reviewed a few books made by Geiser, I'm not surprised at this attempt to elevate the design production of history/theory books. Still, these are not books the average architect will plop down in an armchair and read; their audience is small and focused on academia. (Hey, architectural historians like gift books, too!) Dugdale, a Yale professor based in New York City, has written a book set in Germany between the two world wars, using the Tower of Babel and the artistic output of Uriel Birnbaum from Austria as threads to explore how architects recreated a world where God is absent. Moritz Gleich, director of gta Verlag at ETH Zurich, appears to have turned his dissertation "on the genealogy of machinic concepts in architecture" into Inhabited Machines, which looks at technologies and architectural typologies in the 18th and 19th centuries as progenitors for some pretty famous machine analogies in 20th century architecture. TWO COOPER HEWITT TOMES: An Atlas of Es Devlin Es Devlin, edited by Andrea Lipps, published by Thames & Hudson, December 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Making Design: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Collections by Cara McCarty and Matilda McQuaid, published by The Cooper Hewitt, February 2015 (Amazon / Bookshop) An Atlas of Es Devlin, the first monographic show devoted to UK artist and designer Es Devlin, opened at the Cooper Hewitt on November 18, 2023. Devlin worked with Cooper Hewitt curator Andrea Lipps on the exhibition, one that immerses museum goers in a recreation of Devlin's studio and moves them through a mirrored labyrinth presenting early drawings, models of the large-scale set designs she is known for, and much in between. Lipps is also the editor of the hefty book that is united with the exhibition in terms of its contents but also its execution: it immerses readers in Devlin's process to better understand her output. The exhibition presupposes that visitors do not know anything about Devlin (I'm guessing very few will not), and the book takes a similar approach, revealing insights to readers who are invited to patiently page through the book. At around 900 pages, there's a lot to see, from school-age drawings and glances of her studio to maquettes of theatrical set designs and photographs of concerts by the likes of Adele and U2. Thankfully, with its mix of paper sizes and types, and the insertion of small gatefolds that further explain her design process, the book's format makes a voyage through it anything but boring; there are surprises at every turn of the page. Boasting as many pages as An Atlas of Es Devlin is Copper Hewitt's guide to its own collection, made with designer Irma Boom when the institution completed a major overhaul of its Upper East Side home (the former Andrew Carnegie mansion) in late 2014/early 2015. While the book is big, the numbers on the cover indicate how small it is compared to the collection: it presents just 1,145 of the museum's 210,000 objects in its archive. The objects were selected by the curators, who also penned texts for the book — all expressing the museum's primary goal: "to inspire people to see how design impacts their lives." Boom, ever the innovative book designer, created different colored wraps for the paperback; it's not clear which color one gets on Amazon and Bookshop (red?), but the Cooper Hewitt offers pink and "glow in the dark" (light green) on its website. THE NEW YORK WILLIAM B. HELMREICH KNEW SO WELL: The Bronx Nobody Knows: An Urban Walking Guide by William B. Helmreich, published by Princeton University Press, August 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William B. Helmreich, published by Princeton University Press, October 2013 (Amazon / Bookshop) A few years after Princeton University Press published William B. Helmreich's well-received The New York Nobody Knows, it started putting out standalone "urban walking guides" to each of the five boroughs. Helmreich, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the City College of New York, famously walked every street in New York City, speaking with just about everybody he came across (or so it seems), be it a building super, a doorman, a shop clerk, someone leaving their apartment, someone leaving a synagogue, ... The New York Nobody Knows discusses immigration, gentrification, and other issues in thematic chapters; it is thorough, but it must have been evident for both author and publisher that the effort of walking the five boroughs and the results of talking with so many people would lead to more than just one book. The first guide published was Brooklyn, in 2016, followed by Manhattan, in 2018. Sadly, a few months before the Queens guide was released in 2020, Helmreich died, succumbing to COVID-19 in March of that year, the same month fellow CCNY professor Michael Sorkin also died. At that time, as recounted by his wife Helaine, William had already finished the manuscript for the Bronx and the couple was starting to work on Staten Island, walking (again!) the streets of that borough. It's too bad we won't see Staten Island, because it, like the Bronx, is not as widely known (for me, at least, and I'm guessing quite a few other people) as Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. But as the earlier guides made clear, there is more to the boroughs than the familiar sites found in other guidebooks; and the boroughs are made up of people, not just buildings and landscapes, and it was those people that interested Helmreich the most. Their voices permeate The Bronx Nobody Knows, just as in the other guides. For me, someone who lives in Queens, one thing I appreciate about Helmreich's books is the way he managed to get people to open up and say things that would both describe a place and convey the similarities binding people across the city and, on a wider canvas, across humanity. A BEAUTIFULLY MADE SERIES ON CAROSO ST JOHN CONTINUES: Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 2 2000–2012 by Caruso St John, published by MACK, October 2023 (Amazon) Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1 1990–2005 by Caruso St John, published by MACK, October 2022 (Amazon) Twelve months after MACK released the first volume in the collected works of British architects Adam Caruso and Peter St. John, the publisher put out the second volume, which takes the qualities of the first book — qualities I wrote about earlier this year in "Three Lessons from Three Monographs" — and applies them to the studio as they started their second decade and a new century began. I wrote in that post that monographs "should be comprehensive if not complete, "should convey the voice of the architect," and "should function as archives." Collected Works: Volume 1, I wrote, does all three: "From its simple linen cover with drawing of the steel facade of their Swan Yard project, strong stitching, and matte paper selection, to its documentation of built and unbuilt works over the title's fifteen years and the incorporation of articles and interviews previously published in Quaderns and other venues, the book is a beautiful object that is rewarding and refreshing on every turn of the page." Given the consistency of the two books, the same applies Collected Works: Volume 2. The numerous buildings, projects, exhibitions, articles, lectures, and other artifacts informing Caruso St John's work are presented in seven chapters, most of them pairs: "History and the Modern," "Greece and Rome," "Chicago and Milan," "Competitions," "Thomas Demand," "Switzerland," "Art and Money." These places and themes reflect their work extending beyond the confines of England as well as their teaching doing the same, with positions in Mendrisio, ETH Zurich, Harvard GSD, and elsewhere. The two architects explain how the studios they ran at universities incorporated reference texts by Rosalind Krauss, T. S. Eliot, Louis Sullivan, and others; those text are found here, enriching the monograph's collection of texts and projects and capturing the interests of two maturing architects. (Note: the two volumes are available from MACK in a Caruso St John Bundle.) THE CHICAGO SKYSCRAPER HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED: Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986: How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City by Thomas Leslie, published by University of Illinois Press, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934 by Thomas Leslie, published by University of Illinois Press, May 2013 (Amazon / Bookshop) In my 2021 review of Thomas Leslie's 2013 book Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871–1934, I pointed out how Leslie's book is described in another book as a "'recent study that includes thorough discussion of structural and constructive technologies,' as opposed to more prevalent architectural histories that focus on aesthetics, politics, planning, social history, and other issues with tall buildings." Such a focus is evident in the appendix listing the dozens of tall buildings built in Chicago between 1871 and 1934 (the years of the Great Chicago Fire and Great Depression) with such criteria as "facade type" (bearing masonry, cast iron, expressed frame, curtain wall, etc.) and "foundation" (piles, spread, caissons). It's an excellent book, as is the second installment in Leslie's series of books on skyscrapers in Chicago, but the subtitle of the second book, How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City, indicates the incorporation of those wider contexts eschewed in the first book. Even with these topics, technology is the most prevalent, based on a quick glance at the book's contents, which include numerous construction photographs and 3D "digital reconstructions" of a lot of the buildings discussed in the book. Spanning from the Great Depression to the recessions of the 1970s and 80s, the new book contains a large diversity of architecture — from Art Deco and modernism to brutalism and postmodernism — but also enormous social changes and other aspects (migration, civil rights, oil crisis, Mayor Richard J. Daley) that make the embrace of broader contexts sensible. While any book on skyscrapers in that period would include Marina City, Bertrand Goldberg's classic city within a city completed in 1967, Leslie also includes Goldberg's Raymond Hilliard Homes, a public housing project on the South Side for seniors and families. The latter allow Leslie to compare the forms and construction of the two projects but also the opportunity to touch on racial segregation in the city. (A couple addenda: While the two books have similar covers, three-column page layouts, and graphic design features, the use of different page sizes and proportions — from 10x10" to 8.5x11" — is unfortunate and a missed opportunity for consistency on the shelf, especially if a third book in the series is forthcoming. And just as my 2021 review of the earlier Leslie book coincided with the author speaking at the Skyscraper Museum, Leslie is giving a virtual talk tomorrow night about his new book and the city's residential high-rises in concrete; the talk will be archived on the museum's YouTube channel.) ADVENTURES IN HOUSING: Cohousing in Barcelona: Designing, Building and Living for Cooperative Models edited by David Lorente, Tomoko Sakamoto, Ricardo Devesa and Marta Bugés, published by Actar Publishers and Ajuntament de Barcelona, August 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Housing Redux: Alternatives for NYC's Housing Projects by Nneena Lynch, James von Klemperer, Hana Kassan and Andrei Harwell, edited by Nina Rappaport and Saba Salekfard, published by Yale School of Architecture, December 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) If life were fair, everyone would have access to decent, well-designed housing, and those projects would garner as much attention in the architectural press as the single-family houses that are commissioned by and built for the wealthy. A modicum of balance has been found in recent years, with social housing projects winning major architectural awards and gaining coverage, most notably Lacaton and Vassal's transformation of public housing projects in France and Lacol's La Borda Cooperative Housing in Barcelona. The latter is the star of Cohousing in Barcelona, which features case studies of eighteen built and ongoing projects that are the result of a partnership between the Barcelona City Council and non-profit social housing providers and housing cooperatives. Even though I was fortunate enough to visit La Borda with the architects last year, the book's thorough documentation through photographs, drawings, and lengthy commentary from the architects means I learned something new about it — and the other commendable projects in the book. If cohousing is endemic to Barcelona, what is the NYC situation? In the 20th century it was a mix of below-market subsidized housing, public housing, and middle-income cooperatives, aka Mitchell-Lama. Today, everything is lumped under "affordable housing," and it is typically created by developers as part of larger market-rate projects, with the city incentivizing the developers through zoning bonuses. One place proponents of affordable housing are looking is the open spaces of large public housing projects, in the vein of Carmel Place, a narrow stack of micro-units by nARCHITECTS built in 2016. A recent studio at Yale School of Architecture had students proposing affordable housing solutions for NYCHA's Washington Houses in East Harlem; the public housing project consists of more than a dozen towers on three superblocks that are the equivalent of seven city blocks, with open space comprising more than 85% of the site. The students developed master plans and then designed schemes ranging from reimagined brownstones to terraced housing and other ways of weaving more units between the existing buildings. It's refreshing to see architecture students tackling affordable housing in creative ways. MONOGRAPHS WITH A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA: Field Guide to Indoor Urbanism by MODU (Phu Hoang and Rachely Rotem), published by Hatje Cantz, October 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Quiet Spaces by William Smalley, published by Thames & Hudson, November 2018 (Amazon / Bookshop) These two monographs are atypical — and refreshing — in that they incorporate content from outside the work of the designers who made them, but in ways that meld seamlessly with their own work. Although MODU, the Brooklyn studio of Phu Hoang and Rachely Rotem, is so young and has built so little a monograph would seem a bit premature, their Field Guide to Indoor Urbanism is nevertheless chock full of projects, each one illustrating the multifaceted nature of their output: architecture, urban interventions, installations, and socio-economic research among it. The duo makes a statement by upending conventions, literally, by starting the book with a glossary — one where the terms and definitions clearly describe their unique points of view — and ending it with the foreword. In between are essays, projects, and a series of conversations with Japanese architects, including Fumihiko Maki, Itsuko Hasegawa, and Kengo Kuma. The last is what would be considered the outsider content, but even then the interviews were conducted by Hoang and Rotem as part of their research into Second Nature, which they define as "a dual expression of social and environmental contexts. Humans and nature as one." Quiet Spaces is an apt title for the first monograph on UK architect William Smalley, who established his eponymous practice in London in 2010. The coffee table book is full of full-bleed color photographs captured mainly by Harry Crowder but also Hélène Binet; each photographers' choice of film over digital jibes with Smalley's handling of interior spaces, which could be called, for lack of a better term, timeless. The cover photograph by Binet — of Smalley's Oxfordshire Farm, done in collaboration with James Gorst Architects — hints at this quality, but it also recalls the work of Luis Barragan. Hardly by coincidence, Oxfordshire Farm is preceded by Barragan's own house in Mexico City, one of six "quiet spaces" in the book by other architects, ranging in time from Andrea Palladio to Peter Zumthor, with Geoffrey Bawa and others in between. Smalley's way of treating his inspirations in the book with equal weight to his own work is refreshing and illuminating, revealing shared qualities but also Smalley's enduring fascination with beautiful design regardless of the who, when, or where. (The Record section of his website expresses this too.) The mix results in a monograph that is surprisingly cohesive regardless of the various voices and times, reinforcing the timeless quality of Smalley's architecture. CAPTURING AMERICA'S PAST IN PHOTOGRAPHS: Lost in America: Photographing the Last Days of our Architectural Treasures by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, published by CityFiles Press, November 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Richard Nickel Dangerous Years: What He Saw and What He Wrote by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, published by CityFiles Press, December 2015 (Amazon) Anyone with a strong interest in architecture in the United States should know and love HABS, the Historic American Buildings Survey that is maintained by the Library of Congress. The voluminous collection of photographs and drawings spanning from 1933 to the present is a great resource for, among other things, people making architecture books. Photographer Jeffrey Ladd creatively mined the survey for A Field Measure Survey of American Architecture, creating a portrait of the US through a small sampling of the hundreds of thousands of HABS photographs. Similarly, photo historians Richard Cahan and Michael Williams pulled photographs from the survey to draw attention to the buildings and bridges that America lost to decay, neglect, demolition, and destruction. One hundred notable, lesser known, and fairly generic examples are presented in four chapters: Timeless, Forgotten, Disgraced, Doomed. Even though the HABS photographs have remained remarkably consistent over its 90 years, with contemporary photographers still using large-format film (not digital) cameras, Lost in America has a notable arc to it, with famous buildings early in the book and actual scenes of demolition, as in the cover photograph, found at the end. It's hard not to feel a tinge of melancholy or even anger at the wanton destruction implied and captured by the HABS photographers in black and white — emotions tempered, or perhaps even magnified, by the information presented in captions by Cahan and Williams. Although Lost in America is available on Amazon, Bookshop, and other usual outlets, people buying it directly from CityFiles have the option of getting a limited edition with a slipcase featuring a Richard Nickel photo of Chicago’s Republic Building, a Holabird and Roche building that was erected in the first decade of the 20th century and pulled down in 1961. Nickel is one of the photographers inside Lost in America, but the photographer and preservationist is also the subject of Dangerous Years, an earlier book also by Cahan and Williams and also published by CityFiles, in 2015. Cahan had written an earlier, indispensable biography on Nickel, They All Fall Down: Richard Nickel's Struggle to Save America's Architecture (notably, that book features a self-portrait of Nickel atop the Republic Building), so it is logical that he would make another book on Nickel, one that "in his own words and with his own pictures, is his story." The coffee table book traces Nickel's brief but productive and passionate career through photographs, letters, notes, sketches, and other artifacts displayed on large 9x12" pages with black backgrounds. Like Lost in America, Dangerous Years is melancholy, not only because he gravitated to buildings that often met the wrecking ball, but because his widely known end while salvaging materials from one such building is made all the more real through letters to/from his fiancé and even notes for a missing person report made by his parents on the day he went missing. ILLUSTRATED STORIES FOR KIDS — AND GROWN-UPS: Modern New York: The Illustrated Story of Architecture in the Five Boroughs from 1920 to Present by Lukas Novotny, published by Rizzoli, September 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Shigeru Ban Builds a Better World by Isadoro Saturno, illustrated by Stefano Di Cristofaro, published by Tra Publishing, September 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) A pair of illustrated books: one for children and one for grown-ups. Modern New York is Lukas Novotny's second book, following the similar Modern London published in 2018. The colorful illustrations — all of them straight-on elevations, as evidenced by the cover — give the impression that the book is yet another repackaging of famous and predominantly tall buildings in New York City: the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building are there on the cover, as are the American Radiator Building, the Pan Am (MetLife Building), AT&T, Hearst, and 432 Park Avenue. But the inclusion of Paul Rudolph's Tracey Towers in the Bronx and the presence of the Goodyear blimp and a helicopter landing on the Pan Am Building hint at a wider presentation. Novotny is actually drawn (pun intended) to buildings obscure, plain, and off the beaten path — those well beyond what's found in tourist guides. The buildings and modes of transportation, which were potentially more modern than the buildings, are presented in ten chapters: one per decade, from 1920 to present. Each is given at least 16 pages, so relatively insignificant decades (what was built in the 1940s?) reveal surprises even so-called experts, like this reviewer, weren't aware of. I wish there were more children's books about architecture, not only because they provide parents a way to educate their kids about architecture and architects at an early age, but because the subject has such a great potential for doing interesting children's books. Pop-ups! Concertina books! (I reviewed one of those.) Books by architects for their own kids! (I reviewed one of those, too.) Isadoro Saturno's children's book on Shigeru Ban gets creative with format, from its cardboard-like cover with cutout framing a portrait of the architect to the choice of matter paper, cutout-like illustrations, and smaller book on Ban's disaster-relief projects inserted into the middle of the book. By focusing on the fact Ban has made many buildings from paper, from cardboard tubes, and not all of them disaster-relief projects, the book shows kids that what they didn't think was possible is possible. The book opens their minds to the possibilities in anything, architecture or otherwise, encouraging them to think creatively and without limits. CHANGING ZURICH (AND ITS ENVIRONS): Urban Change Over Time: The Photographic Observation of Schlieren 2005–2020 Reveals How Switzerland Is Changing edited by Meret Wandeler, Ulrich Görlich and Caspar Schärer, published by Scheidegger and Spiess, October 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) New Housing in Zurich: Typologies for a Changing Society, edited by Dominique Boudet, published by Park Books, April 2018 (Amazon / AbeBooks) Last month the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) and Frankfurt Book Fair announced the winners of the 2023 DAM Architectural Book Award: ten books, nine of them from publishers in Germany and Switzerland, six from Zurich alone, and four of the ten winners published by Park Books or its sister publisher Scheidegger & Spiess. A winner by the last is Urban Change Over Time, a two-volume book with fifteen years of photo documentation of Schlieren, a satellite town on the western fringe of Zurich. The jury praised the book for its vision and endurance: "The book’s structure derives from the topic, explores many different aspects of the theme, and yet is very careful not to waste the reader’s time." The slimmer of the two volumes has nearly 150 pages of photographs on landscape-oriented pages, with each spread showing the matching photographic documentation of one spot in town over those fifteen years. The matching of the framing in the photos is remarkable, as if dozens of tripods were cemented into place throughout the town for the fifteen-year duration of the project. In some cases the changes are in your face, in many they're subtle, and in others they're apparently non-existent. The longer volume — 480 pages in portrait format — has photographs as well, many of them larger on the page and in the context of the town's development areas or focusing on different typologies; there are also essays, interviews, and maps that aid in orienting oneself with the photos and understanding some of the development areas. The whole is a beautiful production worthy of its accolade. While I don't think New Housing in Zurich nabbed a DAM Award when it was released five years ago, this book from Park Books pairs well with Urban Change Over Time, for its equally high production values, for its geographic proximity, and for simply having the word "changing" in its subtitle. (This book, though hard to find, should also appeal to readers interested in Cohousing in Barcelona and Housing Redux, featured above.) The book presents 51 housing projects spread across Zurich, some of which I was able to visit years before when in Zurich for my work with World-Architects. The projects I visited, and most of the ones in the book, are fairly large and therefore have large sites where site planning is paramount; site plans or aerial views are then included for each of the 51 projects, as well as floor plans, photographs (or renderings), and project descriptions. What makes the projects remarkable beyond their architectural qualities is the fact they are predominantly middle-class and/or cooperatives — making the book a suitable reference for other places where there is a shortage of such housing, well-designed or not.

A review of a new book released this week: The Japanese House Since 1945 by Naomi Pollock, published by Thames & Hudson, November 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) What makes modern and contemporary Japanese houses so appealing? Much of it stems from the novelty of residential designs, which can be traced to a litany of factors, including a cultural acceptance of demolition and renewal that creates a constant stream of new architecture; a litany of legal requirements pushing architects — both young and established — to be formally creative; and let's not leave out the clients willing to take risks. Most of the houses that spark jealousy in architects outside of Japan are found in Tokyo and other urban areas where money, zoning, and architects converge to fuel unexpected creations. One factor, the country's exorbitant inheritance tax, leads many families to cut up their properties into smaller parcels to pay for the tax; the resulting, awkward pieces of land then require architects to squeeze a house into a wrapper defined by fire-safety requirements, sunshine laws, and practical concerns like a parking space. Such is the case today, but distinctive single-family houses in and beyond Tokyo have been prevalent since the end of World War II, when architects took part in the necessary postwar rebuilding that was buoyed by prosperity in the ensuing decades. Naomi Pollock's excellent The Japanese House Since 1945 traces the evolution of single-family houses across eight decades, focusing as much on the people who live(d) in the houses than the architects who designed them. The book is structured as a chronological, decade-by-decade presentation of nearly one hundred houses across 400 pages. Each house is documented in two to five pages with photographs, drawings, and a brief description. The photographs are of their period, rather than contemporary, probably done because most of the old houses have long been demolished. The floor plans are also original, rather than redrawn for the book, but they use a helpful numbered key that is consistent across the book. Last, and perhaps most important, are Pollock's descriptions, which incorporate quotes from the architects and/or the owners and provide details on the designs and living situations beyond typical surveys. Pollock has written numerous books on Japanese architecture, is an international correspondent for Architectural Record, and has elsewhere brought her firsthand accounts and access to architects in Japan to bear on architecture that many people outside of Japan are fascinated by. Compared to books such as New Architecture in Japan, co-written with Yuki Sumner, and Jutaku: Japanese Houses (see bottom of this review), The Japanese House Since 1945 is her most important and best book to date. Although the Japanese houses that are the subject of Pollock's new book are billed as, per the back cover, "many of the most exceptional and experimental houses in the world," it starts with houses that are more traditional than modern. Kunio Maekawa's own house in Tokyo, completed in 1942, has a wood exterior that "evoked traditional Japanese farmhouses," Pollock writes, but has a "spacious living room, exemplifying Maekawa's vision of the ideal house for the burgeoning modern era." Maekawa worked in the Paris atelier of Le Corbusier, later joining Antonin and Noémi Raymond in Tokyo, two foreign architects who moved to Japan after World War I (Antonin worked with Frank Lloyd Wright on the Imperial Hotel). The couple left Japan ahead of WWII but returned after its conclusion, building a house and studio (above spread) in Tokyo that is also rooted in traditional Japanese architecture but subtly signals this "burgeoning modern era." These two instances illustrate how outside influences entered Japan after the war, with tradition and modernity mixing in ways that would eventually lead to the exceptional architectural experimentation the country is known for. The chronological, decade-by-decade presentation allows the evolution of Japanese residential architecture to unfold gradually and be seen in the context of the 1964 Olympics, Expo 1970 in Osaka, the end of the bubble era, the March 2011 earthquake, COVID-19, and other epoch-defining events that are described by Pollock in intros to each decade. Readers see the introduction of concrete, steel, and other materials in the 1960s and 70s, followed by the light construction of the 80s and 90s, and the formal experimentation of our current century. Each decade has at least one icon — Kiyonori Kikutake's Sky House in the 50s, Kazuo Shinohara's Umbrella House in the 60s, Tadao Ando's Row House in Sumiyoshi in the 70s, etc. — but most readers will find something new among the 98 houses. Even those well-versed in modern Japanese houses will be pleased by the nine "At Home" pieces inserted throughout the book. In these, we learn about Yuki Kikutake, daughter of Kiyonori, growing up in Sky House; Fumihiko Maki writes about his own house built in Tokyo in 1978; and we read about the anonymous husband and wife living in Sou Fujimoto's House NA. A last ingredient is nine spotlights — one at the end of each chapter — that discuss the articulation of various elements: roofs, windows, stairs and corridors, gardens and courtyards, etc. The brief case studies, "At Home" features, and spotlights combine to create a compelling and vivid portrait of modern living in Japan over the last eight decades. Naomi Pollock's latest book prompted me to dig out a few other titles from my library that also present Japanese houses. They are described briefly below, presented in chronological order by date of publication, and are intended for anyone who wants do delve deeper into some of the decades or architects explored in Pollock's book; titles with links point to earlier reviews on this blog. Readers who want a more comprehensive overview of early modern Japanese architecture (not just houses) should find David B. Stewart's The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture rewarding. The New Japanese House: Ritual and Anti-Ritual, Patterns of Dwelling by Chris Fawcett, published by Harper & Row, 1980 (Amazon / AbeBooks) The push and pull between tradition and modernity is the subject of this book by Chris Fawcett, the British critic who wanted to undo misconceptions in the West about Japanese houses. He focused on "Post-Metabolist" architecture, houses from the late 1960s and the 1970s that he presented as "ritual affirming" and "ritual disaffirming" houses. It's an intriguing book, but not one that seems to have had much of an influence all these years later; I wonder if Fawcett would have gone on to make more lasting and impactful books on Japanese architecture if he didn't die young. The New Japanese House can be bought inexpensively online, but harder to find is GA Houses 4: Ontology of House, Residential Architecture of 1970s in Japan, which features an essay by Fawcett and dozens of houses from that decade. Japan Houses in Ferroconcrete by Makoto Uyeda, photography by Junichi Shimomura, published by Graphic-Sha, 1988 (Amazon / AbeBooks) This book features 35 houses designed by 21 architects, all united by the use of concrete, varying from small applications, such as alongside wood, steel, and other materials, to expansive houses in reinforced concrete by the likes of Tadao Ando. Although dates are not provided for the houses, most are from the 1980s with some from the previous decade. One of the most rewarding aspects of this book, which I was chuffed to discover while browsing a used bookstore, is the fact all of the photographs — and there are A LOT of them — were specially taken for the book; they go much deeper inside the houses than the "official" photographs found in monographs and other publications. Tadao Ando 1: Houses and Housing, published by Toto, 2007 (Amazon / AbeBooks) 2G N.58/59: Kazuo Shinohara Houses edited by David B. Stewart, Shin-Ichi Okuyama and Taishin Shiozaki, published by Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2011 (Amazon / AbeBooks) One thing I find appealing about architecture in Japan is the way many famous architects there continue to design single-family houses even after getting hired for museums, office buildings, and other larger projects; houses are not merely a leg up to bigger commissions. In turn, monographs on architects' houses can occasionally be found. A couple favorites of mine are the first book in Toto's now-five-strong series on Tadao Ando (Houses and Housing was followed by Outside Japan, Inside Japan, New Endeavors, and Dialogues) and a double issue of 2G devoted to the houses of Kazuo Shinohara built between 1959 and 1988. In addition to them including some of the best modern Japanese houses ever built, the two publications are beautifully produced. Small Houses: Contemporary Japanese Dwellings by Claudia Hildner, published by Birkhäuser, 2011 (Amazon / AbeBooks) Another appealing aspect of Japanese houses is their size. Even though the petit houses prevalent in Japan can be attributed to the country's population density, the breaking up parcels to pay for inheritance taxes, as mentioned above, and other considerations that aren't necessarily geared to the sustainability of living small, it's refreshing to see so much creativity put into small houses rather than the oversized houses that are the norm in the US. This appropriately small book is a good collection of around two-dozen small houses by Go Hasegawa, Atelier Bow-Wow, Sou Fujimoto, and others, all of them completed within the few years leading up to the book's publication. The years since have seen many more creative Japanese houses but fewer house books for readers outside of Japan; websites are now the norm, but I'd be more than happy with more books like Small Houses. How to Make a Japanese House by Cathelijne Nuijsink, published by NAi Publishers, 2012 (Amazon / Bookshop) Astute readers may have noticed that most of the books featured in this post were authored by foreigners (Pollock from the US, Fawcett from the UK, Hildner from Germany, Nuijsink from The Netherlands), which goes hand in hand with the strong appeal Japanese houses have on people outside of Japan. I can't imagine a book titled "How to Make a Japanese House" coming from a Japanese architect; they would not need to explain the work they do on a daily basis to fellow Japanese architects doing the same. For Cathelijne Nuijsink, the premise of the book allowed her to explore the making of Japanese houses through in-depth interviews with four generations of their creators: Jun Aoki, Kazuyo Sejima, Junya Ishigami, and so on. It's an excellent book that remains in print a decade later. Jutaku: Japanese Houses by Naomi Pollock, published by Phaidon, 2015 (Amazon / Bookshop) Appropriately, this review of Naomi Pollock's The Japanese House Since 1945 ends with another book by Pollock: a compact Phaidon picture book with more than 400 contemporary Japanese houses, from Hokkaido in the snowy north to Kyushu in the subtropical south. Not surprisingly, most of the houses are found in Kanto Prefecture, which is anchored by Tokyo. It's a stellar collection that suffers from too much in a small package: there is only one photo per house, an exterior photo that shows readers what anyone would be able to see in public, just hinting at the qualities within. Two photos per house — one outside, one inside — could have been done with a slightly larger paper size. Alas, the book proves the creativity in Japanese residential architecture but leaves us wanting more — much more.

The recent publication of two books prompted me to ponder the future of cities and do a write-up of them together: Implementing Urban Design: Green, Civic, and Community Strategies by Jonathan Barnett, published by Routledge, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Renewing the Dream: The Mobility Revolution and the Future of Los Angeles edited by James Sanders, published by Rizzoli Electa, September 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Implementing Urban Design is the latest of many books about urban design and planning by Jonathan Barnett, whose career and CV span around fifty years. Over that time he has served as an architect, planner, educator, and an advisor to cities in and beyond the US, including Charleston, South Carolina, Omaha, and New York City, where he was Director of Urban Design in the Department of City Planning. When I received Implementing Urban Design, one of the first things I did was scour my bookshelves for other books by Barnett (something I do with most other reviews). There I found his first book, Urban Design as Public Policy: Practical Methods for Improving Cities, published in 1974. It, his first book, summarized his efforts in that role at NYC Planning, presenting the working methods behind the projects he worked on and doing it in ways that other urban designers in other places could learn from them. Just as Barnett's first book was "concerned with techniques of dealing with a number of significant urban and environmental problems which are found in existing cities, or are created when new areas are developed," his latest book focuses on the "complicated interactive process" that is required to move urban designs from their conceptual phases to completion. "What happens in between," in other words, is the subject of Implementing Urban Design, illustrated in ten chapters with case studies drawn from Barnett's experience as an urban design consultant. New York City is here, in chapter 3, "Designing Cities Without Designing Buildings," an echo of a chapter of the same name in the 1974 book. The chapter in the earlier book includes, among other projects, the Lincoln Square Special Zoning District, created in the wake of construction of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and developers rushing to build near it. A requirement to build to the sidewalk (to a height of at least 85') and including arcades for the buildings on the east side of Broadway were the most dramatic components of the special district. Too early to see its impact in 1974, Implementing Urban Design shows the area nearly fifty years later, with a hodgepodge of towers on podiums along Broadway but a street wall that is fairly cohesive. Although the arcade requirement was eventually eliminated from the special district (they're now "permitted" rather than required, such that recent projects like Robert A. M. Stern's 15 Central Park West don't have one), the bulk of the requirements are there, working to maintain that certain design aspects of Broadway north of Columbus Circle extend into the future. The same chapter in the new book also touches on the office campus of PPG in Pittsburgh and a streetscape handbook for Norfolk, Virginia, but other chapters often delve deeper into individual projects in individual cities. For example, chapter nine, "Mobilizing Support to Redesign an Entire City," presents Barnett's process in the fairly massive creation of a master plan for Omaha, Nebraska (the cover depicts a visualization from the plan). Another chapter, "Changing Regulations to Prevent Suburban Sprawl," documents his work with Wildwood, a town west of St. Louis that incorporated in 1995 and wanted to develop a new zoning ordinance that would be appropriate to the area and veer from the suburban norm. My wife being from St. Louis, a city I've in turn visited numerous times, attracted me to this chapter, whose theme — preventing urban sprawl — is of undeniable importance. Barnett walks through the process in detail, from initial contact and developing a team, to research, concepts, writing the master plan and development regulations, and devising a specific plan for the Town Center. The last is now just partially built out, about 25 years after Barnett was brought in. But if we learned anything from the Lincoln Square example, urban designs can take upwards of fifty years until they are "complete." Spread from Renewing the Dream: The Mobility Revolution and the Future of Los Angeles If the visuals in Implementing Urban Design are, to put it inelegantly, less than sexy, the opposite is true of Renewing the Dream, which was edited by James Sanders, author of Celluloid Skyline, and produced in association with Woods Bagot, the Australian firm that now boasts 17 offices around the world. The "freshest member" of the global studio, founded in 2020, is in Los Angeles, where numerous projects to date have focused on transportation, including a concourse at LAX and a proposal for turning gas stations in Los Angeles into EV charging stations with cultural components like drive-in theaters. This beautifully produced coffee table book is full of striking visuals by Woods Bagot and from the worlds of art, photography, and cinema. Even though Renewing the Dream presents a number of projects by the LA studio of Woods Bagot, including the ReCharge LA Prototype EV Station, I wouldn't call the book a monograph. Consisting of a half-dozen essays and two interviews alongside case studies of Woods Bagot projects — all geared around the theme of the "mobility revolution" in Los Angeles — the book's genre is indefinable: it is a hybrid that Sanders describes in the introduction as a "kaleidoscopic portrait" of LA, with "an unusually wide-ranging mix of content—research and data studies, urban design and public art projects, cultural and historical overviews, surveys of current and future technologies." ReCharge LA Prototype EV Station by Matt Ducharme and Woods Bagot Los Angeles Studio The book's wide-ranging content is predicated on what Sanders and Woods Bagot call LA 3.0, a new Los Angeles in the making, following LA 2.0, the freeway and tract-housing landscape of the mid-20th century, and, before that, LA 1.0, the streetcar and boulevard paradigm before WWII. Some of the in-progress LA 3.0 is mandated — extending the subway by 2028, the year of the LA Olympics, and the outlaw of gas cars and trucks for sale by 2035, accelerating the rise of EVs — but much of it comes from wider developments that aren't necessarily rooted in LA but have taken hold there, notably the climate emergency (think the Getty Fire in 2019) and digital technologies like Uber, which eliminate the need for personal cars on, for instance, nights out with friends. Los Angeles may seem like the most unlikely place for a book devoted to a mobility revolution, but my personal experience with LA gave me the opposite impression. My only trip to the city was around twenty years ago, when I spent two weeks there working on a competition with a short deadline. I stayed at the Biltmore in downtown, with a view of Pershing Square out my window. My morning commute was walking across the street to U.S. Bank Tower; my evening commute, 12 or 16 hours later, was the opposite. No car, no driving — a very un-LA experience of LA. But on weekends I walked around DTLA, took buses to the Getty Center and Santa Monica, and rode the subway to West Hollywood. Although I was a tourist, my experience showed me it was possible to navigate a good deal of LA without a car. An expanded subway network, more frequent buses, urban design focused on walkability and bicycling — it isn't hard to consider these and other efforts having dramatic changes on the car-centric nature of Los Angeles. Yet, the wide-ranging mix of content in Renewing the Dream reveals that the biggest impact of mobility advances on the city — any American city, really, not just LA — is found in parking. If changes in laws, increased public transit, technology advances, and other things lead Americans and Angelenos to have fewer cars, drive less, and use ride-sharing and take public transit more, then the many square miles of surface parking lots can be given over to spaces for people, not cars: densifying (sub)urban areas and providing housing and other much-needed functions. So, in addition to the ReCharge LA project, the book includes MORE LA, Woods Bagot's study for infilling lots previously used for surface parking, and Sanders' own California Court project, a denser version of the city's beloved bungalow courtyards apartments from a century ago. The last, documented in the 1982 book Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles, is one of a few-dozen books in the bibliography whose quotes and influence pepper Renewing the Dream. The older book and newer proposal illustrate that, while certain elements of the mobility revolution are linear and future-oriented, some of them are historical and cyclical. The answers to tomorrow's sustainable Los Angeles, in other words, are found as much in the city's existing built environment as they are in technologies and designs still to come.

In 1939, Otto Neurath's Modern Man in the Making was released by Alfred A. Knopf. Neurath was director of the International Foundation of Visual Information and used the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) system to "teach through the eye." A recent article describes Modern Man in the Making as a "pictorial statistical history of human technological adaptation and social cooperation [that] addressed a modern audience searching for optimistic narratives amid an economically, politically, and socially volatile era." The book is a classic, and for someone like me who veers toward arguments made in a combination of words and images, it is a book I should probably have — at the very least, I should know more about it. Although it was released as a trade book, can be found cheaply in b/w reprints, and is freely available on the Internet Archive, first editions of Modern Man in the Making go for hundreds and thousands of dollars. This is one of those books that screams out for a high-quality facsimile edition — and it will be getting that treatment early next year, courtesy of Lars Müller Publishers. The timing is curious, though, as Lars Müller just released Joy and Fear, in which Theo Deutinger brings the subjects and visual techniques of Neurath's magnum opus into the 21st century. Although Deutinger writes that his book "enters in dialogue" with Neurath's book, I couldn't help thinking that the two books side by side would heighten the differences and similarities, the constants and changes between the 1930s and the 2020s. Alas, I'll have to wait until February to do that. Joy and Fear is not the first book by Theo Deutinger published by Lars Müller. That was Handbook of Tyranny, which was published in 2018 and was recently released in an updated, expanded edition. I didn't see it upon its initial release, though I did catch Deutinger's display of the book's illustrations — the walls, fences, and other means of controlling human behavior in cities — in actual objects: plants, railings, barbed wire, a prison jumpsuit and other pieces of the "routine cruelties of the twenty-first century" at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. That 2019 exhibition prompted me to get the book and then write a review: "The straightforward illustrations look like they could have been pulled from Architectural Graphic Standards, making the book read at times like an actual handbook for tyrannical dictators." Deutinger's "detailed non-fictional graphic illustrations," as described by the publisher, also owe a debt to Neurath, as evinced by the publication of Joy and Fear. People who already own the first edition of Handbook of Tyranny won't find it necessary to buy the update, given that the changes amount to just eight new pages and consist mainly of some new paragraphs here and there, and the reordering of charts and graphics to reflect the state of the world five years later. Still, I appreciated the fact Deutinger went to the effort of an update, doing something that was de rigueur in books decades ago but is now rare, almost exclusively the province of the internet, which can be updated in close to real time. But Deutinger's illustrations — almost subversive in their dryness — are appropriate to the pages of a book; I feel like they would lose something on the screen, even though the changes impacting his illustrations happen at a clip much faster than in half-decade intervals. Spread from Handbook of Tyranny (Expanded Edition) by Theo Deutinger, published by Lars Múller Publishers, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) In between Handbook of Tyranny and Joy and Fear, Deutinger and Lars Müller put out Ultimate Atlas: Logbook of Spaceship Earth, a book that uses lines — and nothing else — "to create a total portrait of the planet." No wonder one review calls it "the ultimate simplification of reality." I haven't seen that book, but visually it seems that Joy and Fear strikes a balance between the highly detailed illustrations of Tyranny and the minimalism of Ultimate Atlas, as if Neurath's Isotype cannot be improved upon in describing the state of the world over time. As described above, Deutinger's book "dialogues" with Neurath's nearly century-old book. It does this by extending the timeline to the present and adjusting some data visualization from the original; the latter updates are highlighted with the icon of a person holding up a sign. What does the book reveal about the modern world? Clearly, yet unfortunately and not surprisingly, that progress is being made by the few, not the many: geographically, demographically, politically, economically, etc. Spread from Joy and Fear: An Illustrated Report on Modernity by Theo Deutinger, published by Lars Múller Publishers, September 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) The spread above can serve to illustrate how the book works. The red, blue, and black chart on the left shows household ownership of amenities in the USA, from 1910 to 2020, including such items as computers, phones, wifi, telephones (cell and landline separately), toilets, and electricity. Most of the amenities are full as of 2020, though only one — landline telephones — is in decline. Though the same chart for other geographical areas would be telling, the opposite page shows an update version of data viz. from Neurath's 1939 book: radios, TVs, and cars in the 1930s (top) and 2020s (bottom) in the six geographical regions used throughout Deutinger's book (USA and Canada, Europe, CIS, Latin America, Southern Territories, Far East). Although the scales change between the two charts, it's clear that the regions in the bottom rows (Latin America, Southern Territories, Far East) have become more modern in recent decades. But it's up to the reader to speculate on what so many cars mean, for instance, to our warming planet. Visualizing how the continued burning of fossil flues will impact our warming planet is one subject of Climate Inheritance, the latest book from Design Earth, the brilliantly inventive studio of Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy that previously wrote and illustrated Geographies of Trash (2015), Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2018), and The Planet After Geoengineering (2021). The cover features one of the many beautiful illustrations populating the book: a diagram of aquifers refilled by injecting storm water into "bladders" that serve to raise the sinking city of Venice. Venice and its Lagoon is one of ten sites in the book, each one on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Others include the Galápagos Islands, Sagarmatha National Park, and the Statue of Liberty. What is the future of such places — heritage sites that are already preserved to a greater extent than other places — when the Anthropocene leads to inherited conditions future generations may not anticipate? Spread from Climate Inheritance by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (DESIGN EARTH), published by Actar Publishers, August 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) By way of illustration, the chapter on the Statue of Liberty indicates that Design Earth is not interested exclusively on the preservation and care of monuments, of places deemed heritage sites; what they symbolize is also important, revealing that inheritances involve myriad problems beyond the environmental and physical. To Ghosn and Jazairy, the statue gifted to the USA from France is about patina, poverty, and pollution: "The ecology of the color line is more than skin deep." Pollution led to damage on the skin of the statue and the need for numerous restorations, but well beyond that, "disparate exposure to pollutants," the book reads in regards to today's reframing of socioeconomic inequalities, "may help explain racial discrepancies in lung functioning." In Design Earth's imagined future, the Statue of Liberty appears to be joined by a "Brown Lady Liberty," the symbol of "a long awaited but not yet actualized freedom that was articulated over a century and a half ago." One more book that joins with the other three to be — in my mind, at least — an illustration of how images are effective in describing the world and the way it changes over time is Stephen J. Eskilson's Digital Design: A History. Eskilson's book, unlike the other three, does not use newly created images to create a narrative, but the story that he is telling is about images: design in its various aspects, from graphic and industrial design to architecture and data visualization. It's a history that needs to be told, especially since people now born into the digital world don't realize how developments in design from the 20th and even earlier centuries shaped our digital present — and likewise will shape our digital futures. Architecture is the subject of two chapters: "Digital Architecture I: Origins" and "Digital Architecture II: Parametrics and 3D Printing." (The latest buzz in architecture — and just about every realm, really — AI, is treated in its own chapter.) In the first architecture chapter, Eskilson moves from the Sydney Opera House, in which "[Ove] Arup pioneered the use of computational analysis," to Peter Cook and Colin Fournier's Kunsthaus Graz via Frank Gehry in Bilbao, Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, and Greg Lynn. The second chapter jumps ahead to Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, especially the latter's wholehearted, sometimes controversial embrace of parametricism, while also looking at how digital software bridges construction via 3D printing and robotics. This is design history, remember, so there is nothing novel in what Eskilson discusses, but he succinctly traces some of the most important developments to describe our current condition. (Unfortunately, one typo — and I hope it's just that — distracted me while reading the first architecture chapter: Eskilson calls AD, the "magazine that associated digital architecture with aspects of structuralist theory," Architectural Digest instead of Architectural Design! I can't think of more polar opposites than these two publications sharing the first term and abbreviation but having very little else in common.) Spread from Digital Design: A History by Stephen Eskilson, published by Princeton University Press, October 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Even with two architecture chapters among its twelve chapters, most interesting to me is the chapter devoted to data visualization, a subject that is also strongly aligned with Neurath and Deutinger. Like other chapters in the book, Eskilson briskly covers decades and centuries in just around twenty pages, moving from 18th-century charts and graphs to digital data on websites, across buildings, and on the walls of galleries. Some of what makes this chapter so appealing is the abundance of examples unknown to me, such as Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway (1995), which is pictured above, has a permanent home at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and now I feel I must go see. (That said, I wish the book had a list of books for further reading, and I am surprised that a book published by a university press has no footnotes at all.) More recent examples are really interesting, including Oliver O'Brien's Tube Tongues (2014), an interactive map that shows the prevalence of non-English speaking in different London neighborhoods. Rising to the fore re: data viz., though, is the importance of design/the designer in making data in digital environments visible and understandable, especially when the output is on a website and via an API, for instance, rather than in a book and done by an illustrator. The books above may be old-fashioned, just by the fact they are books rather than digital environments, but they offer plenty to consider in regards to thinking about and visualizing the world around us — now and in the future.

Over at World-Architects I reviewed As Found: Experiments in Preservation (Flanders Architecture Institute, 2023) edited by Sofie De Caigny, Hülya Ertas and Bie Plevoets, the companion to the exhibition of the same name at the Flanders Architecture Institute. Read my review here.

The recent receipt of two review books got me thinking about the past and the future of architecture books. The first one is This is Architecture: Writing on Buildings, a collection of excerpted texts about buildings, spanning from the mid-1800s to the 2010s. This is Architecture: Writing on Buildings edited by Stephen Bayley and Robert Bargery, published by Unicorn Publishing Group, October 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop) Edited by Stephen Bayley and Robert Bargery, respectively chair and executive director of the UK's Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, This Is Architecture is billed as "different" from the typical "writing on building by architects [that] is limited to exculpatory manifestos or technical sermonizing to a captive congregation of converts." They describe the nearly 100 excerpted texts as "exceptional examples of writing on buildings by writers which merit inclusion on the quality of the writing alone" (emphasis in original). So readers find Lewis Mumford, Ada Louise Huxtable, Ian Nairn, Martin Pawley, and others who wrote (well) about architecture for a living, but also Virginia Woolf, Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard, Blaise Cendrars, and others far removed from the field of architecture. The aims of the "non-partisan" and "non-didactic" selection are to "enhance popular appreciation of architecture and to celebrate those who are architecture's eloquent champions." Presented in a "running order [that] is essentially random," each writing is accompanied by a biography of the author in a narrow column; in a few cases the excerpt is so short the bio runs longer on the page, as in the four lines from Louis Kahn's Conversations with Students from 1969. As in any book that is basically a survey, a collection of things united by a theme, it's easiest as a reviewer to focus on organization, presentation, and selection. In order, I find the "essentially random" organization interesting at times (Kahn's text opposite Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York, for instance) but for the most part insignificant, since many entries span multiple pages, each one serves as a self-contained statement, and such a book can be read in many ways beyond the usual front to back. The presentation is very good, from the glossy papers with occasional images to the inclusion of a ribbon bookmark and the list of sources in the back matter. The selection is fittingly UK-centric, with numerous English critics alongside Nairn and Pawley, for instance, and far too many writings about London and buildings in London. But where are Michael Sorkin and Herbert Muschamp, two US critics who I read for "the thrill of their prose" and "the stimulation to be had from their insights," qualities the editors find lacking in architectural criticism? Unfortunately, they are missing: a shame, given that Muschamp's nearly iconic critique of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao is far more interesting than Jonathan Glancey's piece excerpted here. Judging the book based on what it includes, rather than what it omits, and doing so in the context of me thinking about the past and future of architecture books, This Is Architecture says a few main things to me: writings on buildings are not the sole purview of architects and architecture critics, since architecture is "the most important art because [it is] the one that cannot be ignored," as the editors assert; architecture is more than aesthetics and style, as evidenced by the texts that focus on other aspects of the built environment; and the most influential writings on architecture have not been exclusively in books, given the numerous texts excerpted from magazines and journals, some of which were later collected in book form (think Martin Filler's NYRB essays and his Makers of Modern Architecture series). These three points are hardly groundbreaking — they're obvious, really — but it's good to be reminded now and again about such things. While the point of This Is Architecture is to take pleasure in things written in the past, it inadvertently says some things about the future by focusing on a diversity of voices, approaches to writing about architecture, and media. Which brings us to the second book, Future Book(s), in which editors Pia Pol and Astrid Vorstermans asked journalists, artists, architects, and others to speculate on the future of the book, specifically "books on art, design and architecture, and cultural-critical publications." Future Book(s): Sharing Ideas on Books and (Art) Publishing edited by Pia Pol and Astrid Vorstermans, published by Valiz, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) The occasion of the recently published book is the twentieth anniversary of Valiz, the Amsterdam publisher started by Vorstermans in June 2003 (Pol joined in 2008). The last twenty pages of Future Book(s) shows the covers of the many books put out by Valiz over those twenty years, some in series (Antennae, Vis–à–Vis), many in Dutch and almost as many in English, and all on art, design and architecture, and culture, as expected. I have not read any Valiz books before Future Book(s) (one of their books, Binational Urbanism: On the Road to Paradise, was featured on this blog, but reviewed by an outside contributor), but it's clear the publisher focuses on the margins, presenting work by artists, practitioners, and academics that explore new territory in their fields. The design of Future Book(s) accentuates their position; in many ways the book is the antithesis of This Is Architecture, from the voices included in its pages to the materiality and layout of the same: the glossy This Is Architecture has a staid, consistent format from piece to piece, while the various chapters of Future Book(s) were laid out by different graphic designers, limited only by the monochrome palette of the lightweight matte paper. If This Is Architecture's random order makes flipping through the book one of surprising adjacencies, Future Book(s) is the same times ten. Each thematic chapter may be united by a single graphic designer, but each contribution is treated singularly, meaning they are visually unique but often wholly unexpected takes on the subject at hand. A fairly academic text with footnotes but sans illustrations may be followed by a two-page spread that is entirely illustrated content, followed by six pages of artworks, followed by a personal anecdote, and so on. The themes that structure the book (Personal Threads, Histories Unfolding, Digital Realms, Shaping Future Form, etc.) are vague enough that contributions could fit in just about any of them; in fact, the editors admit the dozen themes were came later, meaning the contributors were not beholden to any themes in speculating on future books. Still, the editors give some hints in their introduction: "By definition, books are made for the future. They solidify knowledge while at the same time generating new ideas. They make sure that the now finds a place where it is accessible to the future." While the comments of Vorstermans and Pol make it seem that threats to the future of the book are hyperbolic, there is no shortage of contributors imagining distant futures where books take on forms different than the bound books we are familiar with. Books 200 years in the future, as seen in Elisabeth Klement and Pieter Verbeke's contribution, look like books, but they are made underwater, celebrated at the New York Art Book Fair Under Water 2223, and read by dogs, who have evolved considerably in the ensuing two centuries. In Tricia Treacy's piece, "What If?," shortages of paper are addressed through algorithms that "design and print several different texts of interest, overlapping on individual sheets of paper throughout a custom book..." More than one contribution examines how AI will be involved in the making of books, but nobody denies that ChatGPT and other will be involved to some degree. Uniting the texts, as I mentioned, are the nearly dozen designers, whose treatment of the contributions illustrates the importance of graphic design and the inadequate nature of web pages and other digital media by comparison. My reading through of This is Architecture and Future Book(s) coincided with me visiting The Book in the Age of ... exhibition at Harvard GSD's Loeb Library, which I reviewed for World-Architects a couple of weeks ago. Curated by Rem Koolhaas, Irma Boom, and Phillip Denny, among other elements the exhibition had (it ended yesterday after six weeks) a large three-part "book" on a table near the entrance to the library. Across the three parts, it moved from books in the age of "the hand" to the age of "press" to the age of "machine." One page in the last included this statement relevant to the blog post you're reading: "The future book is local. It is made from locally produced materials, printed nearby, and delivered to homegrown readership. Hyper-local publishing will lead to a renaissance of book innovation." Positioned beneath an image of the cover of Elements of Architecture, the massive book by Rem Koolhaas and Irma Boom that came out of Koolhaas's 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, but not attributed to anyone, the statement (image above) comes across to me as Boom's, given how she has spoken about the appeal of books from the 1500s, the 1600s, and the 1960s: "periods [that] demonstrate freedom and creativity in the use of materials, typography, sizes of the books, and structure of the texts" (source). An example from the 1960s is Art of the Sixties, published by the Wallraf-Richartz Museum with plastic covers, a plexiglass spine, metal screws, color photos pasted on brown paper, and portraits of the artists on transparent foils (take a look). The 1500s and 1600s follow the invention of the Gutenberg press, while the sixties came after the war and coincided with great social change. Similarly, the digital software and other tools that led to e-ink, ebooks, and other potential book-busting technologies will most likely herald this "renaissance of book innovation." The statement from the exhibition also indicates that bookmaking will have to respond to climate change, dwindling resources, and other things that will (continue to) impact our globalized world. Books tend to be produced in one place (unknown for This Is Architecture, Netherlands for Future Book(s)) and then are shipped around the world from there; "hyper-local publishing" would reduce the need for books to be loaded on container ships and sent halfway around the world, using digital technologies and local printers to create variations on a book based on papers, inks, bindings, etc. It would also lead to more variations on subjects, as seen in these two books, considering the UK-centric nature of This Is Architecture and the numerous Dutch voices in Future Book(s). Actually, the UK- and NL-focus of these two books are what made me think of the statement from The Book in the Age of ... exhibition. If the future book is hyper-local, not just national or local, dramatic changes in production and distribution should lead to changes in content and design. Who knows, maybe the 2030s will be as exciting as the 1500s, 1600s, and 1960s?

Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, the English architect who was born in 1869 and died in 1944, that is. Although a famous name, Lutyens was not an architect I had much familiarity with before I received a review copy of the first volume of The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens. Flipping through it prompted me to do a little digging on Lutyens in other publications. Racking my brain, it seems my classmates and I learned very little about him in architecture school a few decades ago. As a traditionalist with buildings in Arts and Crafts, Edwardian, and neoclassical garb, Lutyens was far removed from the concerns of postmodernism, deconstructivism, and any other –isms in vogue a half-century after his death. If we had heard his name, it was most likely in regards to what's referred to as Lutyens’ Delhi in New Delhi, the British colonial capital in India that he laid out and designed buildings for between 1912 and 1931. The Beaux-Arts plan culminated in the Viceroy's House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan), the grandiose domed presidential residence, inaugurated in 1931, that is arguably his greatest building. Yet, when I dig into my library to find some mention of Lutyens, the few titles I can find emphasize his country houses rather than his work in India. The trusty Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Architecture (2004), for instance, devotes one short paragraph to New Delhi, it coming after a handful of paragraphs listing his many notable country houses. In her entry on Lutyens, Hilary J. Grainger calls him "one of the most noteworthy English architects of his generation," one who was "above all, a domestic architect." In another instance, the first US edition of Nikolaus Pevsner's A Dictionary of Architecture (1976) praises the "genuine monumentality" of the Viceroy's House but goes further in describing his early Arts and Crafts houses as "excellent" and his later Edwardian houses as "really spectacular." Although Lutyens is nowhere to be found in Pevsner's An Outline of European Architecture (1943) or in his influential genealogical history of modernism, Pioneers of Modern Design (1949; originally published as Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936), Pevsner did write a lengthy reassessment of Lutyens for Architectural Review in 1951. The occasion was the then-recent publication of the three-volume The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens by A.S.G. Butler and The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens by Christopher Hussey. Pevsner admits he did not find Lutyens as important in the development of European architecture as C.F.A. Voysey and Charles Renee Mackintosh, two contemporaries both in Pioneers, but given that Lutyens built more than them and his "success was so much bigger and maintained over so much longer a period," Pevsner found the large three-volume monograph and 600-page biography sufficiently warranted. What stands out to me are how Pevsner praises Lutyens' "immense care over details," which is paralleled by the many exquisite detail drawings in the three volumes by Butler, and "the fun he had with space," a bit of a surprise given the traditional nature of the plans he developed. Pevsner's statement that "Lutyens’ handling of space has not in the past been sufficiently appreciated," says to me why this noteworthy English architect failed to impact the architects who overlapped with him chronologically but went down different avenues in the 20th century: with modernism's focus on space, especially open and flowing space, Lutyens offered little overt inspiration. Similar sentiments to Pevsner's are explored in Architectural Monographs No. 6, published by Andreas Papadakis in 1979. The foreword to the monograph edited by David Dunster and featuring a lengthy essay by Peter Inskip starts: "This issue of Architectural Monographs is something of a departure" from previous issues, among them Michael Graves and Alvar Aalto, because Lutyens "has never been canonized by architectural historians as a predecessor of the Modern Movement." It continues: "His vast output of over 300 buildings and projects shows a continuing fascination with traditional construction techniques and borrowing from the past," as evident in "the scale and detailing of the functionally distinct rooms." No new technologies and no open plans — no wonder Lutyens has remained influential with classically trained architects but not with modernists (not that there are just the two camps, of course). While Inskip looks at Lutyens' houses from a "modernist point of view," he was not the first to do so. A decade earlier, in the pages of Perspecta 12: The Yale Architectural Journal, architect Allan Greenberg explored architectural similarities between Lutyens and Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Greenberg's 1969 essay, "Lutyens' Architecture Restudied," was later put into book form, in 2007, as Lutyens and the Modern Movement. In the earlier essay he presents numerous floor plans of Lutyens' houses from the first decade of the 1900s and points out a few characteristics common to them: a symmetrical disposition of rooms; a solid mass (or void) at the crossing of the main axes; an independent circulation pattern overlaid on the first two; and an intricate plan hidden by the formal, symmetrical massing and elevations. It is in the plan where he links Lutyens and Wright, finding the same four characteristics in Wright's Ward Willits House from 1901. The departure in the two architects' contemporaneous plans are rooted in space: "Wright's space is continuous and flowing," Greenberg writes, while "Lutyens seldom planned continuous spaces [...] but he was aware of the potential." Greenberg finds some of the same with Corbusier's houses of the 1920s, though he also discusses the similarities between New Delhi and Chandigarh at length. Which brings me to the impetus for this post: The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens, Volume 1: Country Houses by A.S.G. Butler with George Stewart and Christopher Hussey, published by ACC Art Books, April 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) As mentioned above, The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens — aka the Lutyens Memorial Series, given that it was published six years after his death — was first published in 1950 in three volumes, the first on "Country Houses"; the second on "Gardens, Delhi, and Washington"; and the third on "Public Buildings, Etc." The originals (now fetching thousands of dollars) were published by Country Life, the British magazine founded by Edward Hudson in 1897. (Country Life also published the Lutyens biography by Christopher Hussey mentioned above.) Not only did Hudson commission Lutyens for several houses, most notably Deanery Gardens (1901) and Lindisfarne Castle (1903), and the magazine's offices, he regularly published the architect's buildings in his magazine. The photos, drawings, and text from the magazine are what became the three-part Memorial. The large-format books (12x16"!) were reprinted by the Antique Collectors Club at least twice that I gather, in 1984 and 2002, each in limited print runs. The new reprints are being published by ACC Art Books, the successor to the Antique Collectors Club, which was bought by The Images Publishing Group in 2016. The first volume, featured here, was published in spring of this year, the second volume came just last month, and the third volume is forthcoming. Around the time of the 2002 reprint, Gavin Stamp wrote an extensive introduction for Edwin Lutyens: Country Houses (From the Archives of Country Life), published by Aurum Press and The Monacelli Press. Although Stamp was, from the best of my limited knowledge of him, an architectural historian more interested in Greek, Victorian, and other architectures predating modernism, he also felt the need to align Lutyens with modern architecture, specifically Wright. His introduction quotes a review of the Memorial series by Wright himself, from a 1951 issue of Building magazine: "[I] voice admiration of the love, loyalty, and art with which this cultured architect, in love with Architecture, shaped his buildings. To him the English chimney, the Gable, the Gatepost monumentalized in good brickwork and cut-stone were motifs to be dramatized with great skill. He was able to idealize them with a success unequaled." So, basically, in the 20th century, the relevance of Lutyens relied on his architecture being influential on younger generations of architects who were trained in modernism or, in later decades, were dabbling in postmodernism. Even A.S.G. Butler and his collaborators wrote in Country Houses that, while "Sir Edwin was not a notable exponent of the slick modern mode," they did not believe "the architecture of Lutyens was outside the main stream [sic] of modern work." Does the same striving to align Lutyens with modern architecture apply today, in the third decade of the 21st century, more than 150 years after the birth of Lutyens and more than 75 years after his death? My opinion, and it is just that, is no, the archive of Lutyens' architecture can stand on its own without the need for it to be aligned with more forward-thinking contemporaries. If anything, the opposite of previous attempts is most valid today: his work is an inspiration for architects more inclined to vernacular, classical, and other traditional styles of architecture. While I'm not a proponent of 21st-century classicism, I'm all for a plurality of architectural expressions — if they're done intelligently, capably, and, dare I say, beautifully. And with the superrich getting superricher, our current age isn't too far off from the late 1800s, when Lutyens started designing country houses for people of means. Put another way, large houses on par with those in Country Houses are being made today, unfortunately as lousy McMansions rather than tasteful and complex compositions rooted in architects like Lutyens. I'm generalizing, to be sure, but the audience for this book is both well-defined and likely to buy it. The series, it should be noted, is the winner of the inaugural ICAA Book of the Year from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. With all that said, is The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens, Volume 1: Country Houses, keeping in mind that it is a reprint of a nearly 75-year-old book, good? The quality of the reprint is nearly perfect, with a good selection of papers for the three sequential parts of the book: the texts, the drawings, and the black-and-white photographs. Text and drawings are on matte heavyweight pages, while the photos are on glossy paper. The inks make everything read well; in particular, the drawing reproductions are exquisite. The book is big and apparently well-built, but a tear at the hinge of the paste-down endpaper and free endpaper indicates it might not be strong enough. Hence, not quite perfect. My main frustrations are with the format of the book, which obviously goes back to the original. The text is page after page of wide justified columns — four to a spread, roughly fifty pages without a single illustration; it's a bit of a slog. Houses in the roughly chronological text are keyed to the drawings, which are numbered I to CX and logically follow the text. I often appreciate properly keyed texts, like here, but without any inline images this format requires a lot of flipping back-and-forth in a very big book. And the photos that come third and last in the book? They are numbered, 1 to 271, but they not keyed to the texts or the drawings. What is the result of this three-part structure? Unless you follow the text closely, dutifully flipping to the drawings and searching for the related photographs, forming a mental image of each house (and there are many) based on description, drawing, and photographs is difficult. The Papadakis and Monacelli books mentioned above use project structures more common in architectural monographs, with text descriptions alongside photographs and drawings; these make knowing Castle Drogo, Grey Walls, The Salutation, Tigbourne, and other houses by name that much easier. Familiarity in The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens comes with a bit more effort, but it's an effort architects interested in Lutyens will find rewarding. Spread from The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens, Volume 1: Country Houses Spread from The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens, Volume 1: Country Houses Spread from The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens, Volume 1: Country Houses

Blue Dream is a house designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro for Julia "Julie" Reyes Taubman and her husband Robert "Bobby" Taubman. The house, located in East Hampton, on the South Fork of Long Island, was completed in 2017, nearly 30 years after the architects were commissioned to design their first house on Long Island, the Slow House. A book devoted to Blue Dream, written by Paul Goldberger, was released last month by DelMonico Books. Blue Dream and the Legacy of Modernism in the Hamptons: A House by Diller Scofidio + Renfro by Paul Goldberger, photography by Iwan Baan, published by DelMonico Books, September 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Like other architects educated in the United States in the early 1990s, the architecture of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio was an inspiration to me. Diller + Scofidio had built very little then, but their beautiful drawings and means of presenting them exhibited a clear desire to build. The only constructing they did then was temporary, almost exclusively in theaters and galleries. Even without a building to their name, their first monograph, Flesh: Architectural Probes, was published in 1994 (the butt cheeks on the front and back covers and butt-crack binding set it apart from every other architecture book). A standout project, coming near at the end of the monograph, is the Slow House, which had already brought D+R attention when it won a P/A Award and graced the cover of Progressive Architecture's January 1991 issue (PDF link). Model of Slow House from DS+R website. The Slow House arcs and expands in plan from a single front door to a two-story picture window facing the water (locals referred to it as a banana). Of relevance here is the house's site in North Haven, Long Island, and the view through the picture window of Long Island Sound. The view's importance is accentuated by a second chimney, opposite a functioning chimney, that would have held a video camera framing the water view for the owners to look at while in the house or back in Manhattan. Page 229 in Flesh shows a photograph of the Slow House taking shape, the formwork for its foundation walls and columns ready to be filled with concrete. Alas, that photo captured the furthest extent of construction: the house was a victim of insufficient assets and the early 90s recession, never to be completed. L: Slow House drawing in the collection of MoMA. R: Slow House under construction in 1991. I never knew exactly why the Slow House wasn't completed, but Paul Goldberger reveals some of the story in Blue Dream, writing that "the house was to be funded by the sale of two Cy Twombly drawings." The collapse of the art market kept that from happening, but the importance of Slow House can be found in the Museum of Modern Art's acquisition of the project's drawings and models for its permanent collection. The most iconic piece is a floor plan and series of building sections drawn on a transparent sheet over wood with what appears to be a schmear of joint compound. Moving from the view in the rearview mirror to the view through the picture window, the sections radiate from the floor plan, in a sequence that is logical yet confounding, given how the sections overlap as they increase in height. Most remarkable is the way the drawing implements remain part of the presentation, and how the compass armature is a custom creation, what I see as a clear extension of Diller's education and Scofidio's teaching at Cooper Union. Needless to say, I was chuffed to see the drawing in person back in 2013, when Pedro Gadanho pulled it out of the MoMA archives for Cut 'n' Paste: From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City. Goldberger mentions Slow House in a chapter of Blue Dream that finds Julie and Bobby considering Diller Scofidio + Renfro for their East Hampton house. Charles Renfro, who joined Diller + Scofidio in 1997 and became a name partner in 2004, recounts to Goldberger their initial meeting with Julie at their office, in 2010, when they showed her Slow House "and our small residential oeuvre of mostly unbuilt houses." While hearing "unbuilt" would push most clients to look for another architect, Julie was not a typical client. A few years before the meeting, the Taubmans held an invited design competition, with Thomas Phifer standing out above Shigeru Ban, whose design was "remarkable" but impractical and "more suited to a house in the tropics," and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, whose design was "more restrained and perhaps less daring than what [Julie] wanted." Phifer sensed that Julie wanted something more sculptural than his first scheme, with three linear pavilions connected by glass-enclosed walkways, so over time it morphed into striking sail-like forms appropriate to its site on the dunes facing the Atlantic. But designing and building a house, architecturally daring or not, is as much about personal relationships as it is about architectural design. Phifer and Julie Taubman "had not connected as closely as [Phifer] wanted his clients to connect," Goldberger explains, and "the immaculate quality of Phifer's architecture was never the right match for Julie's taste." Blue Dream as captured by Iwan Baan. Who was the right architect for Julie's tastes? It was Charles Renfro, who "seemed to connect easily with Julie Taubman in a way that Phifer had not," Goldberger writes. Another reason DS+R got the job was their ability to connect with the precedents Julie was drawn to, namely the houses of John Lautner, Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, and Jacques Couëlle, as well as Frederick Kiesler's iconic, site-less, unbuilt Endless House (also in MoMA's collection). The cave-like qualities of the houses designed by Couëlle and Kiesler appear to have inspired Renfro the most, as Julie selected the "Ravioli" scheme from the four initial concepts the studio generated after their meeting. The others were the "Mobius," the "Roof," and the "Dunes." Any of them would have led to statement house dramatically different from the Hamptons norm, but continuing on the path started by the Ravioli scheme led to the built Blue Dream, a sculptural house unlike another DS+R project, yet one that is hard to see coming from another contemporary architect. Spread from Blue Dream in "Where Modernism Flourished" chapter. By the time we read about the Taubmans selecting DS+R for the commission, we have absorbed much of the house through the numerous full-bleed color photographs by Iwan Baan that sit between early chapters about the Taubman's background and wishes, about the history of modernism on Long Island (this chapter echoes Goldberger's essay in Houses of the Hamptons from 1986), and about the aborted project with Phifer. The chapters that follow move forward in time, tracing the development of its formal design; documenting the efforts to engineer the design and turn it into an actual building; presenting the interior contributions that turned the house into a Gesamtkunstwerk; and revealing the personal issues that make the house as melancholy as it is exuberant. The book has a clear narrative sweep, one that is aided by the coffee table format, with its large paper size, large photos, and the easy integration of images with Goldberger's text. The format, I feel, is appropriate to the house and its circumstances. Even if you're not a fan of Blue Dream (I'm still more partial to the Slow House), it's hard not to get pulled along on the ride of its realization as recounted in these pages. The view from the picture window at Blue Dream, photographed by Iwan Baan.

(Covers of some of the books discussed in this post) If your first reaction to the title of this post is something along the lines of, "Wait, isn't critical regionalism just 40 years old?," then everything you think know about critical regionalism is partial, in both senses of the term: incomplete and biased. Yes, Kenneth Frampton's "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance" was published in Hal Foster's The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture in 1983, exactly 40 years ago, but the term "critical regionalism" was coined two years earlier by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in their article "The Grid and the Pathway: An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis" in Architecture in Greece. But as the term took hold in architectural circles that decade, and to a lesser but still lasting degree in the decades since, it has more often been associated with Frampton's essay, even though he acknowledged the earlier essay at the time and that acknowledgment brought Tzonis and Lefaivre a good deal of attention beyond their native Greece. Yet, if critical regionalism is some sort of –ism, then should it be defined by just one critic? Is it unfair, in other words, that Frampton's take should take precedence over Tzonis and Lefaivre's? First thing's first: what is critical regionalism? If we take a step back and look at the more general term "regionalism," the entry for it in the three-volume Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Architecture (2004, edited by R. Stephen Sennott) describes regionalism in architecture as "the desire to shape buildings according to the particular characteristics of a specific place." Further describing it as "the oldest and most pervasive of all building ideas," the entry omits mention of critical regionalism but includes Frampton's essay in its bibliography. Richard Weston, in his excellent introduction to architecture from 2011, 100 Ideas that Changed Architecture, while he doesn't include critical regionalism among the hundred, he describes it in the entry for regionalism like so: "Attempting to come to terms with the ethical dilemmas of practicing in a globalized world, [... Tzonis and Lefaivre] argued that while welcoming the benefits of interaction and exchange, designers should think critically about their impact and value the uniqueness of the local/regional culture, environment, and resources." Furthermore, they "hoped to avoid both the commercialization of 'folk' traditions and their political use — as in Hitler's promotion of volkisch culture — as a means of excluding others." Weston goes on to describe how Frampton took up the couple's approach but "argued for an emphasis on topography, climate, light, and the tactile rather than the visual [...] advocating tectonic rather than scenographic form as exemplary of the approach," as found in the work of Alvar Aalto and Jørn Utzon. In just a few sentences, Weston draws a basic distinction between the concepts of critical regionalism proffered by Tzonis, Lefaivre, and Frampton, namely that the social and political implications of regionalism nullified the concept for Tzonis and Lefaivre, thereby requiring a critical approach to regionalism, while Frampton saw critical regionalism as a valid response to "scenographic form," by which he means the postmodern architecture that was taking hold of the American architecture profession at the time. Although the architecture and ideas influencing Frampton's "Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance" date back to at least the mid-1960s, the direct impetus for his essay was the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Paolo Portoghesi with its famous "street," the Strada Novissima. Frampton was invited by Portoghesi, alongside fellow critics Charles Jencks, Christian Norberg-Schultz, and Vincent Scully, to contribute to the inaugural architecture biennale in Venice, but he stepped down, writing in a letter to Robert A. M. Stern (a page of it is shown in OASE #103: Critical Regionalism Revisited) that the exhibition "seems to represent the triumph of Post-Modernism" and that he had already "written a text which is categorically critical of this position." Frampton's letter to Stern was dated May 13, 1980, but the text he mentions he had already written was not "Towards a Critical Regionalism" as it would be found in The Anti-Aesthetic. Most likely it was "The Need for Roots: Venice 1980," which was published in the winter 1981 issue of GA Document. (I have not seen that essay so can't comment on it.) Between the Biennale in 1980 and the release of Foster's collection of postmodern essays, Frampton worked out his concept of critical regionalism, or at least the seeds of the concept can be seen in those years. Modern Architecture and the Critical Present, published by AD in 1982, was basically devoted to his 1980 book Modern Architecture: A Critical History (the fifth edition arrived in 2020), so alongside its other contents it included "Place, Production and Architecture: Towards a Critical Theory of Building," an excerpt of the book's last chapter. It also included "The Isms of Contemporary Architecture," revised to add "Regionalism" as one of the –isms. Although Frampton mentions the thesis of a "hybrid 'world culture'" advanced by philosopher Paul Ricoeur, whose words preface his Anti-Aesthetic essay, and he discusses the work of Aalto, Mario Botta, Alvaro Siza, Gino Valle, and other architects who fit the mold of critical regionalism, the –ism was not yet explicitly "critical." That same year, 1982, Frampton contributed "Proposals for a Critical Regionalism" to Perspecta 20: The Journal of the Yale School of Architecture. Similarities to the essay that will follow in 1983 are found in the Ricoeur quote prefacing the article and a mention of "The Grid and the Pathway." While the "Six Points" essay is abstract, with mention of just two or three architects, the Perspecta article is loaded with buildings and projects that illustrate Frampton's concept. Tadao Ando, J. A. Coderch, Ricardo Bofill, Raimund Abraham, Botta, Valle, and others serve as examples of "recent regional 'schools' whose aim has been to represent and serve, in a critical sense, the limited constituencies in which they are grounded." The essay concludes with mention of "The Grid and the Pathway," but Frampton does not give credit to the authors for coining "critical regionalism," instead using their subjects, Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis, as exemplars of the regional "school" in Greece. Curiously, even though the Perspecta editors give full credit to Tzonis and Lefaivre in the citation to their text, Frampton only mentions Tzonis, referring to "The Grid and the Pathway" as "his article"; this is indicative of the sexism still entrenched at the time but also a lack of understanding of Tzonis and Lefaivre's concept for critical regionalism beyond their 1981 essay. The information described above can be cobbled together from various sources, as cited, as well as from the recently published Kenneth Frampton: Conversations with Daniel Talesnik, in which Frampton is forthcoming about the origins of "Towards a Critical Regionalism" and the debt it owed to Tzonis and Lefaivre. (His recital of the facts to Talesnik makes it seem that it is a story he has told numerous times in the decades since his essay.) But to gain a considerably deeper understanding of the overlapping theories of critical regionalism and their origins, one recently published book is extremely valuable and highly recommended: Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism before Globalisation by Stylianos Giamarelos, published by UCL Press, 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop) There are too many revelations in Giamarelos's history/historiography of critical regionalism, but only enough space here to mention three. First is the role of Robert A. M. Stern in the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, The Presence of the Past. Giamarelos describes Stern as "the show's overlooked protagonist [...] historically overshadowed by Portoghesi." Frampton, remember, was invited to participate, but by the time he and the other critics went to Venice, in November 1979, the direction of the exhibition was already determined during a September 1979 meeting where Stern presented his detailed proposal that "practically formed the backbone of the exhibition," per Giamarelos. No wonder most of the architects contributing to the Strada Novissima were from North America rather than Europe or Asia, and no wonder Frampton addressed his resignation letter to Stern. A second revelation is the contribution of Anthony Alofsin, who was a student of Tzonis's in the 1970s, when he was teaching at Ivy League schools in the US. Alofsin is known now for numerous books on Frank Lloyd Wright, but in the 1970s his work as a sculptor and architect in New Mexico "stimulated his interest in the historic processes that lay beneath" the area's historic buildings. He brought this interest in regionalism to Harvard GSD in 1978, where he took courses from Tzonis that "familiarized him with critical theory," per Giamarelos. Alofsin ended up joining Tzonis and Lefaivre on a paper, "The Question of Regionalism," for a conference in 1980 organized by Swiss sociologist Lucius Burckhardt. Alofsin's text submitted to Tzonis, "Constructive Regionalism," served as the basis for the paper, but Tzonis and Lefaivre modified Alofsin's conclusion, introducing the critical regionalism they would expand upon for the Architecture in Greece esssay. (Vincent B. Canizaro's excellent Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity and Tradition includes Alofsin's original text.) So, while "The Question of Regionalism," when published in 1981, was the first appearance of critical regionalism in print, it was only in German and therefore not cited by Frampton, unlike the bilingual "The Grid and the Pathway." A third illuminating thread of information from the book involves Frampton's proposed 18-book series of "monographs on critical architecture practices of 'unsentimental regionality'" for Rizzoli, who would have published them over a period of two to four years. First proposed at the end of 1981, Frampton moved forward with two titles — on Tadao Ando and Atelier 66, the practice of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis, published in 1984 and 85, respectively — before Rizzoli discontinued the series. (Such an ambitious, audacious proposal no doubt stemmed from Frampton serving as an acquisitions and editorial consultant at Rizzoli from 1979 to 1988.) Outside of Vittorio Gregotti, whom Frampton would have written about on his own, each book would have been edited by Frampton, included a short introduction by him, and featured a longer essay by an author familiar with their work; naturally, then, Tzonis and Lefaivre contributed to the book on Atelier 66. Giamarelos also discusses the book Frampton started to work about critical regionalism, given that his essay made such an impact in the 1980s that it warranted a book-length exposition. That never happened, but Frampton rolled some of his version of critical regionalism into Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, an excellent and well-respected book but not one with the lasting impact of the 1983 essay. So, if Frampton did not write the book on critical regionalism, who did, assuming one exists? The first architecture book bearing the critical regionalism moniker was written by none other than Tzonis and Lefaivre. Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World was published in 2003, the third in Prestel's "Architecture in Focus" series, which also included books on "Minimal Architecture" and "Light, Mobile and Floating Architecture." The authors used the book to provide a deeper history of regionalism, tracing it from Ancient Greece to ca. World War II in an essay by Tzonis, and delving into the ideas of Lewis Mumford in an essay by Lefaivre that looked at the three decades after the war. The other half of the book has twenty examples of critical regionalism, mainly in photos, making it as much a picture book as a text of history and theory. Given the impact of critical regionalism on architects — it is one of the few architectural concepts/theories with direct application to professional practice — I wanted to include something on it in Buildings in Print: 100 Influential and Inspiring Illustrated Architecture Books. Although Critical Regionalism is the book I chose, Giamarelos describes their later book, Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World (first published in 2011 and expanded in 2020) as the couple's definitive statement on critical regionalism, signaling its greater importance. While this review can only touch on a few points in Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism Before Globalisation, Giamarelos's goals are two-fold: articulating the formulation of critical regionalism by Tzonis and Lefaivre, since it has long been overshadowed by Frampton's concept; and, in the book's second half, exploring the cross-cultural roots of critical regionalism in Greece, the home of Tzonis, Lefaivre, and their original subjects, Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis. Giamarelos wraps up the book by arguing for the continued relevance of critical regionalism today, shifting it from "an architectural theory of the 1980s into a manifesto for architectural historiography in the 21st century." If architectural historians embrace the seven points of Giamarelos's manifesto remains to be seen, but the value of the history the book tells is abundantly clear, given the lack of a history of critical regionalism before it.

Like many people with a lot of books, I keep track of my library with an app/website, tagging books with keywords to better filter and find them. The tags I use move from general terms like "architecture" (the most) and "fiction" (the least) to specific terms that reflect a high number of books by a particular author ("frampton," as in Kenneth) or maybe about a certain architect ("wright," Frank Lloyd). One of the oft-used tags on the specific end of the spectrum is "moma," which includes books published by the Museum of Modern Art, be it Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture or exhibition catalogs, as well as books actually about MoMA, like Terence Riley's The International Style: Exhibition 15 and The Museum of Modern Art. As of today, I have 34 books tagged "moma" in my library, spanning from The International Style in 1932 (the 1990s reprint, mind you, not the first edition) to Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, the catalog to the exhibition of the same name that opened yesterday at MoMA. In between the books from 1932 and 2023 are catalogs for MoMA exhibitions I attended and wrote about; exhibitions I wish I would have seen in person; and exhibitions, many of them seminal, held well before my time. The value of exhibition catalogs is evident in the latter two: they enable people who did not see an exhibition to be exposed to what the curators put together, often with the added input of scholars on the subject. One could even go further and say the catalogs are more important than the exhibitions themselves, since they have longevity, serving as archives of the exhibitions well after they've been demounted and destroyed. While I don't fully agree with such a statement, since exhibitions benefit from being spatial experiences and often — and increasingly — feature films and other media that can't be replicated in books, the value of catalogs is undeniable. Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism edited by Carson Chan and Matthew Wagstaffe, published by the Museum of Modern Art, September 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) How does Emerging Ecologies compare to previous catalogs from MoMA exhibitions on architecture? Based on my exposure to them, I would group MoMA's architecture catalogs into two broad types: printed companions to the drawings, models, and other artifacts on display in the galleries; and scholarly essays on the exhibition's subject. Often these two strands are combined, with essays prefacing plates of the works on display. But if we go all the way back to MoMA's first architecture exhibition — Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcok in 1932 — we find these two types in two separate publications: a companion catalog (PDF link) and the more familiar, polemical book by Johnson and Hitchcock (sans Lewis Mumford's contribution on housing from the exhibition/catalog) that "defined 'the International Style'" at the time and in the decades to come. Emerging Ecologies, as edited by Carson Chan and Matthew Wagstaffe, falls into the "printed companion" camp. Visitors to Emerging Ecologies between now and its closing on January 24, 2023, will approach the third-floor architecture galleries in one of two ways. Stepping out of an elevator, they will be confronted by a timeline of relevant events and dates for the artifacts in the exhibition, while those arriving via escalators and the bridge next to the atrium will see the yellow wall pictured at the top of this post and then go either left or right into the exhibition's two galleries. The various exhibits are laid out thematically, but when I previewed the exhibition last week, I found the layout and presentation fairly laid back, conducive to a leisurely stroll through the numerous colorful projects comprising "the first expansive survey of the history of environmental thinking in architecture," spanning primarily the 1960s and 70s. The exhibition is also the first from MoMA's Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment, which was created in 2020 and helmed by Chan the following year. In lieu of a thematic organization following from the layout of the exhibition (e.g., "Prehistory of Environmental Architecture," "Enclosed Ecologies," "Life Forms," etc.) or one following the timeline visitors see by the elevators, the book is in alphabetical order by the names of the architects or other authors of the works in the exhibition (there is an expanded timeline in the back matter). While this results in putting Emilio Ambasz first among the more than thirty names, it more broadly puts an emphasis on the personalities behind environmental thinking, rather than the works themselves. Like other surveys, be they exhibitions or not, the structure allows comparisons to be made based on quantities: the number of pages given to each name helps signal their importance. So who is most important in Emerging Ecologies? No contest it's R. Buckminster Fuller, not only because he earns sixteen pages while most others have four or six, but because the "pathbreaking architect, writer, designer, inventor, and philosopher" (per the book) infiltrates other names in the book. Cambridge Seven Associates built one of Fuller's geodesic domes for Expo 67 and Murphy & Mackey built one at Missouri Botanical Garden; these are just the most direct permutations of Fuller elsewhere in the book. Architecture exhibitions at MoMA are, by virtue of their setting, geared to general audiences. As such, the catalogs are where the curators expend the effort in digging deeper, usually in more scholarly ways. That isn't the case with this "field guide," as Chan and Wagstaffe label it, but that doesn't mean architects and others with prior knowledge of environmentalism in the 1960s and 70s will not find something new, or new perspectives on the subject, in the book. Beyond names like Fuller, there are such groups as the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation and Warren County Citizens Concerned about PCB that capture today's emphasis on equity and citizen engagement. It's not all hero worship, in other words. For me, a big fan of buildings merging with landscapes, I was pleased to learn about Malcolm Wells, who pivoted his practice from "conventional" to "earth-sheltered," sticking to his beliefs from the mid-1906s to his death in 2009. I was also surprised that I hadn't known about him earlier. Surely, I won't be alone in making such discoveries in Emerging Ecologies, a rich survey of a period with obvious relevance today.

Last week dose explored three "places in time": St. Louis in the early decades of the 20th century; Detroit between 1935 and 1985; and Chicago suburb Oak Park ca. 1906, when Frank Lloyd Wright completed Unity Temple. Those three US-centric books were split between two historical surveys and one case study. The same applies to the European/Asian books here, with a survey of brutalist architecture in Paris followed by a survey of Indonesian architecture trained in Germany around 1960 and a case study of a care center for people with mental disabilities in Belgium. Brutalist Paris: Post-War Brutalist Architecture in Paris and Environs by Nigel Green and Robin Wilson, published by Blue Crow Media, July 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Dipl.-Ing. Arsitek: German-trained Indonesian Architects from the 1960s edited by Moritz Henning and Eduard Kögel, published by DOM Publishers, July 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Living in Monnikenheide: Care, Inclusion and Architecture edited by Gideon Boie, published by Flanders Architecture Institute, April 2023 Before receiving Brutalist Paris from the folks at Blue Crow Media, I thought of the UK company simply as a maker of maps. I reviewed Concrete Map Chicago back in 2018 and since then have noticed them putting out maps of modern architecture, brutalist architecture, public transit — even trees. If the Chicago map is any indication, the others put out by Blue Crow Media excel at assembling a mix of quality buildings and presenting them in a way that allows people to orient themselves to the locations of the selected buildings in a particular city; that's the power of maps: orienting oneself physically, in place, and mentally, at a distance. So I was a bit surprised to find the maps on the inside front and back covers of Brutalist Paris to be, frankly, practically useless. Their scale is too small; the contrast between streets and blocks is too low; it's not clear how the four maps join up; the lists of buildings keyed to the maps do not extend to the book's pages. I could go on, but that's not necessary because this book is not about the maps. Rather it is about the words of Robin Wilson and the photographs of Nigel Green. The maps give some cursory, almost ghostly, geographic information, but they are not there to structure the book. Brutalist Paris features seven essays by Wilson and four geographical sections with Green's photos inserted between the essays. Although the duo collaborates as Photolanguage, words and images are distinct. "Whilst the photographic component provides an extensive, general survey of the production of the period as a whole," Wilson explains in the first essay, "the text necessarily develops a more selective interpretation of a smaller range of key works." Paris does not spring immediately to my mind as the city of brutalist architecture par excellence (that would be London or Boston), but Wilson's words and Green's images do a good job of arguing for the importance of Paris as a brutalist city. Jumping to the fore are not the famous examples (Breuer's UNESCO, Niemeyer's Communist Party HQ, Corbu's Maisons Jaoul) but the complex, fractal-like constructions of Jean Renaudie and Nina Susch, Renée Gailhoustet, and others. Wilson describes "a properly oblique and combinatory architecture" and Green captures the light, scale, and in some cases decay of the complexes. The photos may be just a couple of years old, but the choice of presenting them as duotones helps transport readers to the sixties, seventies, and eighties, when parts of Paris really embraced creative concrete architecture. The next book covers roughly the same timeframe as Brutalist Paris — the few decades following the year 1960 — but in two locales thousands of miles and two continents apart: Indonesia and Germany. The two places don't immediately strike me as intertwined, but editors Moritz Henning and Eduardo Kögel discovered a link between them that is quite interesting: a dozen architecture students from Indonesia who studied at TU Berlin and other schools in West Germany in 1960/61. The editors found out about them while working with the curators of Occupying Modernism, the Indonesian contribution to Encounters with Southeast Asian Modernism, an ambitious, multifaceted program directed by Henning and Kögel with Sally Below and Christian Hiller. (Out of the same program came Contested Modernities: Postcolonial Architecture and the Construction of Identities in Southeast Asia, a publication I "briefed" last year.) Like other parts of Encounters, Dipl.–Ing. Arsitek focuses on cross-cultural cooperation between Southeast Asia and Western Europe, and it even comes across subtly in the book's title, words that are probably enigmatic to English speakers: Dipl.–Ing. Arsitek is the Indonesian equivalent of the German Diplom–Ingenieur Architektur. Dipl.–Ing. Arsitek is number 171 in DOM Publishers' longstanding "Basics" series as evidenced by the square format and orange, geometric cover (like this one). While the subject seems too niche to me to be a "basics" book, the structure and presentation of the book are very clear and well done, aiding in one's understanding of the subject and recognizing its importance. Following spreads of period photographs in West Berlin, Hannover, Aachen, and Jakarta, the book's contents are fitted into five parts: "Context," with a handful of essays give relevant background on Germany and Indonesia in the period of the book; "Diplomas," a presentation of ten of the students' final projects; in-depth "Biographies" of eight of the architects; "Positions," excerpts of a few texts by some of the architects; and contemporary "Photographs" of buildings in Indonesia the architects designed after returning there to practice. So, who are these architects that studied in Germany but took their knowledge back home to Indonesia? Soejoedi Wirjoatmodjo and Han Awal were known by the editors beforehand, but the rest (Herianto Sulindro, Jan Beng Oei, Mustafa Pamuntjak, Bianpoen, Suwondo Bismo Sutedjo, Yusuf Bilyarta Mangunwijaya) were primarily discovered in the archives of TU Berlin, which kept their drawings, model photographs, and even some of the models. I can't think of a better arguments for architecture schools — and the future architects attending them — to carefully document their thesis projects and maintain them in archives. The third place-in-time book, Living in Monnikenheide, heads to Zoersel, in Belgium, and jumps forward in time to near the present. The book's subject, Monnikenheide, is a residential care center for people with mental disabilities that was created around 1973 and has seen more than a dozen buildings added to its "campus" in the half-century since. I had never heard of the place — neither Monnikenheide nor Zoersel, the Flemish village now home to around 22,000 people — so reading some of the essays and perusing the case studies of the buildings were acts of discovery. Gideon Boie, the book's editor and instigator of the book project, describes Monnikenheide as "an unprecedented housing project" that "searched for the normalization of housing for people with mental disabilities" and, in wording that echoes recent trends in architectural culture, "a testing ground for care architecture." The book's subtitle, Care, Inclusion and Architecture, sets up the half-dozen essays that carry the titles "Living with Disability," "At Home in the Care Centre," and "Caring for the Landscape of Care," among others. The essays capably address the myriad issues around the place, from its niche typology to the politics of "inclusion" and the important role of the beautiful wooded landscape connecting the various buildings. The bulk of the book — 70 of its 160 pages — is devoted to the case studies of the buildings, primarily the ones built between 1997 and 2021; the early, "first-period" (of three periods, per Boie) buildings are just described briefly at the beginning of this long section. Architecturally, the buildings range from somewhat typical modern Belgian brick dwellings to low-slung glass-walled updates to older buildings, pitched-roof care homes clad in corrugated metal, and a three-story care home covered in blackened wood. While each building is pleasing in one way or another, Monnikenheide is not about any individual building: it is about the interaction of the buildings with each other and the landscapes between them and, in the case of the brick dwellings in the village, the logical extension of "inclusion" to a context more urban than pastoral. Full-bleed photographs between the different sections of the book do a decent job in capturing the character of the landscape and the village; I say "decent" because their silver duotones, akin to the cover, are more aesthetic than informative. But in concert with the essays, case studies, and the book's design, the photos contribute well to a beautiful document of a special place that architects interested in this facet of care will find valuable.

Like most human beings, I can be contradictory at times. One area where this manifests is architectural surveys: books that usually collect buildings of a certain typology, but also ones spanning a particular timeframe or through some other theme. I've written a few of them myself, so I don't inherently hate them. But I tend to pass on them when it comes to new books, which most likely boils down to the fact I'm not a practicing architect and therefore don't need to look at, say, a roundup of libraries when I'm designing one. Yet, when it comes to old surveys — as in my latest #archidosereads — I have a hard time saying no to them after spotting them in used bookstores. I think part of their appeal is the way they capture the character of a certain time, and often, with the occasional geographical focus of surveys, a particular place in time. Being seen decades after they were made, the best ones manage to transport me back to a certain place in time — something I find irresistible, even if subconsciously, before putting it down in words here. A book need not be old to do such a thing, so this week and next week I'm featuring books that manage to capture certain places at certain times. The six books aren't all surveys, but the majority of them do fall into that subcategory of architectural books. Following the three US-central books here, next week's installment will head to Europe and Asia. Detroit Modern: 1935–1985 by Peter Forguson, photography by Amy Claeys, published by Visual Profile Books, November 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop) Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple: A Good Time Place Reborn by Pat Cannon, photography by James Caulfield, published by Unity Temple Restoration Foundation, December 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop) A. A. Fischer's St. Louis Streetscapes by Nancy Moore Hamilton, published by Missouri Historical Society, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) In its geography and name, Detroit Modern sounds like a sequel to Michigan Modern: An Architectural Legacy, the 2018 book written by preservationist Brian D. Conway with photographs by James Haefner, also published by Visual Profile Books. But they are two different beasts, given that the earlier book was the product of the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office, which received a grant from the National Park Service for the project, while the nearly one-year-old Detroit Modern was written by Peter Forguson, a landscape designer and landscaping contractor who has worked on the grounds of some of the 70 houses collected in his book. Forguson's book, in turn, is a labor of love, one that draws attention to an overlooked geographical subset of mid-20th-century modern residential architecture, something Michigan Modern similarly did for a wider array of building typologies on a larger geographical scale. The 70 houses spanning 50 years were designed by names both familiar and lesser known: from Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Minoru Yamasaki, Edward Durell Stone, and Gunnar Birkets among the former, to Irving Tobocman, Don Paul Young, Louis DesRosiers, and Robert L. Ziegelman in the latter. While those last four names, among numerous others in the book, are new to me, they may be fairly well-known names in the larger Detroit area (the book is more Grosse Pointe Farms and Bloomfield Hills that Detroit proper, it should be noted), given that they designed roughly 20 of the book's 70 houses. This book will no doubt appeal to locals interested in mid-20th-century houses, but it should also appeal to people living outside the Detroit area who like the same. It should be pointed out that although photographer Amy Claeys is billed as photographer, many of the houses feature photographs by others, including Haefner and occasional period photographs by the great Balthazar Korab. As such, the book doesn't have the visual consistency of Michigan Modern (it's also lacking in floor plans, valuable elements in any good book on residential architecture), but the book's ability to capture the high-quality architecture created in a place over a fairly long time period makes it a valuable document. The buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, unlike the houses of suburban Detroit, don't need to worry about being overlooked. There are more than 400 extant buildings designed by Wright, and although only a small number of them are considered masterpieces, that number is higher than most — save perhaps Le Corbusier. One way of quantifying greatness is via UNESCO, which put 17 Corbu sites on its 2016 list but only eight Wright buildings on a similar list a few years later. One of those eight is Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, the Chicago suburb home to Wright at the time; ground broke on the building in 1906 and it was dedicated in 1909, the same year Wright left for Europe to work on the Wasmuth Portfolio. Given the importance of Unity Temple in Wright's oeuvre, it made sense that Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple: A Good Time Place, a celebration of the edifice, was released in 2009. Although restoration plans, led by T. Gunny Harboe, began around 2006, the "award-winning transformative restoration" would not be complete until 2017, twelve years after the building celebrated its centennial. With Unity Temple carefully restored and open to the public for about five years, the time was right to update the 2009 book by Patrick F. Cannon with photographer James Caulfield. I have not seen the earlier book, but it appears to be a square book of approximately nine inches, whereas the newly "reborn" book taking on a larger page size — nearly 10 x 12 inches. The slim, 120-page book has a brief history of the commission, its design and its construction, at the beginning, with a text by Harboe on the restoration, a selective bibliography (including Robert McCarter's 1997 case study from the "Architecture in Detail" series), and some texts from ca. 1909 in the back matter. In between are approximately 75 pages of photographs by Caulfield. Unfortunately, what should be the best part of the book — post-restoration photographs of Unity Temple's exterior and interior — is the most disappointing. Without knowing the details, Caulfield appears to have a preference for HDR photography, which makes the concrete building look like a computer model on the outside and too evenly illuminated on the inside. Only in the photos where Caulfield lets shadows be dark (the cover photo being one of those) can readers fully appreciate what Wright accomplished more than a century ago. I'm from suburban Chicago so am quite familiar with the numerous Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in Oak Park. But even though my wife hails from St. Louis, and therefore I've been there quite a few times and have seen firsthand various parts of the city and county, I was not previously familiar with Alexander August Fischer, the subject of this hefty book by his inadvertent biographer, Nancy Moore Hamilton. I say inadvertent because in retirement Hamilton, a longtime resident of Kalamazoo, Michigan, and former geographer and data analyst who had spent just one year of her life in St. Louis, found herself drawn to St. Louis and the streetscapes built by A. A. Fischer. As the photos on the cover of the book (some of many in the book shot by photographer Reed R. Ratcliffe in 2022) attest, the streetscapes of Fischer are a pleasing lot — or, at least the ones that have survived intact to 2022, a century or more after they were created, are. After all, when I think of the streetscapes of St. Louis, what comes to mind are vacant lots and vacant or condemned buildings being just as numerous on any block as extant and/or occupied buildings, such is the unfortunate present of the Midwestern city. Hamilton's large book published by the Missouri Historical Society is like two books in one: a biography of Fischer and a directory of the many buildings by Fischer's company. Following Hamilton's semi-autobiographical introduction, which goes into some detail on how she ended up spending close to two decades focused on the subject of Fischer and his buildings, is the biography: four chronological chapters on Fischer's life, from his German ancestors to his death (in 1936 at the age of 70) and legacy. The subject may only seem appealing to residents of St. Louis, but it is a lavishly illustrated biography, with numerous large photographs by Ratcliffe as well as archival photographs and other documents. At just 120 pages and accompanied by the illustrations, the biography is a fairly quick read. The bulk of the book follows: the 340-page "Directory of A. A. Fischer Builds" that methodically presents one building per page with data and illustrations. It doesn't matter if a building was razed, it is given a page and indicated as such. While extant buildings receive photos by Radcliffe, buildings long-gone have older photographs or just maps. And speaking of maps, the book is accompanied by a foldout poster that locates every building in the book — very helpful. The pros of the book are obvious, mainly that Hamilton fills a void in the scholarship of the built environment in St. Louis. A. A. Fischer was a prolific builder of residential buildings across the city in the first decades of the 20th century, though his impact was basically unheralded. In this sense, the book is more than welcome. My only con with the book is its hefty format. With a 10 x 12" paper size and nearly 2" thick, it is a large, unwieldy book. The pages are nearly full in the biography, but the photos in the directly are small and the margins across those same pages are large. With the layout of the directory apparently sized to entries with the most available information, most of the these pages are therefore empty space. I feel that either the photos should have been larger across the directory pages, or the whole book should have opted for a smaller page size. Of course, the latter would make the book a less impressive object — one that wouldn't have immediately conveyed the size of Fischer's contributions to St. Louis.

Of the numerous books publishers send me for review — be they requested by me, pitched by them, or arriving at my doorstep unsolicited — the highest percentage of them are monographs. This fact goes against the occasional sirens over the irrelevance and anachronistic nature of monographs in our digital age, with free access (for now) to voluminous amounts of information on buildings and architects readily available online. But books, in my opinion, are better archives than websites, offering architects a further level of control over the finished product compared to websites. It's not uncommon today to find architecture firms, no doubt driven by savvy marketing departments and PR firms, merging their brands across platforms, such that their monographs resemble their websites. But in five or ten years time, only the books will retain that expression, thereby making them important archives of architects' work and the means of presenting it. The four recently published monographs that follow provide four diverse expressions for architectural monographs today. Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual by Bryan Cantley, edited by Peter J. Baldwin, published by Routledge, April 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Merging City and Nature: 30 Commitments to Combat Climate Change by Batlleiroig, published by Actar Publishers, March 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) I'm not sure when I came across the architecture of Bryan Cantley, but for sure it was through his popular Instagram account — with nearly 30,000 followers now, at least it is popular by architecture standards. The images saturating his account transport me to my undergrad days in the early 1990s, when Neil Denari, Peter Pfau and Wes Jones, and other machine-minded architects were in vogue. Building; Machines, the twelfth issue of Pamphlet Architecture, was the bible of this strain of contemporary architecture, where structure and services were exposed, elements moved (or at least appeared to do so), and surfaces (almost always metallic) featured curves that echoed the form of concrete mixer trucks. I figured I wasn't alone in connecting those aesthetic dots, but I also assumed such a reading was overly superficial and potentially unfair toward whatever Cantley is doing through his designs and illustrations. Neil Spiller actually mentions Neil Denari and Wes Jones in his introductory essay to Speculative Coolness, but only briefly, lumping them with a wider swath of visionaries ("the Wright brothers, Barnes Wallace, Archigram, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers") and stating that "nowadays these preoccupations have their epicenter in SoCaL." Cantley is a professor at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) and has taught at SCI-Arc and Woodbury University, all SoCal schools, though his bio at the start of the book also points out that "his work is in the permanent collection at SFMOMA, as well as in the personal collection of Thom Mayne." If such "preoccupations" have their epicenter in and around Los Angeles now, they did so thirty years ago, too, when Denari, Jones, etc. taught and practiced there. This network with shared interests and formal similarities is accentuated by Wes Jones's essay in the pages of Speculative Coolness and Mayne's afterword in the same. A major thing separating the work of Denari and Jones with that of Cantley is the brief, or program, or whatever one wants to call it. Although much of the machine-inspired architecture of the nineties remained on paper or in model form, the projects were clearly proposals to be built, be it an unlikely monastery, a more reasonable house or apartment building, or most obviously an industrial structure (an example of the last, by Holt Hinshaw Jones, was built at UCLA in 1994). But it's difficult to grasp what Cantley's projects might function as if they are considered as models for actual buildings, or if they were designed in response to particular briefs, for instance in the way Brodsky and Utkin created designs for competitions but hardly ever had them approach being recognizable buildings. But do I care if Cantley's designs are speculative, self-generated programs rather than proposals for specific briefs from others? Do I care if I grasp his intentions, further obscured by the texts accompanying the images? Well, frankly, no. His projects, as rendered in sketches, drawings, models, perspectives, and collages, are just too beautiful. No wonder his website sells prints of his architectural imagery — and no wonder this monograph is saturated with the same, sure to woo architects and architecture students too young to remember the nineties. Half a world away from Southern California is the equally warm-and-dry region of Catalonia and the metropolis of Barcelona, where the multi-disciplinary firm Batlleiroig, founded by Enric Batlle and Joan Roig in 1981, is located. Forty years is a long time for an architecture firm, and across those years Batlleiroig has realized many projects spanning multiple disciplines: architecture, landscape, and planning. Those same disciplines structure the book, which features ten chapters with three projects per chapter — one planning project, one landscape, and one building per chapter. But let's not call them chapters: Batlle describes them as "ten concepts that we believe must be incorporated into our daily lives to combat the climate emergency and improve living conditions on the planet." 10 x 3 = 30, hence the thirty projects presented in Merging City and Nature are also "30 commitments to combat climate change." Over Batlleiroig's 40-plus years, the firm has grown to 140 people, making them a large firm in any of their three disciplines. Such size often means, at least in terms of architectural monographs, a business-like approach over an artistic one. This approach is definitely on display in Merging City and Nature, from the 10x3 structure and the descriptions of the projects/commitments (more bullet points than narratives) to the design and layout of the book, which resembles a textbook at times. Structure trumps reality, such that even though the firm has fifteen times more architects than planners and twice as many architects as landscape architects (as expressed in a bubble diagram at the back of the book), there are ten projects presented for each discipline. I would have loved to see more landscapes, which are the strongest parts of Batlleiroig's output (the Garraf Controlled Waste Landfill project is one of many highlights). As is, the book's rigid structure enables the firm to show how each of their disciplines addresses each of the ten concepts: commendable from a marketing perspective but dry and fatiguing for anyone looking for inspiration. So, if you're looking for a practical book loaded with well-designed examples of how architects and planners can address the climate emergency, Merging City and Nature is the book for you. Allied Works Architecture 2003- 2022 (TC 156) by Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works, published by TC Cuadernos, July 2022 (Amazon) Skylab: The Nature of Buildings by Skylab and Jeff Kovel, published by Thames & Hudson, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Often my excitement with learning about an architectural imprint is tempered by the fact I didn't know about it sooner. How did Valencia's TC Cuadernos put out dozens and dozens of monographic issues on contemporary architects in and beyond Spain before Allied Works sent me number 156 without me knowing about them? Am I that out of touch with European architectural publications? Or are there just too many to keep track of? The quality of the issue devoted to about twenty years of Allied Works' buildings is exemplary, indicating that the wider TC Cuadernos oeuvre melds the qualities of, say, El Croquis with Detail: offering color photographs on high-quality paper accompanied by detailed architectural drawings. (That said, I do wish the font for the project descriptions and essays was easier to read and that all the drawings were labeled, not just the wall sections — reading floor plans without labels is not very helpful.) Allied Works Architecture 2003- 2022 is the first expansive monograph on Allied Works since Occupation, the 2011 release covering the first sixteen years of the studio founded by Brad Cloepfil in Portland, Oregon, in 1994. I have not seen that earlier monograph, but the level of control I mentioned in the prologue to this post is naturally eschewed in the new book (essentially a periodical), in terms of page design and the couple of things I quibbled about above. Still, for the most part it is an Allied Works product, with the drawings, models, photographs, and text provided by the studio. Most refreshing is the span of the book, with fourteen completed buildings over nearly twenty years presented; it even includes Cloepfil's fairly well-known early essay/project "Sitings: Five Reflections on Architectural Domain" (PDF link), which functioned as a statement of intent when he founded his firm now nearly thirty years ago. Back in 2017, I attended the Vectorworks Design Summit in Baltimore, where Cloepfil gave the keynote and I was able to speak with him one-on-one after his presentation for an article at World-Architects. Before that talk, the projects I was most familiar with were the Maryhill Overlook (1998), the Wieden+Kennedy Headquarters (2000), the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2003), and the Clyfford Still Museum (2011). These four projects are thoroughly orthogonal buildings, but the projects he presented in Baltimore, such as the National Music Centre of Canada (2016) and National Veterans Memorial and Museum (2018), are dramatic departures from the apparent norm: curved and spatially complex constructions that see Cloepfil and Allied Works apparently striving to create architectural icons. Not surprisingly, these last two projects are found at the beginning of TC 156, signaling their importance in this phase of Cloepfil's career and the output of his studio. The diversity of Allied Works' designs can be seen in the other cultural, residential, and commercial projects that fill the monograph, including the issue's closer: Providence Park Stadium Expansion (2019), a project that hardly screams "Allied Works" but exhibits the studio's attentiveness to form, material, and structure — especially as presented in the pages of TC 156. Also based in Portland, Skylab was founded by Jeff Koval in 2000 — more than twenty years ago, meaning it was about time for the firm to produce its first monograph. Although Skylab is best known for a series of projects with Nike — especially the Serena Williams Building (2021) and a temporary installation for the shoe brand at the 2012 United States Olympic Trials for Track & Field — the format of the book reflects the music business: The square book features foldout cover boards, a circular cutout and "parental advisory" sticker on the cover, multiple large double-fold gatefolds, and "sides" rather than chapters (Side-A, Side-B, etc.). There isn't even a table of contents, something that makes flipping through the book a voyage of discovery, much like dropping a needle on an album, putting on headphones, and listening deeply. From the photographs of the ten presented buildings under construction to photographs of them completed and everything in between, there is an almost rock n' roll aesthetic suffusing Skylab — a certain coolness that makes the LP format appropriate, if a bit quizzical at times. (If taken to its logical conclusion, wouldn't each "side" be the same length, instead of just 12 pages for Side A, for instance, versus 130 pages for Side B?) One can easily flip through The Nature of Buildings without any awareness of the LP metaphor and gain just as much understanding of Skylab's work: digesting the projects through images layered with green text and drawings; relishing the surprise each gatefold elicits; and reading the trio of conversations between Kovel and others, including clients. The latter are presented sideways on the page, a bit like liner notes, I assume, though they can also be seen just as readily as print elements meant to stand out from the projects that are right side up throughout the book. Like fellow Portlanders Allied Works, the portfolio of Skylab is formally and typologically diverse. Kovel and company's projects might not be as geographically widespread as Cloepfil's, with most of Skylab projects keeping Portland weird, but with commissions in Utah and Idaho they're gaining in popularity beyond their local following.

From the middle of March, when a family emergency put this blog on hiatus, until the middle of July, when a funeral mass was held for my dad, my life was split almost evenly between my home in New York City and my parent's home in Central Florida. The emergency in March was an incident putting my father in the hospital, and it was followed by numerous diagnoses, the need for him to go into assisted living, and eventually him going back into the hospital, where he died — peacefully, with me, my mother, and my sister at his bedside. Back in March I anticipated, even with his diagnoses, to be helping him in various capacities for a few years, not just a few months. They were difficult and taxing months that found me as relieved as saddened when he passed; the obvious pain and frustration he felt are gone, but memories of him remain and in some ways are stronger and more prevalent now than before. Over those three months, I managed to eke out a half-dozen posts on this blog: a roundup of some books published during the first part of this year; some thoughts on the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which I managed to attend between trips; a couple work-related posts, one on self-publishing by architecture firms and the other featuring books from my trip to the Venice Architecture Biennale; a "cheater" revisiting an old post as an excuse to explore ChatGPT; and my first installment of "Book Briefs" this calendar year. That sporadic frequency will continue for the rest of the summer, as I take time to do things with my wife and daughter and just generally decompress. But one thing the last three months did, in the context of this first blog post in six weeks, was push me toward a local focus. So here I present two books on the phenomenon of supertall residential towers, the most high-profile ones found along 57th Street, aka "Billionaires' Row." Billionaires’ Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race To Build the World’s Most Exclusive Skyscrapers by Katherine Clarke, published by Currency, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Sky-High: A Critique of NYC's Supertall Towers from Top to Bottom by Eric P. Nash, photography by Bruce Katz, published by Princeton Architectural Press, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) In the prologue to Billionaires' Row, Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Clarke describes the construction of 40 Wall Street, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building nearly a full century ago as "a veritable race to the sky as wealthy titans of industry vied to build a succession of towers, each taller than the last." (It's a race recounted by Neal Bascomb in Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City back in 2003.) The brief historical anecdote gives the new book an angle, one expressed clearly in its subtitle. Yet I have a hard time buying that the developers of One57 (Gary Barnett/Extell), 432 Park Avenue (Harry Macklowe and CIM Group), 111 West 57th Street (Michael Stern/JDS), 220 Central Park South (Steve Roth/Vornado), and Central Park Tower (also Barnett/Extell) were involved in any sort of race, figurative or otherwise. I've been paying attention to this handful of buildings along Billionaires' Row as long as Clarke has, though not nearly to the same in-depth and insider degree as her, I'll admit, yet I still struggle to find a correlation between these towers and the Manhattan office buildings from the 1920s and 30s. Yes, there is synergy in that each grouping was born from the circumstances of the time (architectural, technological, economic, etc.), but the only "race" I find now is not between the developers themselves, but between the developers and the market — the developers had to quickly sell their eight- and nine-digit aeries before the market for them dried up. If anything, the assemblage of these five towers sitting mainly along 57th Street, a wide street they exploited for unused FAR (floor-area ratio) and reshaped in the process, are less an example of competition and more so an instance of geographical synergy, like a row of car dealers along a busy thoroughfare. People looking for a behind-the-scenes look at the development of these Billionaires' Row towers will be very happy with Clarke's book. The focus is squarely on the four men listed above, the developers behind the five towers. Readers will learn a little bit about the architecture, interior design, engineering and other physical attributes of the towers, but they will learn a lot more about the legal and economic means of how each individual tower happened, as well as the personalities of those men and the people they had relationships with, both business and personal. I have given walking tours of 57th Street and other parts of the city where luxury residential towers are in abundance, and while I tend to focus on aspects of architecture, engineering, and zoning, I never forget to mention how much celebrities and other high-worth people pay for the units; slenderness ratio is exciting to some, but the most audible gasps come from patrons hearing about condos selling for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Similarly, Clarke knows her audience; she is attuned to the public's interest in money — plus how much people love to hear about bad things happening to rich people. So the book, a chronological account spanning just over a decade, has plenty of information on the money problems, leaks and creaks, lawsuits, and personal squabbles playing out over that time. If you like hearing that sort of thing, you'll love this book. Although I found Billionaires' Row at a used bookstore a few weeks ago, it was released just last month, exactly two weeks before Sky-High, by former New York Times writer Eric P. Nash. Was there a publishing race to get the first book about Manhattan's supertall towers for the super rich in print? I doubt it, especially since Nash's book has a wider scope than Clarke's, and his book is as much about the photographs by Bruce Katz as it is Nash's critical takes on a dozen 300-meter-plus towers, residential and otherwise, in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Also, the two books lag two years behind Andi Schmied's wonderful and artsy Private Views: A High-Rise Panorama of Manhattan (VI PER Gallery, 2021), arguably the first book on the phenomenon. Last year, well before it was published, an editor at Princeton Architecture Press sent me a preview of Sky-High for a potential blurb on the cover. It wasn't used (the book ended up without any blurbs), but this is what I wrote: "I don't know whether to join Eric P. Nash's fact-filled, opinion-laden chorus and decry some of the dozen supertalls that have reconfigured New York City’s skyline this century, or adore them all through Bruce Katz's loving wide-angle lens. All I know for sure is that this is a much-needed book." Now seeing the book in print, sent to me recently by the publisher, I stand by my statement and its implication that it's nigh impossible to reach any conclusions on the phenomenon of NYC skyscrapers this century when imbibing critical takes, mainly of the aesthetic variety, joined by architectural photography presenting the buildings in the best possible manner. No wonder the back-cover description calls it "part architectural guidebook and part critique." Nash's thirteen numbered chapters are grouped in three parts — "A Short History of the Tall Building in New York City," "Supertalls," and "Is Bigger Better?" — with Katz's documentation of the dozen towers inserted as project spreads with black backgrounds. The latter would seem to demarcate photo contributions from text, but more of Katz's photographs are provided alongside Nash's text, making the book more visual than textual. As such, the tug of war between verbal critique and visual praise is near constant. Unfortunately, in the last part of the book, when Nash states that "the real question skyscrapers of any height pose is [...] how they impact the quality of street life," very few photos of that condition, where a skyscraper meets the sidewalk, are provided — and we only see the good examples, including the pedestrian plaza next to One Vanderbilt. Perhaps this dearth is due to timing (the retail at the base of 111 West 57th is still empty, for instance, while its residential entrance on 58th Street sits behind scaffolding), but perhaps it's an inadvertent commentary on the fact these towers contribute very little to the quality of street life. Yes, 432 Park Avenue has a nice POPS between the tower and its detached retail component, but 220 Central Park South puts a private drop-off along 58th Street, opposite where Central Park Tower has an entrance to the pricey Nordstrom department store. Most of these Billionaires' Row towers put their loading docks along narrow 58th Street, but photos similar to those I captured recently would stand out like proverbial sore thumbs in this book. Instead, Nash references Edward Soja, Rebecca Solnit, Shoshna Zuboff, and Henri Lefebvre in a chapter in part three, when he quotes Elizabeth Diller, architect of the near-supertall at 15 Hudson Yards, as saying skyscrapers like 432 Park Avenue and 111 West 57th Street "damage the city fabric." If they do, visual evidence of it is hard to find in Sky-High.

The most recent numbered installment of "Book Briefs," the series of occasional posts featuring short first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that publishers send to me for consideration on this blog, was #48, back in December. I wasn't planning on continuing the series this year-of-doing-things-differently (or so I thought), but a couple of weeks ago I brought back the "Briefs" to play around with ChatGPT, which I had been hesitant to dive into but was told by numerous people that I MUST try it. At that time I also mentioned an in-progress "Brief" with eight books — here they are. Concrete in Switzerland: Histories from the Recent Past edited by Salvatore Aprea, Nicola Navone, Laurent Stalder and Sarah Nichols, published by EPFL Press in May 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop) Concrete in Switzerland is a companion publication to Beton, the exhibition held at S AM (Swiss Architecture Museum) in Basel from November 2021 to April 2022. In addition to the involvement of S AM, both the exhibition and the book boast three partners: the gta Archiv, ETH Zürich; the Archives de la construction moderne, EPF Lausanne (EPFL); and Archivio del Moderno dell’Academia di Architettura, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). The editors from each of these three institutions — Salvatore Aprea (ETH), Nicola Navone (USI), and Laurent Stalder (EPFL) — also contributed one essay each among the book's thirteen essays: Aprea's contribution is about the famous Hennebique System; Navone's focuses, appropriately, on reinforced concrete architecture in Ticino; and Stalder traces about a century of technology's role in the Swiss pastoral, moving from Bruno Taut's Alpine Architecture to near the present day. Appropriately, Stalder's essay is first in the book, effectively serving as an overview or appetizer, if you will, for the essays that take deeper dives into individual subjects. Some standouts include: Silvia Berger Ziauddin's take on concrete bunkers, reminding me of my visit to Sasso San Gottardo; Lorenzo Stieger's essay on terraced hillside housing; Giulia Marino's presentation of the IGECO heavy prefabrication system; and Roberto Gargiani's piece on concrete in the early works of Herzog & de Meuron. This being a companion to an exhibition, the essays comprise about two-thirds of the book, the remainder filled by a lengthy visual essay, "Concrete Stories," by Sarah Nichols, curator of Beton. Her nearly 100-page contribution is broken down into shorter sections with such names as "Concrete is Rock," "Concrete is Energy," and "Concrete is Immaterial." The last shows how ideas around concrete are as important as the physical material itself. Urban Design in the 20th Century: A History by Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye, published by gta Verlag in January 2021 (Amazon) In its selection of Urban Design in the 20th Century as one of the ten recipients of a 2022 DAM Architectural Book Award, the jury described the book as "a handy and extensive" publication that is "an exciting, informative, and likewise uncluttered read, giving the complex mass of material a good structure and making it easy to consume." That is an apt description for the 100-plus urban design projects described through hundreds of illustrations across nine chapters spanning 440 pages. Organization is paramount, from the chronological-thematic structure of the chapters to the layout of said images (on black pages) and text (on white). Born from a course in urban design history taught by the authors at ETH Zurich, the book traces a history along the lines of what has been covered before (e.g., the books of Peter Hall and David Grahame Shane) but occasionally broadens the scope beyond a European center, and does it in a way that is appealing for students today: lots of images, large text, and bite-sized (sub)chapters. Today, one might expect a more culturally relevant take on the subject, but the authors point out in the book's coda that most developments in urban design the 20th century were "informed by a European point of view" and that telling a more global history would "undermine current attempts to decolonize history." The last point hints at some forthcoming scholarship that should flesh out histories like this one, presenting alternatives to familiar European perspectives. Modern Architecture in Japan by Manfredo Tafuri, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi, published by MACK in October 2022 (Amazon) Even though, as my collection of books has grown, my appetite for first editions has increased, I still have a soft spot for reprints. (It was one of the likes in my Valentine to architecture books, after all.) They allow hard-to-find, often prohibitively expensive books to be readily available once again and appreciated by new generations of audiences. Even if the ideas in an old book are dated, decisions regarding what merits reprinting point to some renewed interest in a subject or an author's take on a subject, among other things. A few months ago I happened upon a 1982 reprint of Ralph Adams Cram's Impressions of Japanese Architecture and the Allied Arts, first published in 1905 then revised in 1930; I had never heard of the book, but the fact it was reprinted and was relatively cheap led me to buy it. It has a little bit of overlap with one of the fall 2022 books MACK sent me, a handsome reprint of Manfredo Tafuri's Modern Architecture in Japan from 1964. The differences between the two books are as great as their similarities: Both are outsiders' views of Japan (Cram from the US, Tafuri from Italy), but the ensuing changes in the half-century between books meant Tafuri focused on modern architecture over Cram's exploration of temples, shrines, and other creations from previous centuries. (Only in the brief conclusion does Cram jump to the present and Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel and the influence of European architecture on Japan.) Although Cram based his book, as the name indicates, on travels to Japan, curiously, when Tafuri wrote his guide to the country's modern architecture at the age of just 29, he had never even been to Japan! But the biggest difference, at least in terms of the reprints themselves, is that Tafuri's book was originally released in Italian, so the book put out by MACK is notable as the first English translation of his armchair guidebook. The nearly 60-year lag between original and translation means its importance is minor relative to Architecture and Utopia (just six years between the 1973 Italian original and English translation in 1979) or even Theories and History of Architecture (twelve years: 1968 and 1980). Still, Mohsen Mostafavi's preface argues for the relevance of Tafuri's book today "despite its reliance on secondary sources and its occasional inaccuracies," while a handful of essays following Tafuri's text put it in a greater context. A most interesting take is Tafuri writing the book as much to influence contemporary architecture in Italy as to understand it in Japan. Modern Architecture in Japan was part of a series edited by Leonardo Benevolo, in which other architects and writers wrote about the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Brazil, and a few European countries. I can't help but wonder if those books will find their way into English, or if Tafuri's book, thanks to the longevity of his name, will be the only one meriting a reprint. The Pliable Plane: The Wall as Surface in Sculpture and Architecture, 1945–75 by Penelope Curtis, published by MACK in October 2022 (Amazon) Just as MACK's translated reprint of Tafuri's book reminded me of an older book on Japan, the subject of Penelope Curtis's The Pliable Plane — the manipulation of the wall surface bridging art and architecture in the decades after WWII — made me think of another old book: Paul F. Damaz's Art in Latin American Architecture. I became aware of the 1963 book when writing 100 Years, 100 Buildings, using it as a reference on two of the buildings: Oscar Niemeyer's Saint Francis of Assisi Church at Pampulha (1947) and University City of Caracas by Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1953). Niemeyer actually wrote a preface for Damaz's book, and no wonder, considering the author called his church "the best instance of collaboration between an architect and artists"; the expressive azulejo artwork on the street facade is the most famous instance of many artistic contributions integrated with the church, outside and in. Are these or other examples of wall-heavy art in Damaz's survey also found in Curtis's book? Not that I could see. Her short yet very interesting book is limited to European and US examples, with an abundance of Henry Moore — no surprise, given her former role as director of the Henry Moore Institute. While some of the projects are very well known, Curtis examines them in atypical ways. Paul Rudolph's A&A Building at Yale (now Rudolph Hall), for instance, is bound to come to any architect's mind when considering wall surfaces, but Curtis focuses on the lesser-known sculptural plaster casts from classical architecture integrated into the hammered corduroy concrete walls. Part of the joy in the book, at least for me, was discovering previously unknown projects, a standout being the Mausoleum Fosse Ardeatine (1949) in Rome. Foundations of Urban Design by Marcel Smets, published by Actar Publishers in January 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) The latest by Marcel Smets, whom I know of as the author, with Kelly Shannon, of the excellent The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure, is a short book with short texts that aim to "open up the core ideas of urban design to the wider public." The Foundations of the title are 29 numbered chapters (F01–F29) that consist of apparently oppositional yet complementary pairs that touch on organizational strategies (Ribbon/Cluster, Ladder/Star), urban spaces (Market Square/Parade Ground, Hole/Void), circulation corridors (Street/Road, Path/Avenue), waterways (Brook/Detch, River, Canal), and other less formal aspects of urban design (Use/Morphology, Creator/Curator), among other things. The short texts (none appeared to be more than four pages) are accompanied by pairs of images that capture the essence of Smets's lessons. Given the intended audience, the text is far from challenging and is further leavened by the illustrations, though I wouldn't go so far to say it's a stimulating read. Still, the book is a good introduction to urban design for students — and that wider public curious about the field. Spatial Infrastructure: Essays on Architectural Thinking as a Form of Knowledge by José Aragüez, published by Actar Publishers and Public Space in January 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Back in 2016, José Aragüez's The Building was released. I never saw the book back then, but I recently picked it up and, despite its occasional academic abstruseness, really like the collection of 43 brief, three-page theoretical takes on what the title indicates: buildings. Born from symposia at the Architectural Association in 2014, it reads a bit like TED Talks for architectural educators and theoreticians. Clearly not a followup, even though it does include the introductory essay from the earlier book, Aragüez's second book, Spatial Infrastructure, takes a different, longform approach, featuring just eight essays across roughly 150 pages (that's nearly 20 pages per essay, on average). The topics in the essays spanning from 2010 to 2022 are very much aligned with The Building, with heady theoretical takes grounded in discussions of real-world examples, such as Toyo Ito's Taichung Metropolitan Opera House in Taiwan (the subject of "Sponge Territory") and FOA's Yokohama Ferry Terminal among other buildings in the essay that lends the book its title. Em obras: história do vazio em Belo Horizonte (Under Construction: History of the Void in Belo Horizonte) by Carlos M. Teixeira, published by Romano Guerra Editora in 2022 (Amazon) Think of cities in Brazil and most likely the three most-populous ones spring to mind: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasilia. Sixth on the list of Brazilian cities by population, though right up top in the life of architect Carlos M. Teixeira, is Belo Horizonte, a not-too-small city of 2.5 million in Minas Gerais. The name of Teixeira's studio, Vazio S/A, translates as "empty" but refers to the voids in Belo Horizonte that have preoccupied him for decades. In my review of his 2012 monograph, Entre, I wrote how "the stagings and sets [of his performance-based projects] attempt to activate the leftover voids of his home city," using the second Topographical Amnesia as an example. For his latest, more thematically ambitious and chronologically sweeping book, Teixeira presents the 100-plus-year history of Belo Horizonte (it was founded in 1897) with a focus on everything that has not been built: "The city, fragmented and prosaic, accepted with no nostalgic sentiment and exalted as what is most important in the city." This atypical history is told through photographs — "anti-postcards" — and numbered texts (001–122) that are interspersed with the photos. (The English translation placed at the end of the book means some back-and-forth flipping is needed to see any relationships between image and text.) Architects outside Brazil will see something familiar when they reach number 82, circa 1947: Oscar Niemeyer's buildings at Pampulha, what Teixeira calls "the occupation of a suburban void." In 1994, Teixeira writes, when residents were give a referendum to select a symbol of the city, Niemeyer's Pampulha Church was in the running but, in the end, the Serra do Curral — a sprawling natural void at the southern boundary of the municipality — won with 270,000 votes. With that "victory," I can't think of a stronger argument for Teixeira's ongoing infatuation with the void in the city where he lives and works. Lina Bo Bardi: Material Ideologies edited by Monica Ponce de Leon, published by Princeton University School of Architecture in October 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop) The Womxn in Design and Architecture (WDA) formed at Princeton University School of Architecture in 2014, and three years later the graduate student group held its first annual conference, commemorating the one-year anniversary of Zaha Hadid’s passing. But it would be the second conference, Lina Bo Bardi: Material Ecologies, that became the first in WDA's Publication Series, published as a beautiful linen flexicover with numerous gatefolds among the numerous contributions coming out of the March 2018 conference. The conference had a three-part thematic structure (Concrete Brut, Natura, Material Re-Use) stemming from the "Material Ecologies" subtitle, and while the contents of the book follow the schedule of the conference's keynotes and panels, with two notable additions (Beatriz Colomina and Mario Gandelsonas), the book does not belabor the three themes, instead letting the essays stand out on their own merits. An obvious highlight is "Betwixt and Between" by Zeuler R. M. de A. Lima, author of an excellent 2013 monograph on Bo Bardi. Photo contributions by Veronika Kellndorfer ("Sprawling Nature") and Joana França ("Lina, In Situ") are stunning. Mike Cooter's "Artifacts of Work" is an unanticipated standout, one that translates a piece of one of Bo Bardi's buildings into an installation in an architecture exhibition. Kudos to CLANADA (Lana Cavar and Natasha Chandani) for the lovely design of the highly tactile book.

Last week I cobbled together eight books, some of which publishers had sent me more than a year ago, in an effort to write a "Better Late Than Never" installment of "Book Briefs," something I had done back in April 2018 with Book Briefs #35. But, sensing I would not be able to absorb the books quickly enough to get the post done in less than a week, I thought that revisiting that five-year-old post would be a great way of (finally) dipping into the timesaver that is AI, asking OpenAI's ChatGPT to write similar one-paragraph reviews and see what it came up with. So that's what I did. Specifically, I told ChatGPT to "Give a short, one-paragraph review of 'X Book' by Y author." Its output is featured below, in four of the six books that were part of Book Briefs #35, accompanied by my own "briefs" from 2018 and blurbs from the publishers. How do the reviews compare, my own vs. OpenAI? My takes are certainly more personal, with first-person commentary that isn't always germane to the book at hand but indicates where I'm coming from and what I find of interest and/or value. ChatGPT is, on the other hand, formulaic, with four sentences in a clearly repetitive structure for each review: statement of importance; two descriptive sentences; a closing statement indicating relevance to a particular audience. The AI "reviews" read well and have a clear position, but they are prescriptive, repetitive, and boring (so many rules of three!), especially when read in multiples, as here. I included the blurbs to see if OpenAI was drawing any phrases from them in shaping the reviews; that does not appear to be the case, nor does it appear that it used my "briefs" to formulate its speedy takes (each one took about five seconds to generate) on the books I gave it. Maybe ChatGPT is more effective in longer reviews, but this exercise does not lend any urgency to such an attempt on my part. African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence. Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia edited by Manuel Herz, published by Park Books in 2015 (reprinted in 2023) (Amazon | Bookshop) Blurb: "In the 1950s and 1960s, most African countries gained independence from their respective colonial power. Architecture became one of the principal means by which the newly formed countries expressed their national identity. African Modernism investigates the close relationship between architecture and nation-building in Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. It features one hundred buildings with brief descriptive texts, images, site plans, and selected floor plans and sections. The vast majority of images were newly taken by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster for the book’s first edition. Their photographs document the buildings in their present state. Each country is portrayed in an introductory text and a timeline of historic events. Further essays on postcolonial Africa and specific aspects and topics, also illustrated with images and documents, round out this outstanding volume." JohnHILL: Although the size of a coffee table book and graced by full-page Iwan Baan photographs, African Modernism is a deep, scholarly work, not just something to flip through. Focused on the five subtitled African countries that gained their independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s (5 of 32 countries on the continent that did so), the book examines how architecture played a role in expressing their independence and modernity. Each country is given an introduction, a timeline, a photo spread by Baan, documentation of important buildings in photos (most by Baan) and words, and an in-depth academic essay. Though many buildings show signs of wear (not surprising, given the time between their realization and today), the architectural quality is astounding. That the buildings in the book are largely unknown points to a deficit in architectural education and publishing — and the need for more books like this one and Adjaye Africa Architecture. ChatGPT: "'African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence. Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia' edited by Manuel Herz is a groundbreaking book that sheds light on the architectural legacy of African modernism. With a focus on five countries, the book explores the post-independence era and the architectural projects that emerged during this period of political and cultural transformation. The book's rich collection of photographs, plans, and essays provides valuable insight into the unique blend of local and international influences that shaped African modernist architecture. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in the intersection of architecture, history, and cultural identity in Africa." The Architecture of Paul Rudolph by Timothy M. Rohan, published by Yale University Press in 2014 (Amazon | Bookshop) Blurb (excerpt): "Based on extensive archival research and unpublished materials, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph is the first in-depth study of the architect, neglected since his postwar zenith. Author Timothy M. Rohan unearths the ideas that informed Rudolph’s architecture, from his Florida beach houses of the 1940s to his concrete buildings of the 1960s to his lesser-known East Asian skyscrapers of the 1990s. Situating Rudolph within the architectural discourse of his day, Rohan shows how Rudolph countered the perceived monotony of mid-century modernism with a dramatically expressive architecture for postwar America, exemplified by his Yale Art and Architecture Building of 1963, famously clad in corrugated concrete. The fascinating story of Rudolph’s spectacular rise and fall considerably deepens longstanding conceptions about postwar architecture: Rudolph emerges as a pivotal figure who anticipated new directions for architecture, ranging from postmodernism to sustainability." JohnHILL: A lot has happened in the four years since this book's publication [between 2014 and 2018]: Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago was demolished, Paul Rudolph's own Orange County Government Center was maligned through a partial demolition and insensitive addition, and the famed Robin Hood Gardens was demolished. A new exhibition, in fact, hones in on the demolition of Brutalist structures, something that books like Rohan's haven't been able to reverse. This isn't to say that saving Rudolph's buildings and others like it was Rohan's goal, but as Alexandra Lange points out in her 2014 review of The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, "it's a timely publication." That time seems to have slid by rapidly, but given that 2018 is the centennial of Rudolph's birth, we might just see a renewed appreciation in his work. If so, Rohan's thorough, well-researched book will surely play a part. ChatGPT: "'The Architecture of Paul Rudolph' by Timothy M. Rohan is a comprehensive and insightful exploration of the influential architect's work. Rohan delves into Rudolph's distinctive design language, innovative use of materials, and his significant contributions to modern architecture. Through detailed analysis and stunning visuals, the book captures the complexity and dynamism of Rudolph's buildings, showcasing his mastery of space, form, and light. This book serves as an invaluable resource for architects, students, and enthusiasts seeking a deeper understanding of Rudolph's architectural legacy and his lasting impact on the field." Brodsky & Utkin by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2015 (Amazon) Blurb: "From 1978 to 1993, the renowned Soviet 'paper architects' Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin created an incredible collection of elaborate etchings depicting outlandish, often impossible, buildings and cityscapes. Funny, cerebral, and deeply human, their obsessively detailed work layers elements borrowed from Egyptian tombs, Ledoux's visionary architecture, Le Corbusier's urban master plans, and other historical precedents in etchings of breathtaking complexity and beauty. Back by popular demand following the sold-out original 1991 edition and 2003 reprint, Brodsky & Utkin presents the sum of the architects' collaborative prints and adds new material, including an updated preface by the artists' gallery representative, Ron Feldman, a new introductory essay by architect Aleksandr Mergold, visual documentation of the duo's installation work, and rare personal photographs." JohnHILL: I'm not certain when I first learned about Russian Architects Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. Maybe it was in a 2005 blog post at Pruned. For sure it was well after the title Princeton Architectural Press put out on the duo in the early 1990s, as well as the 2003 first edition they put out and then printed again (with new preface) in 2015. The duo's intricate etchings are more art than architecture (they're represented by Feldman Gallery, after all), though many were submissions for architectural competitions hosted by Shinkenchiku and others in the 1980s. At 9x12 inches, the book isn't small, but with so many layers of information in their images it could easily be twice as large. ChatGPT: "'Brodsky & Utkin' by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, published by Princeton Architectural Press, is a captivating and visually stunning retrospective of the renowned Russian architectural duo. The book showcases the imaginative and whimsical architectural drawings and etchings that Brodsky and Utkin are known for. With their unique blend of historical references, surrealism, and social commentary, their works transport readers to a dreamlike world of fantastical structures. This publication serves as a valuable tribute to their distinctive artistic vision and is a must-have for architecture enthusiasts, artists, and anyone captivated by the power of architectural illustration." Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres by M. Christine Boyer, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010 (Amazon) Blurb (excerpt): "On his French identity card, legendary architect Le Corbusier listed his profession as 'Homme de Lettres' (Man of Letters). Celebrated for his architecture, which numbers fewer than sixty buildings, Le Corbusier also wrote more than fifty books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of letters. Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres is the first in-depth study of Le Corbusier as a writer as well as an architect. [...] In Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres author M. Christine Boyer focuses on the development of his writing style as it morphed from romantic prose to aphorisms and telegraphic bulletins. [...] Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres shows for the first time how his voluminous output — books, diaries, letters, sketchbooks, travel notebooks, lecture transcriptions, exposition catalogs, journal articles — reflects not just a compulsion to write, but a passion for advancing his ideas about the relationship between architecture, urbanism, and society in a new machine age." JohnHILL: When I received this book way back in 2010, I had every intention of reading the whole thing — all 702 pages (780 pages with notes and index). Well, life got in the way and I only got through two of the book's twelve chapters before putting it down and, unfortunately, not returning to it again. I recall those hundred or so pages being, though not an easy read, certainly an enjoyable one. Boyer managed to mine Le Corbusier's original documents and discuss them in a way that pulls the reader along. A strong interest in Le Corbusier and his writings (the book focuses on 1907-1947) helps greatly; though there are plenty of architects out there meeting that criteria. ChatGPT: "'Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres' by M. Christine Boyer is a compelling exploration of Le Corbusier's lesser-known role as a man of letters. Boyer sheds light on the prolific writings of the renowned architect, showcasing his literary talents and intellectual pursuits. Through a meticulous examination of his letters, essays, and manifestos, the book reveals the breadth and depth of Le Corbusier's ideas on architecture, urbanism, and society. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and enthusiasts seeking a deeper understanding of Le Corbusier's multifaceted contributions to the fields of architecture and literature." As an expansion of my partial revisiting of Book Briefs #35, below are catalogs of two exhibitions I wrote about for World-Architects back in 2022 (MoMA's The Project of Independence in February of that year, The Met's Bernd & Hilla Becher in July) but never got around to reviewing here. These are books I consulted after my initial visits and while writing my exhibition reviews, so I have some familiarity with them, albeit now from a distance of roughly a year or more. But given that I'd yet to articulate my thoughts on them, I decided to write "briefs" on them after inputting the same prompt into ChatGPT — a reverse of the reviews above. Will the AI-generated affect how I write about them? Should I adopt the style of ChatGPT in my one-paragraph reviews? Read on to see... The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 edited by Martino Stierli, Anoma Pieris and Sean Anderson, published by the Museum of Modern Art in March 2022 (Amazon | Bookshop) Blurb (excerpt): "Anchored by a newly commissioned portfolio of images from architectural photographer Randhir Singh, this richly illustrated and meticulously researched catalogue features essays by the curators and leading scholars in the field on subjects such as the politics of concrete, institution-building, higher education, housing, infrastructure and industry, landscape, and design, as well as presentations of seventeen transformative projects from around the subcontinent. While several of the architects appearing in these pages have in recent years received monographic exhibitions, The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 marks the first attempt to consider their work within the ideological frameworks of its creation and the political context of the region as a whole." ChatGPT: "'The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985' edited by Martino Stierli, Anoma Pieris, and Sean Anderson is a thought-provoking and enlightening anthology that explores the architectural landscape of South Asia during the post-independence era. Through a collection of essays, case studies, and visual documentation, the book examines the complex interplay between politics, identity, and architectural production in the region. It sheds light on the diverse range of architectural projects that emerged during this transformative period, offering valuable insights into the decolonization process and its impact on the built environment. This book is an essential resource for architects, historians, and anyone interested in the intersection of architecture, history, and postcolonial studies." JohnHILL: Museum of Modern Art curator Martino Stierli, in an interview at World-Architects that I edited ahead of the opening of The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985, described that exhibition as "a continuation of the 2018 exhibition, Toward A Concrete Utopia," subtitled Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 and notably his first major show at MoMA. Stierli actually proposed the exhibition on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka in his 2014 interview for the MoMA post, a clear sign that he sees the contemporary importance in "destabilizing the Western-centric canon of modern architectural history," one notably fostered by MoMA for decades. The catalog is as good as the exhibition was, with a portfolio of contemporary photographs by Randhir Singh, essays by architects and scholars (on cities, housing, infrastructure, education, and other subjects), and case studies on more than a dozen buildings, from Antonin Raymond' s Golconde dormitory in Pondicherry, India, to Yasmeen Lari's Anguri Bagh Housing in Lahore, Pakistan. As befits Stierli, an architectural historian, the catalog is more thorough and wide-ranging than the exhibition it accompanied. Bernd & Hilla Becher by Jeff L. Rosenheim, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in August 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop) Blurb: "For more than five decades, Bernd (1931–2007) and Hilla (1934–2015) Becher collaborated on photographs of industrial architecture in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States. This sweeping monograph features the Bechers’ quintessential pictures, which present water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and more as sculptural objects. Beyond the Bechers’ iconic Typologies, the book includes Bernd’s early drawings, Hilla’s independent photographs, and excerpts from their notes, sketchbooks, and journals. The book’s authors offer new insights into the development of the artists’ process, their work’s conceptual underpinnings, the photographers’ relationship to deindustrialization, and the artists’ legacy. An essay by award-winning cultural historian Lucy Sante and an interview with Max Becher, the artists’ son, make this volume an unrivaled look into the Bechers’ art alongside their career, life, and subjects." ChatGPT: "'Bernd & Hilla Becher' by Jeff L. Rosenheim is a captivating tribute to the renowned German photographic duo known for their systematic documentation of industrial architecture. The book delves into the Bechers' distinctive approach to capturing the beauty and functionality of industrial structures, presenting their work as a unique blend of art and documentary photography. With insightful essays, stunning reproductions of their iconic images, and a comprehensive overview of their artistic journey, this book is an essential resource for photography enthusiasts, art historians, and anyone fascinated by the power of visual storytelling." JohnHILL: In the last of six numbered galleries of the Bernd & Hilla Becher exhibition at The Met last year, a glass vitrine displayed a selection of books published by the photographers in their lifetime. I wrote in my review of the exhibition that "books [were] an integral part of their career — the primary means of making their work accessible to artists, architects, historians, and the general public." Their books, furthermore, are highly prized — expensive even as reprints, and somewhat scarce — so any book on the Bechers, in my mind, is welcome, especially this one by Met curator Jeff L. Rosenheim. Highlights of the beautifully produced catalog include Gabrielle Conrath-Scholl's essay on the Bechers' documentation of Zeche Concordia between 1967 and 1970; Rosenheim's interview with Max, the Bechers' son; and 120 pages of plates that include a couple gatefolds. The plates may not be a substitute for seeing the Bechers' photographs — larger — in a gallery setting, but their accompaniments make them that as valuable here.

Two weeks ago I was in Venice for the Biennale, covering the 18th International Architecture Exhibition curated by Lesley Lokko for World-Architects. It was my first trip back to Venice since the 2018 Biennale, which was the 16th edition and was curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects. Like other writers outside of Europe, the interim edition, though delayed from 2020 to 2021 due the pandemic, still opened at a time when international travel was difficult. I passed on it, as many others did. My 2018 trip yielded a pair of "book briefs" on this blog with two handfuls of catalogs from the main exhibition, some from the national pavilions, and some on collateral events. Although a similar number of books from the current Biennale is featured below, it felt this year that print catalogs were slimmer than in years past. For instance, the national pavilions were focused more on digital than print publications, making them available via QR codes and offering to ship print versions later. And only one pavilion, Bahrain, had a large stack of books that whittled down over the course of the two-day vernissage. The FOODSCAPES book in the Spanish Pavilion I have a hard time passing up any printed catalog, but I could only carry so much with me, so the below list is limited to the ones I felt were important enough to bring home with me. What's missing? The most exceptional printed catalog I came across was for the Spanish Pavilion, FOODSCAPES, whose website indicates part of the exhibition includes "an archive in the form of a recipe book." The book I flipped through on the large table in the middle of the venue (photo above) was large, the size of an atlas; its large pages were full of essays, images, architectural projects, and other content related to the theme. But only a newsprint was distributed during the vernissage and, while the Biennale bookshop was selling catalogs to other pavilions, Spain was not one of them. For now, this book remains a mystery. The days leading up to the opening of the Biennale on May 20 were also packed with book launches, some that I signed up for ahead of time but, for one reason or another, didn't make it to, and others that I happened upon as I trekked the Biennale grounds or ventured around Venice. These books I missed include: Sketches on Everlasting Plastics, the first iteration of an ongoing editorial intervention around the US Pavilion exhibition Everlasting Plastics; Architecture in Islamic Countries: Selections from the Catalogue for the Second International Exhibition of Architecture Venice 1982/83, the first English translation of the Italian catalog for the second Venice Architecture Biennale, directed by Paolo Portoghesi; and the launch of the first volume of Khōrein: Journal for Architecture and Philosophy. Main Exhibition: Biennale Architettura 2023: The Laboratory of the Future edited by Lesley Lokko, published by Silvana Editoriale (Amazon / Bookshop) As seems to be the norm in Biennales this century, the catalog for the International Architecture Exhibition is published in two sizes (small and large) and, at least in the large size, in two volumes: one volume devoted to the main exhibition and one volume cataloging the dozens of national pavilions. The latter for this year is the slimmer volume (176 pages) and is basically unnecessary, given the numerous standalone catalogs for the national pavilions and the only cursory, preliminary content available for each contribution. The volume basically serves as a reference, with two-page spreads providing a curatorial statement, list of contributors, and an image giving a sense of the theme for each pavilion and collateral event. On the other hand, the longer, 440-page volume devoted to Lesley Lokko's exhibition, The Laboratory of the Future, is more than necessary. Not only does it provide similar statements, team information, and images on the 89 contributors to the exhibition, it helpfully presents them in the multifaceted structure Lokko set up for the exhibition. Within the theme are a handful of sections (Force Majeure, Dangerous Liaisons, Curator's Special Projects, etc.) that are split between the Giardini and Arsenale venues but also intertwined. The catalog presents the contributions within this thematic structure and in alphabetical order; plans of the venues with numbered keys indicate their physical location. Short essays and images inserted between the color-coded sections round out the beautifully produced volume. National Pavilions: Cloud-to-ground edited by Oren Eldar, Edith Kofsky and Hadas Maor, published by Park Books (Amazon / Bookshop) Open for Maintenance – Wegen Umbau geöffnet edited by Anh-Linh Ngo, published by ARCH+ / Spector Books (Amazon / Bookshop) Partecipazione / Beteiligung edited by AKT and Hermann Czech, published by Luftschacht Verlag (Amazon / Bookshop) Walkers in Amazonia: The Calendar Project edited by Alexia León and Lucho Marcial, published by Patronato Cultural del Peru (PDF download) With just two days of the vernissage to take in the large main exhibition, dozens of national pavilions, and even more collateral events and other exhibitions around the city — and with most visitors to the Biennale spending a day or two there anyways — catalogs are valuable for allowing visitors to devote more time to exhibits of interest. They're particularly valuable for the national pavilions, which are major efforts that often treat the catalogs as extensions of the materials on display. A case in point is Israel's pavilion, cloud-to-ground, which is empty this year and just consists of a few models of buildings on stands in the adjacent courtyard. The concrete models depict old telephone exchanges that are, in reality like the Israel Pavilion, closed off, symbols of how technological change leads to a residue of "black boxes" and provoke the obvious question: What will happen to today's server farms tomorrow, when their technology is obsolete? If the pavilion is slim on information, the book is thorough — and lovely, in its own way — overloaded with essays, interviews, a 112-page "telephone exchanges index," an index of data centers, and much more content. Brazil and Great Britain won the jury's awards for national pavilions, but two of my favorites didn't: Austria and Germany. Though markedly different in content, each pavilion is about connecting to the Venetian context; Austria does it through a proposal to physically link its pavilion to the Sant'Elena neighborhood just beyond its walls, and Germany does it by turning its pavilion into a materials depot and workshop for Venetian students and craftspeople to use scrap from the 2022 Venice Art Biennale for school and building projects. Austria's bilingual catalog gives a background on the Biennale's gradual encroachment into Sant'Elena as the reasoning behind the temporary footbridge the curators wanted to build for this year's exhibition; the book also catalogs the expansion of the Biennale this century into the rest of the city via small venues and has essays on the right to the city and other relevant topics. It's a strong, politically charged idea — no wonder the Biennale and other authorities shot down the proposed temporary bridge. The German Pavilion is curated in part by the editors of ARCH+, so logically the catalog to Open for Maintenance – Wegen Umbau geöffnet is published by the German architecture magazine; it has been released in separate German and English issues, the latter done with Spector Books. The 208-page matte-paper issue, number 252, comes with a 24-page glossy insert that explains the premise of the pavilion and documents its realization through color photographs. The various pieces of the pavilion — exterior ramp, material repository, workshop, kitchenette, waterless toilet, and meeting space — are both illustrative and functioning parts of the circular economy promoted by the curators. The numerous contributions to the issue proper address everything from maintenance and care to race and gender, from the politics of disability to squatting and the right to the city. The issue even has built projects, set off from the rest on gray pages, that follow from the pavilion's theme. Last of the national pavilion catalogs I brought home is Walkers in Amazonia: The Calendar Project, Peru's contribution to the Biennale. Housed in a smallish building at the Arsenale alongside a few other nations that don't have their own pavilions in the Giardini, Walkers in Amazonia is structured as an A-frame displaying colorful calendars created by indigenous communities in the Peruvian jungle. The catalog contains all of those calendars on glossy pages, but at a smaller size that means many of the words accompanying the drawings are too small to read (they're all in Spanish, obviously, but still). The calendars clearly express a circular understanding of time that is rooted in natural cycles, of reciprocally living in and caring for the jungle. Coincidentally, I met architect Marta Maccaglia, who was in town to accept the inaugural divia award (see below) for the work she's been doing in Peru for about a decade; she told me how happy she was to see the Peruvian jungle as the subject of the pavilion, especially its expression in the colorful circular calendars. Elsewhere in Venice: divia award 2023: Diversity in Architecture edited by Ursula Schwitalla and Christiane Fath, published by Hatje Cantz (Amazon) Kengo Kuma: Onomatopoeia Architecture edited by Elena Caldara, published by Dario Cimorelli Editore Quaderns Biennale, 2023: Following the Fish edited by Daniel Cid, Francesc Pla and Eva Serrats, published by Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC) Zero Gravity Urbanism: Principles for a New Livability published by NEOM La Biennale di Venezia has a structure that is clear but can be confusing for people visiting Venice during the Biennale — which is about half of every year, when considered between the alternating art and architecture exhibitions. The official exhibitions and events for the Venice Architecture Biennale consist of the International Architecture Exhibition (the one curated by Lesley Lokko this year), the national pavilions (in the Giardini, traditionally, but also in the Arsenale), special projects like V&A's Applied Arts Pavilion, and collateral events that are distributed around the city. But many unofficial exhibitions and events overlap with the Biennale, taking advantage of the people visiting the city to look at architecture exhibitions but also giving the impression that any exhibition in Venice in that time is part of the Biennale. Of these four books, only one is for an official Biennale event. One of the just nine collateral events in this year's Biennale is Catalonia in Venice_ Following the Fish, which is strongly aligned with Lesley Lokko's exhibition. (National pavilions, or in this case a regional collateral event, don't need to follow the theme of the main exhibition, but they have every right to — and often they do.) It looks at the community of vendors ("manters") in Barcelona who traveled there from Senegal for better opportunities, but instead of being able to ply their trades they are left to hustle cheap wares on the sidewalks, always on the lookout for police ready to arrest them. The story is more complicated than this description, but the exhibition bravely addresses the racism the manters confront on a daily basis; and it reveals to visitors the unseen or ignored community that the curators have formed an alliance with, one aimed at much-needed reparations. Architecturally, the pavilion includes some small-scale solutions for community places in Barcelona, but the catalog focuses on texts that contextualize the complex issue. Want an experience that is the near-opposite of Following the Fish? Head to Abbazia di San Gregorio and the over-the-top, non-Biennale exhibition of The Line and other NEOM projects. Zero Gravity Urbanism—Principles for a New Livability is, I wrote, more marketing than culture: numerous models of various scales for The Line, the inane — or it it insane? — proposal for a 170-km-long "city" in the Saudi Arabian desert that would house 9 million people and somehow be a model for sustainable living. I'll admit that the models on display are impressive, and the architect in me who was educated in the early 1990s liked seeing designs that were almost plucked from the decade ... but this is irresponsible planning, to say the least. Yet, with the country's deep pockets and architects willing to go along with it, at least a portion of it is being realized: The Hidden Marina, clearly catering to the super rich and their vessels. The catalog I was able to get a hold of is "not for sale," per its insides, but like the exhibition it's more marketing than anything else of value. Not far from the NEOM exhibition, at the Berührungspunkte venue along the Grand Canal, the inaugural divia award was celebrated the Friday of the vernissage. The event was not the unveiling of the winner, Marta Maccaglia, which had taken place a couple weeks prior in Berlin, but a celebration of the award taking place during the Biennale and the distribution of a few copies of the book on the award. (World-Architects is a media partner for divia, which is short of Diversity in Architecture, so I was able to get a copy.) The book is slim, at less than 100 pages, but is very well done, from its red cover boards to the color photos with projects of the winner and finalists, and interviews with the same. While the inaugural award created by Ursula Schwitalla and Christiane Fath is focused on women in architecture, future iterations of the award are supposed to branch out to encompass other areas of diversity within the profession. Directly across the Grand Canal from Berührungspunkte is Palazzo Franchetti, a venue for Portugal's national pavilion but also host to an exhibition of cultural projects underway in Qatar (almost as questionable as NEOM) and a sizable monographic exhibition on Kengo Kuma. Onomatopoeia Architecture, which I'll be reviewing for World-Architects in the coming weeks, is a pleasing show, with beautiful models of Kuma's buildings sitting in the palazzo's lushly appointed rooms. The displays are accompanied by two installations: a wooden structure at the entrance to the exhibition on the piano nobile and a larger aluminum piece in the garden overlooking the Grand Canal and the Accademia Bridge. The catalog isn't a particularly deep exploration of Kuma's buildings, but it does a good job of articulating the ideas behind the Japanese architect's "onomatopoeia architecture."

Over at World-Architects I wrote about two self-published books recently published by BNIM and KPF: ALL - The Tom and Ruth Harkin Center by BNIM Design in Detail by Kohn Pedersen Fox The "Found" feature also includes responses to a few questions on why the firms opted to self-publish rather than work with publishers on these books.

This year's New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is my third, following the 2022 book fair and, just days before lockdown, the 2020 book fair. Three hardly makes me an expert, even in my specialization of architecture books, but it does help with gauging the value given to books on the subject and getting a sense of how architecture books are seen within the wider rare books market. Generally, "rare" equates with "old" first editions that have signatures and, in some cases, limited print runs. The last, in the realm of architecture, points to anything pre-capital-M-modern but also, ironically, architecture books in general, since they tend to have limited print runs compared to fiction — compared to anything but artist books, really — and usually just one printing. But the small print runs of architecture books do not equate to high asking prices, as could be grasped by the smattering of architecture books that I came across at the 2023 edition of the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair — at the Park Avenue Armory until Sunday. The ones on display are a narrow bunch, tending almost exclusively toward big-name architects from the 20th century (Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Venturi Scott Brown) and old Europeans (Alberti, Palladio, Vitrivius, Piranesi). Along these lines, below are some things I learned while browsing the booths at this year's book fair trying to find some architectural gems. Lesson 1: Corbu is (still) king. If one architect appeared more than any other in my quick scan of the booksellers' offerings yesterday afternoon, it was definitely Le Corbusier; he made roughly fifty books in his lifetime, so that's hardly a surprise. It also helps that it's been a half-century since his death and, even with a lot of criticism of his legacy in recent years, he seems more popular than ever in rare book circles. A few of the Corbu books I came across: Johnson Rare Books & Archives has a first edition of Des Canons, Des Munitions? Merci! Des Logis... S.V.P. from 1937, complete with a typed signed letter by Corbu. It is going for $7,500. Ursus Books is selling an "incredibly rare first edition of Le Corbusier's legendary Farbenklaviatur [Color Keyboards ...] the first of the two collections of colors which he designed for the Salubra wallpaper company" in 1931. Birkhäuser did a reproduction about 25 years ago that can be found for a few hundred dollars, but a first edition at Ursus will put you back $22,500. Those offerings pale in comparison to one of the 250 copies of La Poème de l'Angle Droit from 1955; Bernett Penka Rare Books on the Arts and Visual Culture has it, complete with an original case, for $50,000. Lesson 2: Old + European = Rare + Valuable. While walking the aisles of the fair, it felt at times that "architecture" was limited to old treatises, pattern books, etchings, and the like, all coming from Europe centuries ago. Large folios opened to drawings were in many glass cases, standing out as skilled and (once) influential creations but also anachronistic images of what many people think buildings should be: classical. Traditionally, architecture libraries — be they institutional, professional, or private — have been practical: providing guidance and inspiration for architects. Outside of a few architectural historians, that's not the case with books like these, which are prized for their age, scarcity, and beauty, not their practicality to architects. And even if architects still used them, such as those at the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, they'd probably use reprints rather than valuable 500-year-old originals. Ursus Books makes another appearance here, this time with a portfolio (ca. 1810) of 24 plates by Antoine Joseph Gaitte of Claude Nicholas Ledoux's 18th-century toll-gates in Paris. Price: $8,500. Books — or, more accurately, scrolls — of Vitruvius's foundational text on architecture, De architectura, don't exist, so later Renaissance versions of it are prized, such as this one edited by Fra Giovanni Tacuino in 1511. Erasmushaus is selling it for $65,000. (The Basel-based bookseller also has a first edition of Palladio's Quattro Libri for $66,000.) The enduring legacy of Giovanni Battista Piranesi is evident in "The Grand Tour" booth of Mayfair Rare Books & Manuscripts, which has a folio with 20 etched plates of Paestum (ca. 1778) going for €25,000. Lesson 3: Architects love certain artists and designers. Audience is always important when it comes to book sales. If we lump architects together as one audience, I'd argue that they purchase books outside of architecture as often as they amass books on architecture. Books on art and design are high among the former, with very particular artists and designers — ones with shared affinities for form, space, texture, etc. — standing out over others. A couple are below, plus one surprise (to me). In his lifetime Massimo Vignelli designed many architecture books, though in NYC he is known for his redesign of the MTA subway map in the 1970s. Never widely implemented, the Vignelli Map made a comeback this century for the MTA's Weekender website, and in recent years I've seen it popping up in stations. Still, seeing an original map from 1978 at Geographicus Rare Antique Maps made me stop in my tracks (no pun intended). How much? $7,500. Architects love artists who trained as architects, and right up top is Gordon Matta-Clark, who sliced and cut open buildings, documenting the transient (de)constructions in photographs. A book of his I'd heard about but hadn't seen in person is Walls Paper, which the artist made from photographs of partially demolished buildings in the Bronx in the early 1970s (he died in 1978 at just 35 years old). He colored the b/w photos and then cut the pages in the middle so juxtapositions are created as one flips through it. Two copies were on display at the fair: at Sims Reed Ltd. ($5,000) and Jeff Hirsch Books ($3,000). Who is this Utopian architectural designer that Vivien Greene supposedly called the "Edgar Allan Poe of Architecture"? I'd never heard of Albert Trachsel before coming across this signed copy of Les Fêtes réelles, an "architectural poem" he made in 1897. Martyan Lan is selling it for $9,500. Lesson 4: Learning from Las Vegas is the architect's "one book." If there is one book today that every architect should have, it's not Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture or Koolhaas and company's S,M,L,XL or even Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. It's Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. (No explanation needed on its importance and influence, I hope, but here's something I wrote about it five years ago.) Heck, most architects already have the book, but I'm referring to the 1972 first edition, not the 1977 paperback. It's big, expensive (even the facsimile edition put out by MIT Press in 2017 is $100), and rare. I'm lucky enough to have a first edition, but mine is lacking the glassine jacket that Johnson Rare Books & Archives has on display next to Corbusier's Munitions. That's not an original box at right, but inside the book are the authors' signatures, which brings the price to $3,000.

For this week's curated picks of architecture and design competitions listed on Bustler, we are featuring four calls seeking student projects that exhibit the best in computational design, proposals for two sunken courtyards at the Korean Museum of Urbanism and Architecture in Sejong, South Korea, outstanding work from the Chicago architecture community, and imaginative conceptual explorations of the stair. For the complete directory of newly listed competitions, click here.

Zaha Hadid Architects has shared news and photography of their completed Shenzhen Science & Technology Museum. The mammoth centerpiece for the new Guangming Science City equals close to 1.35 million square feet and is part of the firm's expanded focus in the Shenzhen metro region. Photo: Virgile Simon Bertrand It joins OPPO Shenzhen headquarters and the Shenzhen Institute of Financial Technology campus, which will be finished later in the year and followed by their winning Shenzhen Bay Super Headquarters Base Tower C competition design in 2027. Photo: Virgile Simon Bertrand According to the firm's original project announcement: "The design is a volumetric response to the distinct conditions of the site. Responding to the city to the east, the design is defined by its solidity and dynamic curvilinear geometries that express the many urban circulation routes." Photo: Virgile Simon Bertrand This is notable as the first architectural design to incorporate dual-color INCO technology in a ...

This post is brought to you by Nakheel Nakheel, a member of Dubai Holding Real Estate, has announced its collaboration with six locally and globally acclaimed architecture firms – WATG, SAOTA, Whitespace Architects, NAGA Architects, LOCI, and LW Design Group – to deliver a stunning 10 distinct architectural styles for the bespoke villas planned for the Beach Collection at Palm Jebel Ali. Inspired by the island's unique blend of oceanfront serenity, vibrant cityscape, and the colours and forms defining its landscape, the architects have crafted an exclusive collection of 10 homes that celebrates the iconic destination’s natural beauty and urban dynamism, delivering a collection of residences that seamlessly integrate indoor-outdoor living and infuse luxury into everyday living. From minimalist elegance to bold contemporary statements, the emphasis is on creating spaces that embrace natural light and take advantage of the scenic vistas to offer residents a sanctuary of tranquillity an...

Specht Novak has completed its latest residential project in the heart of a dense Austin neighborhood. Named the Stealth House, and a winner at the recent Texas Design Award, the compact, 1,100-square-foot dwelling is designed to explore new models of privacy, sustainability, and urban infill. Image credit: Leonid Furmansky Image credit: Leonid Furmansky Conceived as an experimental project and built as the personal residence of architect Scott Specht, Stealth House rethinks the accessory dwelling unit (ADU) through a design that eliminates all perimeter windows. Instead, the structure is clad in corrugated steel, offering a protective shell that prioritizes privacy, security, and a distinct architectural presence. The home’s name pays homage to its inconspicuous exterior, which conceals light-filled interiors oriented around internal courtyards. Image credit: Leonid Furmansky Image credit: Leonid Furmansky “For years, we’ve worked on unbuilt designs that investigate self-sufficiency, c...

The design of France's national pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka from leading international studios Coldefy and Carlo Ratti Associati has the look of a fair favorite after the April 13th opening of festivities at the six-month exhibition. As a follow-up to an early preview of its 'Theater of Nature' concept, organizers of the pavilion have shared photographer Julien Lanoo’s imagery detailing a stemwinding journey that invites visitors to be both an actor and spectator in a grand production of space and nature. Via their transversals of the "looping narrative path" that weaves inside and out of the pavilion (whose porous voided facade is framed by 56-foot-high suspended fabric veils), those who experience it will come away with a more personal understanding of the symbiosis between form and humanity. The Expo is open until October 13th, 2025. France Pavilion at the Osaka World Expo 2025. Image: © Coldefy & CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati. Photo: © Julien Lanoo. France Pavilion at the Osaka Wor...

Nationwide spending on nonresidential construction decreased by 0.5% for March following weeks of uncertainty in the face of new trade tariffs, the latest analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data from the Associated Builders and Contractors has shown. On a seasonally adjusted annualized basis, nonresidential spending totaled $1.25 trillion. Spending was down on a monthly basis in 11 of the 16 nonresidential subcategories. Private nonresidential spending fell 0.8%, while public nonresidential construction spending was down 0.2% in March. This follows the findings from last month's report, which eclipsed new record highs in the month of February. The Dodge Momentum Index has also seen a pullback lately while the commercial sector falters outside of typically strong data center designs. Table credit: Associated Builders and Contractors "Nonresidential construction spending fell sharply in March, with declines spread across virtually every private subsector,” ABC’s Chief Economist, Anirban B...

This week's edition of our curated career roundup from the Archinect Job board features 20 intermediate-level architecture roles currently available in the Los Angeles area. To explore specific job titles from the architectural profession, consult Archinect's Guide to Job Titles series. Also, follow our Archinect Tips series to improve your portfolio, resume, and interviewing skills, to increase your overall chances of getting that next job. Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects [LOHA] seeks an Intermediate Architect "The candidate will join an experienced, creative team with a portfolio of work that is rooted in our mission of embracing architecture’s role as a catalyst for change. Considered applicants must have strong design and graphic skills, an ability to assume a significant role in larger projects and run smaller projects with oversight. Candidate will be expected to contribute expertise throughout all phases of project development." Cloverdale749 by Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects [LOHA]...

SANAA founders Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima traveled to London today to receive their official RIBA Royal Gold Medal from King Charles III at the Royal Institute of British Architects' (soon-to-be-renovated) 66 Portland Place headquarters. The 46th winners shared their own delights at receiving the honor following a 30-year pursuit of an architecture that brings people joy as it provides them with shelter and valued cultural infrastructure. RIBA President, Muyiwa Oki, comments: "Their work has become a standard for creating meaningful, culturally insightful designs and will continue to raise the bar for future generations." SANAA is also the 2025 Le Prix Charlotte Perriand Award winner. The RIBA will be hosting a two-city exhibition of their work between its London galleries and at the Tate Liverpool beginning on May 2nd.

As prospective students began to receive offers of study from M.Arch programs across the United States, Archinect wanted to hear from our community on how they had fared in their applications and their thoughts and reflections on the process. Building off an active Archinect Forum thread with over 300 comments, we launched a survey to gain further insights from applicants. The landscape that emerged from responses was one of general relief and satisfaction among students with the results of their efforts, but shared concerns over finance, feedback, and resources. Below, we have summarized seven key takeaways from the survey responses. Do you have further thoughts beyond those captured below? Let us know in the comments. 1. Overall, students are happy with the outcome. Archinect asked respondents if, overall, they were happy with the results and offers they had received so far during the application period. In response, 62% of students told us that they were very happy with the outc...

The next NOT A HOTEL to join the brand’s roster of resort destinations worldwide (including those designed by Bjarke Ingels and Sou Fujimoto) has been revealed in a village in Gunma Prefecture, Japan. More specifically, the brand says, NOT A HOTEL MINAMAKI TOJI (its seventh to open and the first to be announced back in August 2023) will accommodate eight people in search of its signature refinement and repose. Makoto Tanijiri and Ai Yoshida of the Hiroshima practice SUPPOSE DESIGN OFFICE designed TOJI, a mountaintop gathering of five, copper plate-clad cabins offering about 2,700 square feet in space that taper with the site’s topography. Photo: Kenta Hasegawa, Newcolor inc. Photo: Kenta Hasegawa, Newcolor inc. Spaces are designed to a ceiling height of more than 19 feet (or 6 meters) with a wood stove and other pieces from Isamu Noguchi's Akari collection. Outside, a long (49-foot) infinity pool frames the outer network of baths and other water features. Photo: Kenta Hasegawa, Newco...

With summer approaching, now's the perfect time to see the variety of exciting architecture and design events that are coming up in May. From the roster of ongoing and upcoming events listed on Bustler, here is our curated selection of recommendations worth checking out. UPCOMING EVENTS

As global trade policies continue to shift, most notably under the Trump administration’s imposition of tariffs, construction projects have begun to face increasing uncertainty over contract performance. One novel legal question relevant to the issue is whether new or increased tariffs can be classified as force majeure events, thereby excusing delays or nonperformance in construction contracts. Force majeure, after all, was one of a number of topics noted in our recent article on how construction contracts could be re-designed for tariff uncertainty. Force majeure clauses, commonly found in commercial agreements, are intended to relieve parties from contractual obligations when extraordinary and unforeseeable events, such as natural disasters, war, or government embargoes, make performance impossible or impracticable. However, these clauses are narrowly interpreted by courts, and their applicability often hinges on the specific language used in each contract. Related on Archinect:...

Earlier this week, SCI-Arc announced the appointment of Winka Dubbeldam as the school's next Director and CEO. In light of her new leadership position, it's time for a look at some of her firm Archi-Tectonics' most recognized projects completed since its founding in 1994. Since that time, honors from numerous design awards have helped propel the firm into the international spotlight, highlighting in turn Dubbeldam's profile as an architect. The studio, whose operations are spread between New York, Amsterdam, and Hangzhou, is set to publish their first monograph Monsters and Mutants (via Park Books, Switzerland) later this year. London Solar House in London (completed 2024) London Solar House. Photo: Nick Kane London Solar House. Photo: Nick Kane In search of the most ergonomic and frugal housing unit, the firm first maintained the solid masonry structure of the original two-story building as the gravitational core, forming a largely opaque boundary of the building, from which a new r...

Investment management firm T. Rowe Price has officially opened its new headquarters at Harbor Point in Baltimore. Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), the project transforms a former industrial brownfield site into a contemporary workplace. Image credit: StudioSZ and Justin Szeremeta, courtesy of KPF Image credit: StudioSZ and Justin Szeremeta, courtesy of KPF The new campus consists of two nine-story buildings linked by a central atrium, emerging from a spatial strategy aimed at fostering internal communication while avoiding the traditional office tower format. The atrium, designed to host both large and small gatherings, includes column-free suspension bridges and mature trees, creating a communal space with views of the waterfront. Image credit: StudioSZ and Justin Szeremeta, courtesy of KPF Image credit: StudioSZ and Justin Szeremeta, courtesy of KPF The scheme’s design integrates architectural references from Baltimore’s urban fabric, balancing a material palette of grey metal and...

Here’s another look inside the complexities of rebuilding in Altadena following January’s Eaton Fire, courtesy of AfroLA. "The takeaway right now is that the greatest value is in community preservation," Altadena resident Steve Lewis tells the outlet in response to the growing concerns of displacement for many of the Black families whose properties have sustained an inordinate amount of damage, according to a UCLA study. SoCal NOMA has been active in advocating for their position as the rebuilding process finally starts. They are working closely with other volunteer groups like the Altadena Rebuild Coalition to recover decades of Black history by founding community land banks and through other means.

The M+ museum currently features Nakagin and Kiyotomo: Architectural Icons from Tokyo, 1970s–1980s, a look at the famous capsule tower’s relationship with the late-80s icon Kiyotomo sushi bar and the link between architect Kisho Kurokawa and designer Shiro Kuramata. The exhibition includes one of 23 preserved capsule pods from the original tower alongside a full-scale mockup of the reconstructed bar interiors (1988-2014) for an in situ analysis. They and the supporting materials will be on display in the museum's East Galleries until the end of February 2026. More from our 2022 coverage of the capsule preservation effort is here.

Following our previous look at an opening for an Architecture Archive Fellow at the University of Southern California, we are using this week’s edition of our Job Highlights series to explore an open role on Archinect Jobs for an Architectural Rhino Modeller for Exhibitions at C&G Partners. The role, based in New York City, calls for a “skilled Rhino modeller and architectural designer to work on experiential and exhibit design projects.” Among the requirements for the role are a minimum of 3-5 years of experience and strong visual presentation skills. Astronomical Exhibitions at the Griffith Observatory by C&G Partners (interactive exhibition). Image via C&G Partners / Facebook Why the role interests us The open role at C&G Partners offers us the opportunity to highlight the work of a studio whose work sits at the intersection of design and culture. “We believe in the untapped value of culture, the institutions that enrich it, and the smart companies that cultivate it,” the studio...

A new home in Seattle’s Mt. Baker neighborhood from Best Practice Architecture dubbed 'Lil Shingle' was completed earlier this year at 2,617 square feet. The home, an early-1950s vestige that was salvaged after falling into a state of considerable disrepair, derives its name from the custom-made scalloped cedar facade shingles featured in the new design. Its past degradation had earned it the dubious moniker "Slanty Shanty." Photo by Rafael Soldi Photography Photo by Rafael Soldi Photography Best Practice says only the walls of the basement foundation could be repurposed for the rebuild, which replicated its layout, pitched roof, fenestration, and building footprint while adding a small (52-square-foot) mud room through construction. Photo by Rafael Soldi Photography Photo by Rafael Soldi Photography A list of delicate interventions includes repositioning the home’s interior staircase, which has been rotated 90 degrees to allow for the insertion of a U-shaped kitchen into the plan. Vaul...

The opening date for the new Fondation Cartier extension design from Jean Nouvel has been announced as October 25th, 2025. The new space, which will take over a Haussmann-era building directly across from the Louvre on the Rue de Rivoli, is about 91,000 square feet (8,500 square meters). The project marks the 40th anniversary of the foundation's establishment, which preceded Nouvel’s original 1994 design, and offers a resolution to a previous plan for the Île Seguin that was dissolved in 2014. (You can check out some new interior shots of the extension below, courtesy of the Foundation photographer Martin Argyroglo.) Building site view of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s future premises, Place du Palais-Royal, Paris, March 2025. Photo: © Martin Argyroglo Building site view of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s future premises, Place du Palais-Royal, Paris, March 2025. Photo: © Martin Argyroglo Building site view of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contem...

The local NBC affiliate in Los Angeles is reporting on the start of construction of the first home to be rebuilt in Altadena following the devastation of the Eaton Fire there in January. The design by TC Design-Build is for a private client and took just 56 days to obtain a permit via the new self-certification system. The homeowner, a German immigrant who has lived in Los Angeles for 30 years, told reporters, "It’s the first day of my new life." Video courtesy NBCLA More of our coverage on the rush to rebuild in Altadena and the Palisades is here: L.A. mayor signs on to self-certification for architects, AI-backed plan reviews for fire recovery Tariffs and the growing post-fire ‘cloud over L.A. home builders’ How long will recovery from L.A.'s fires take? New Urban Institute analysis suggests a long wait

Kongjian Yu’s 27-year-old Beijing-based practice Turenscape has been named this year’s winner of the RAIC International Prize by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC). His work, which was described as an aesthetically sound and philosophically grounded endeavor to “create inspiring spaces that foster human reconnection to our natural world," includes more than 1,000 projects in 250 cities worldwide. Yu, who also won the 2023 Oberlander Prize and the Cooper Hewitt's National Design Award for Landscape Architecture the same year, has gained notoriety for the development of the 'Sponge City' concept he began espousing during China's accelerated urbanization push in the 1990s. Yu has taught at Peking University since 1997.

A new report by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has found that overtime continues to be prevalent in the UK profession. The report found that 90% of architectural workers have worked more than their contracted hours, with the average employee working 44 hours a week despite being contracted to work 37.5 hours per week. Two-thirds of the 1,450 people who responded to the RIBA’s survey said that they were not compensated for overtime. Only 6% received payment, with 23% receiving ‘time off in lieu.’ In 2021, Archinect reported in-depth on the prevalence of unpaid overtime across the UK profession. Low pay remains a pressing issue, particularly among younger, early-career professionals. 76% of Architectural Assistants with undergraduate qualifications, and 13% with Master's qualifications, are paid below the Real Living Wage, as defined by the UK's Real Living Wage Foundation. By age group, 69% of those aged 21–24 and 11% of those aged 25–34 do not receive the Real Livi...

In this week's curated employer highlight from Archinect Jobs, we are featuring five architecture and design firms with current openings in New York City, San Francisco, Torrance, Sarasota, and Saint Petersburg. For even more opportunities, visit the Archinect job board and explore our active community of job seekers, firms, and schools. In New York City, Desai Chia Architecture is hiring for an Intermediate Architect with five to eight years of experience and proficiency with Revit, Adobe Creative Suite, 3D modeling and rendering, and AutoCAD. Strong applicants will possess excellent organizational skills, the ability to work both independently and in a team, and strong verbal and written communication skills. LM Guest House by Desai Chia Architecture. Multi-family and mixed-use housing specialists Lahmon Architects is in search of a Project Architect/Job Captain in Torrance, California with seven-plus years of experience. The ideal candidate is proficient with Revit, has good const...

Marina Tabassum is gearing up for her turn as the 24th designer of the Serpentine Pavilion in London. In the lead up to the summer’s most anticipated single-stage exhibition, she spoke in an additional preview of her forthcoming concept titled 'A Capsule in Time.' Tabassum says: "The idea was to connect it to where I come from [Dhaka, Bangladesh], where we have these makeshift structures made out of bamboo and fabric. We call them Shamiana, and it's about the translucency of the light and daylight coming through it; if you’re coming on a nice, sunny day, it should cheer you up. I’m really hoping that people will come together, connect, and that everybody enjoys it." The 2025 Serpentinite Pavilion commission opens on June 6th in London’s Kensington Gardens.

The organizers of the Healing the Heart of LA competition, FORT: LA, have named two winners at the culmination of a very timely contest whose organizers hoped to inspire resilience and determination in the midst of rebuilding for fire-stricken communities in Los Angeles. Selected from a crop of design proposals that were aimed at rehabilitating one of the many architectural landmarks lost in the Altadena area and the Pacific Palisades, the winners chosen by jury members Adrian Scott Fine, Christina Morris, Sharon Johnston, Siddhartha Majumdar, Rochelle Mills, Sam Lubell, and Frances Anderton stood out for their sensibility to memory, place, and the sustainable mandate for a more secure future.

The American Institute of Architects has honored members Olivia Mae M. Asuncion of Quattrocchi Kwok Architects, Carlos Augusto Garcia of Brooks + Scarpa, Gloria Koter of Glow Architects, Corey Squire of Bora Architecture & Interiors, and Matthew Szymanski of Arx Design Co. as the 2025 winners of the Young Architects Award. Each of the emerging talents was said to earn the distinction over their impressive early career contributions and leadership within the field. They were joined by the five winners of the Associates Award: Oswaldo Rivera-Ortiz of Stantec, Cyrus P. Dahmubed of Utile, Katie Cherrier of Integrus Architecture, Ernest Banks of studioMAIN, and Anastasia Calhoun of Texas Architect magazine. You can visit the AIA’s website to learn more about each of this year's Young Architects and Associates Award winners.

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) has appointed Professor Winka Dubbeldam as its next Director and CEO. The Dutch architect, educator, and innovator will assume the role on September 1st, 2025. “SCI-Arc has long been a beacon for radical experimentation, and I am honored to join a community that continuously redefines what architecture can be,” Dubbeldam said about the appointment. “I look forward to building on the school’s legacy of innovation and fostering new opportunities for students and faculty to engage with the future of design.” Dubbeldam brings over 30 years of experience in architectural practice and education. She is currently a Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, where she chaired the Department of Architecture from 2013 to 2023. Archinect spoke with Dubbeldam in 2020 during her time at Weitzman as part of our Deans List series. Winka Dubbeldam on architectural education for the futur...

This spring and summer at the Neutra VDL House in Los Angeles, multidisciplinary artist Maayan Elyakim is presenting Game of Goose, a site-specific exhibition dotted with works inspired by the Austrian-born Immigré who worked at midcentury to create some of the most spatially dynamic residences in the Modernist architecture movement.

In Austin’s Cesar Chavez neighborhood, A Parallel Architecture has completed the adaptive reuse of a long-abandoned auto parts warehouse. A recent winner at the Texas Design Award, the warehouse was converted into a creative studio space, now the firm’s own office, that seeks to emphasize community engagement, cultural preservation, and sustainable design practices. Image credit: Chase Daniel Image credit: Chase Daniel Rather than opting for demolition, the firm pursued a regenerative strategy, preserving and transforming the original rectangular concrete-block structure. A key feature of the project was extensive collaboration with the surrounding community, including local residents and leaders, particularly regarding the restoration of the site’s well-known Cesar Chavez mural. Local Hispanic-American artists were invited to lead the mural’s renewal, reinforcing the project’s connection to the neighborhood’s cultural heritage. Image credit: Chase Daniel Image credit: Chase Daniel Sust...

Following our previous visit to Joseph Vance Architects, we are keeping our Meet Your Next Employer series in New York City this week to explore the work of di Domenico + Partners. Established in 1981, and led by John di Domenico and Andrew Berger, the firm has built a portfolio spanning architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Together, the team “approach design as a learning process through the application of sustainable design, innovative technology, and an exploration of materials applied with an attention to craftsmanship,” the studio notes about its ethos. Over on Archinect Jobs, the firm is currently hiring for a Marketing Manager to join their New York team. For candidates interested in applying for a position or anybody interested in learning more about the firm’s output, we have rounded up four public transit projects by di Domenico + Partners that exemplify the firm’s ethos. METRO Silver Line Expansion. Image credit: Joseph Romeo Photography METRO Silver Lin...

Inspiration and Tools for Architects

The Netherlands has long been at the architectural vanguard, and these Dutch firms are leading the globe through the 21st century.

The post 30 Best Architecture and Design Firms in Netherlands appeared first on Journal.

From functionalism and neoplasticism to structuralism and deconstructivism to the “international” character of the contemporary global context, designers from the Netherlands have been realizing daringly dynamic constructions for over a century. The culture of experimentation that fuses bold aesthetic detail with even bolder engineering feats comes as no surprise in a country that has, for centuries, relied on engineering to make their land liveable by draining water and relying on polders. Rotterdam particularly stands out as a hotbed for experimentation. From the moment visitors arrive through its sleek train station, the city acts as a museum for cutting-edge contemporary design: from Huis Sonneveld and Kubuswoningen to the Erasmusbrug and Markthal and the recently completed Boijmans Depot. Contemporary architectural discourse could not be cited without referencing the plethora of Dutch thinkers. Think of Rem Koolhaas, Wiel Arets, Jacob Van Rijs. These innovative and intelligent spirits have founded some of the biggest global firms, proving time and again that Dutch centrality in global design discourse is shatterproof. With so many architecture firms to choose from, it’s challenging for clients to identify the industry leaders that will be an ideal fit for their project needs. Fortunately, Architizer is able to provide guidance on the top design firms in Netherlands based on more than a decade of data and industry knowledge. How are these architecture firms ranked? The following ranking has been created according to key statistics that demonstrate each firm’s level of architectural excellence. The following metrics have been accumulated to establish each architecture firm’s ranking, in order of priority: The number of A+Awards won (2013 to 2025) The number of A+Awards finalists (2013 to 2025) The number of projects selected as “Project of the Day” (2009 to 2025) The number of projects selected as “Featured Project” (2009 to 2025) The number of projects uploaded to Architizer (2009 to 2025) Each of these metrics is explained in more detail at the foot of this article. This ranking list will be updated annually, taking into account new achievements of Netherlands architecture firms throughout the year. Without further ado, here are the 30 best architecture firms in Netherlands: 30. Joris Verhoeven Architecture © Joris Verhoeven Architecture “Graceful Simplicity” Building is a wonderful adventure! It is an excellent opportunity to arrange your living environment entirely to your own taste. Architect Joris Verhoeven helps you shape this adventure; translating your wishes into a functionally timeless design. When you assume the art of omission, the result is pure architecture with a subdued exuberance; a bright design with a timeless, graceful simplicity. Fair material use and minimalist detailing reinforce this. Some of Joris Verhoeven Architecture’s most prominent projects include: RielEstate, Riel, Netherlands Villa Sundrops, Udenhout, Netherlands A Brickwork Orange, Waalre, Netherlands Four Seasons House, Tilburg, Netherlands Silky black house, Berkel-Enschot, Netherlands The following statistics helped Joris Verhoeven Architecture achieve 30th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 6 Total Projects 11 29. Office Winhov © Office Winhov “For the love of craftsmanship.” We believe that architecture is more than just realizing buildings. It is a collective and constantly evolving field. Our voice is heard through architectural education and research, and by participating in committees, juries, and editorial boards. We are also the initiators of the platform ‘Local Heroes’ and the architecture lecture series ‘Design-by-thinking-of’. In this way, we connect locally and internationally with the breadth of the profession and our peers. Office Winhov comprises a team of 25. We work with clients and partners on new construction and the reuse of existing buildings and listed heritage. Our craftsmanship lies in the combination of the artistic, the technical and the professional, in which personal engagement and the ongoing quest for quality and sustainability are paramount. Some of Office Winhov’s most prominent projects include: house plot 75, Amsterdam, The Netherlands W Hotel Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands Alpine Loft, Switzerland SUD Residential building Kop Zuidas, Amsterdam, Netherlands Leiden’s City Hall, Leiden, Netherlands The following statistics helped Office Winhov achieve 29th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 6 Total Projects 17 28. cepezed © cepezed cepezed is a medium sized, award-winning spatial design specialist. Assignments address the challenges of town-planning, industry, interiors and particularly architecture. cepezed represents knowledge, skill and a stimulating no-nonsense mentality. Combining conceptual skills, contemporary solutions for contemporary problems and ingenious creativity, results are disarmingly sober and inimitably intelligible. Esthetics and functionality are logically linked. At cepezed, projects are designed as monuments of function for people, not monuments of thanks to an architect. cepezed is skilled at managing the complexity behind simplicity. It uses an integral design method with multiple material use in which various aspects such as spatial design, construction and installation techniques are forged into an indivisible whole. Some of cepezed’s most prominent projects include: Temporary Courthouse Amsterdam , Amsterdam, Netherlands International student house, Delft, Netherlands State Office De Knoop, Utrecht, Netherlands Graafschap college, Doetinchem, Netherlands Town hall Woerden, Woerden, Netherlands The following statistics helped cepezed achieve 28th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 6 Total Projects 18 27. Studio RAP © Studio RAP Studio RAP is an architectural design company where we combine the power of computational design with innovative digital fabrication methods. Our team consists of architects, designers, roboticists, programmers and researchers. Together we explore innovative technology and try to improve the way we design, produce, manage and build architecture. We are based in Rotterdam where we surround ourselves with robots in an industrial atmosphere where we can discover and realize challenging architecture. In close collaboration with our client we design from vision to detail. With diagrams, visuals and prototypes we make the design process clear and insightful. With experience in design, fabrication and contracting we deliver unique buildings within time and budget. Some of Studio RAP’s most prominent projects include: New Delft Blue, Delft, Netherlands The Float, Leiden, Netherlands Ceramic House, Amsterdam, Netherlands Theater Zuidplein, Rotterdam, Netherlands The following statistics helped Studio RAP achieve 27th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Finalist 1 Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 4 26. Civic Architects © Civic Architects CIVIC is an office for public architecture. We design libraries, bridges, cultural buildings, public fora, squares, educational buildings, housing, sculptures and stations. We love complex projects that enable us to do what we do best: CIVIC designs generous, powerful and atmospherically architecture that stands the test of time. Some of Civic Architects’ most prominent projects include: Augmented Brickwork Public Railway Passage Tilburg, Tilburg, Netherlands LocHal Library Architecture by Civic, Tilburg, Netherlands Flemish-Dutch pavilion, Frankfurt, Germany Piushaven Harbour Pavilion Tilburg, Tilburg, Netherlands LocHal Library Interior Design by Mecanoo, Tilburg, Netherlands The following statistics helped Civic Architects achieve 26th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Finalist 2 Featured Projects 6 Total Projects 8 25. Superimpose Architecture © Superimpose Architecture Superimpose: ‘to place one thing over another as an addition, in such a way that all layers are still evident.’ Superimpose is not only our studio name, it is also our design approach and thinking methodology. We design and develop the projects based on valid contextual elements and overlay them with architectural elements, promoting and providing a holistic design approach in all stages is the key to our studio’s success. Our design scope covers from architecture to master plan projects, high end furniture design, interior and installation design. We also highly value local initiatives such as our Micr-O project in Hangzhou. We strive to enrich the context by giving back a design that adds value, aesthetic and identity to the place. Some of Superimpose Architecture’s most prominent projects include: CO2, Beijing, China Micr-O Hangzhou, Hangzhou, China Sky Cellar Beijing, Beijing, China Well Living Lab, Beijing, China Y-Loft City, Changzhi, China The following statistics helped Superimpose Architecture achieve 25th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Finalist 4 Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 8 24. ZJA I Architects & Engineers © ZJA I Architects & Engineers ZJA is an international architectural studio, headquartered in Amsterdam. Born as a design studio for architecture and product development, ZJA has developed into a professional architectural studio specializing in sports and leisure, infrastructure and public transport. ZJA designs with the objective to improve the quality of the environment both from an ecological and a human perspective. We are optimistic about the opportunities to do so, knowing what it takes to learn to see and discover the things that make that possible: working together and continually researching new methods and materials. The better the design, the more it enriches society, and the more sophisticated and careful it intertwines new functions with the environment. Some of ZJA I Architects & Engineers’ most prominent projects include: Albert Cuyp underwater parking garage, Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands Zuidasdok – Amsterdam South station, Amsterdam, Netherlands Elevated Lightrail System, South Korea, South Korea Thialf ice arena, Heerenveen, Heerenveen, Netherlands Sports centre Sportoase Groot Schijn, Deurne Belgium, Antwerp, Belgium The following statistics helped ZJA I Architects & Engineers achieve 24th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Winner 1 A+Awards Finalist 3 Featured Projects 3 Total Projects 60 23. Kraaijvanger Architects © Ronald Tilleman Photography Creating places to explore. Kraaijvanger strives to create healthy environments for people to work, learn, and enjoy themselves in, such as public spaces, public buildings, and urban districts, where unique encounters occur, where memories are made, and where important decisions are taken. We take our inspiration from socially relevant themes. And we look ahead as building is a slow process in a rapidly changing world. Some of Kraaijvanger Architects’ most prominent projects include: City Hall Venlo, Venlo, Netherlands Early Childhood Center, Wassenaar, Wassenaar, Netherlands City Hall Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands Brede School Snijdelwijk, Boskoop, Netherlands The following statistics helped Kraaijvanger Architects achieve 23rd place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Winner 2 Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 14 22. NEXT architects © NEXT architects NEXT architects is an architecture practice that covers the full spectrum of the architectural field. Since its earliest projects, ‘Holland – Layer by Layer’ and ‘The Image of Metropolis’, NEXT has explored the boundaries of its own discipline, and searched for areas that overlap with other disciplines. This exploratory attitude has resulted in a highly diverse portfolio that ranges from design products to urban plans. Some of NEXT architects’ most prominent projects include: Lianjiang Butterfly Bay, Lianjiang, Fuzhou, China Bloemendaal Town Hall, Bloemendaal, Netherlands Fuzhou Shouxi Building, Fuzhou, China Lucky Knot, Changsha, China House M&M, Amsterdam, Netherlands The following statistics helped NEXT architects achieve 22nd place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 6 Total Projects 15 21. studio AAAN © studio AAAN studio AAAN is a Rotterdam-based architecture firm, led by Hilbrand Wanders, Luuk Stoltenborg and Rik de Ruiter. With a strong focus on structure, simplicity, material, and detail the studio realizes modern architecture which can be read in a classical manner. AAAN works at various scales in the practices of architecture, urban design, and design. Some of studio AAAN’s most prominent projects include: House Zevenhuizen, Anjerlaan, Zevenhuizen, Netherlands Terphouse Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands NN Kralingen, Rotterdam, Netherlands Hospice de Liefde, Rotterdam, Netherlands Wantijhof Dordrecht, Dordrecht, Netherlands The following statistics helped studio AAAN achieve 21st place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 5 Total Projects 5 20. SeARCH © SeARCH SeARCH stands for Urbanism & Architecture (Stedenbouw en ARCHitectuur). As our name suggests, we see buildings and their surrounding environment as inseparable elements of design. SeARCH was founded in 2002 by Bjarne Mastenbroek, and is a leading architecture and urban design bureau based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with an international multi-disciplinary staff working on projects around the world. Our practice is driven by a fascination with the intimate and reciprocal relationship between architecture and site. Our projects are conceived as landscapes — the most essential and generous element. Without boundaries, landscapes are endless and open — they connect architecture with its surroundings, and interior with exterior. Through a careful consideration of the surrounding environment, SeARCH introduces a high degree of sustainability and circularity into our projects. Some of SeARCH’s most prominent projects include: The Iceberg, Aarhus, Denmark Juf Nienke, Amsterdam, Netherlands Villa Vals, Vals, Switzerland Skewed Stolp, Netherlands Khalifeyah Library, Muharraq, Bahrain The following statistics helped SeARCH achieve 20th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Winner 2 Featured Projects 5 Total Projects 12 19. Felixx Landscape Architects & Planners © Orange Architects Felixx Landscape Architects and Planners is a Rotterdam-based office for proactive landscape architecture, founded in 2014. Felixx believes a better world requires a better organization of our environment. We specialize in addressing urgent global challenges with local embedded design solutions. Our work has a broad international scope and our projects range from spatial research, landscape transformation strategies and developing masterplans, to public space and product design. The office is named after our self-invented modest hero Felixx, who travels the world looking for opportunities to realize happy environments. Some of Felixx Landscape Architects & Planners’ most prominent projects include: Jonas, IJburg, Amsterdam, Netherlands Dapeng Coastline, Shenzhen, China Floating Gardens, Amsterdam, Netherlands Rijnvliet Edible Neighborhood, Utrecht, Netherlands Towards a healthy city by foot The following statistics helped Felixx Landscape Architects & Planners achieve 19th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Winner 3 A+Awards Finalist 2 Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 16 18. Shift A+U © Shift A+U Shift is a Rotterdam based design office that focuses on the fields of architecture, urbanism and spatial planning. The office combines a broad engagement in space production with precise and project-specific design interventions.In the past few years the office and its partners have received several awards and nominations, including Prix de Rome, Archiprix International, Archiprix NL and Europan. Some of Shift A+U’s most prominent projects include: Faculty Club, Tilburg, Netherlands Museumplein Limburg, Kerkrade, Netherlands Vertical Loft, Rotterdam, The Netherlands CMY Pavilion, Groningen, Netherlands Dentist with a view, Best, Netherlands The following statistics helped Shift A+U achieve 18th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 6 Total Projects 8 17. Barcode Architects © Ossip van Duivenbode Barcode Architects is an international office for architecture, urbanism and contemporary design. The office is led by Dirk Peters, along with a creative team of 70 professionals including architects, urban designers, and technologists. We have building experience in both the Netherlands and abroad. Our work ranges from urban masterplans to mixed-use public buildings, from high-end residential and office towers to exclusive villas. Our projects are driven by the ambition to realize buildings that revitalize and transform their surroundings, that offer a moving experience and that awaken an aesthetic awareness, and that users can identify with. The resulting designs are highly site-specific, with an unexpected twist. In this fresh and contemporary approach lies the novelty, the “above and beyond”, the added value that a projects gives to its clients, users, and surroundings. Each project is unique and the result of extensive concept driven-experimentation of function and form. Some of Barcode Architects’ most prominent projects include: The Muse & CasaNova, Rotterdam, Netherlands Bibliothèque Alexis de Tocqueville, Normandy, France Villa X, NB, Netherlands Hyde Park, Hoofddorp, Netherlands Bijlmer Bajes, Amsterdam, Netherlands The following statistics helped Barcode Architects achieve 17th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 7 Total Projects 18 16. Engel Architecten © Engel Architecten Whether it’s the design of a modern home, or the complete remodeling of an interior; Engel Architecten enjoys taking on the challenge. Engel Architecten is a proven, reliable partner with its own unique style and extensive knowledge and experience. From initial sketch to realization, Engel Architecten takes care of the entire process. Some of Engel Architecten’s most prominent projects include: Eclectic Diamond House, Amsterdam, Netherlands Villa Kerckebosch, Zeist, Netherlands Villa Nieuw Oosteinde, Aalsmeer, Netherlands Hidden among the greenery, NH, Netherlands Residence Hoge Dennen, Zeist, Netherlands The following statistics helped Engel Architecten achieve 16th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 7 Total Projects 10 15. MoederscheimMoonen Architects © MoederscheimMoonen Architects We are a team of strategic creatives who want to make the world a better place. For us, the big idea plays an important role in how we look at the world, our team and our collaborations. We think carefully, make informed decisions and make the right connections. We create calm and overview in complex situations. We do what is needed at the right times while always staying focused on the bigger picture. Some of MoederscheimMoonen Architects’ most prominent projects include: ZOHO Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands Community center ‘Het Anker’, Zwolle, Netherlands Clubhouse VV Capelle, Capelle aan den IJssel, Netherlands Sports-Pavilion ‘Zestienhoven’, Rotterdam House of Eemnes, Eemnes, Netherlands The following statistics helped MoederscheimMoonen Architects achieve 15th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Finalist 1 Featured Projects 7 Total Projects 24 14. GROUP A © GROUP A We are GROUP A, a Dutch studio for architecture, interior and urban design founded in 1996. Led by the founders Maarten van Bremen, Folkert van Hagen and Adam Visser we form a close team of 31 architects and four staff members. Together we have won several awards, including Frame Award, Daylight Award and Rotterdam Architecture Award. In the past twenty-five years we have realized a wide range of projects. From offices to housing and from mobility assignments to transformations. In our work, the disciplines urban planning, architecture and interior design are inextricably linked. This way we create sustainable environments where people live, work and reside comfortably. As a full service agency, we are responsible for the entire process, from design to completion. Some of GROUP A’s most prominent projects include: Central Park , Utrecht, Netherlands Workshop Steigereiland Blok 1 Presikhaaf, Zoomstraat, Arnhem, Netherlands Cultural Educational Centre ‘Het Lichtruim’, De Bilt, Netherlands Office Building De Schelde, Vlissingen, Netherlands The following statistics helped GROUP A achieve 14th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Finalist 1 Featured Projects 8 Total Projects 21 13. Mei architects and planners © Mei architects and planners Mei architects and planners realizes leading projects in the Netherlands and abroad. Our work is founded on respect for the environment: for the history of the location, the current context and future living environment. Based on our expertise in the field of adaptive re-use of architectural heritage, new build projects and urban development strategies, we work on designs that put the user first. Our distinct designs tell their own story, which increases the involvement with the building and the connection between its users. With creativity, expertise and courage, we introduce innovative technical applications and user concepts that contribute to social and ecological sustainability. Some of Mei architects and planners’ most prominent projects include: SAWA, Rotterdam, Netherlands Gasometer, Münster, Germany residential tower De Verkenner, Kanaleneiland, Netherlands Schiecentrale 4B, Rotterdam, Netherlands The Four Worlds The following statistics helped Mei architects and planners achieve 13th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Winner 1 A+Awards Finalist 2 Featured Projects 6 Total Projects 19 12. concrete © concrete concrete develops concepts. we develop them in architecture, interior design, urban development and brand development. concrete loves provoking, confusing, philosophizing, scale models, haute cuisine, burgers, and (most of all) shattering dogmas. concrete provides results. no grand theories or abstract ideas. just things that work. concrete unites people. we work with a team of 50 multi-disciplinary creatives as architects, interior designers and visual marketeers to help businesses and institutions. concrete wants the best answers, not the easiest solutions. concrete likes to let the work do the talking. Some of concrete’s most prominent projects include: Jersey City Urby, Jersey City, New Jersey citizenM Bowery, New York City, New York KLM crown lounge, Schiphol, Netherlands Restaurant 212, Amsterdam, Netherlands Hotel Norge, Bergen, Norway The following statistics helped concrete achieve 12th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Winner 2 A+Awards Finalist 2 Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 24 11. Neutelings Riedijk Architects © Neutelings Riedijk Architects Neutelings Riedijk Architects was established in Rotterdam in 1987. We offer a strong commitment to design excellence: realizing high quality architecture through the development of powerful and innovative concepts into clear built form. Over the last thirty years Neutelings Riedijk Architects has established itself as a leading international practice, specializing in the design of complex projects for public, commercial and cultural buildings. The office has great experience in balancing the complex challenges of these projects to meet the ambitions of our client. For our international projects our design force is complemented by technical force through the association with local partners that specialize in architectural engineering, cost calculation and site supervision. Some of Neutelings Riedijk Architects’ most prominent projects include: Cultural Centre Eemhuis, Amersfoort, Netherlands The Museum Aan de Stroom (MAS), Antwerp, Belgium Gare Maritime, Brussels, Belgium Le Cinq Cultural Centre Rozet, Arnhem, Netherlands The following statistics helped Neutelings Riedijk Architects achieve 11th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 7 Total Projects 12 10. Bloot Architecture © Bloot Architecture BLOOT is a concept driven architectural studio located in The Hague, The Netherlands. Founded in October 2010 by Tjeerd Bloothoofd. With much pleasure and great dedication we are constantly searching through design for the concept and shape that unites the function, context, actuality and the wishes of the client in an integral sustainable design that appeals to the development of self-awareness and the liberty of choice in life. Some of Bloot Architecture’s most prominent projects include: East West House, The Hague, Netherlands Extension Villa Heuvelrug, Maarn, Netherlands Garden Studio, Voorburg, Netherlands Transformation Forest House, Hengelo, Netherlands Pavilion The Hague Beach Stadium, Den Haag, Netherlands The following statistics helped Bloot Architecture achieve 10th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 8 Total Projects 11 9. Borren Staalenhoef Architects © Borren Staalenhoef Architects Jacob Borren and André Staalenhoef are modern masters of architecture. Passionate and persevering. Borren Staalenhoef are determined to tackle every aspect of the spatial task; to oversee a large degree of complexity and to reduce it to clear, layered structures. Their ultimate objective is the act of building: the creation of a tangible object that speaks through the details. Their solutions are the result of a long series of consistent decisions and elaborations: diagrams and matrixes, sketches and artist’s impressions, ground plans and sections, construction models and working drawings. It is in this method of working that the mastery and strength of this architecture lies. Some of Borren Staalenhoef Architects’ most prominent projects include: woonhuis Marssum, Marssum, Netherlands Het Bushok, Kortenhoef, The Netherlands Villa Juliana, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands Archem Estate, Archem, Netherlands House Boogert, Epe, Netherlands The following statistics helped Borren Staalenhoef Architects achieve 9th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 9 Total Projects 14 8. LEVS architecten © LEVS architecten LEVS architecten works from the notion that architecture and urban planning have quite a significant impact on our surroundings, on people and society as a whole, as well as the environment. We incorporate this responsibility when detailing our assignments and in our approach to running our enterprise. We welcome the challenge of complex projects in which our aim lies in finding surprising solutions which deliver a result beyond prior expectations. Our goal is to design buildings and areas where residents will eventually articulate a passion about the places they work, live and inhabit; spaces which express an optimal interweaving of functionality, aesthetics and sustainability. LEVS architecten was established in 1989 as Loof & van Stigt Architecten. Some of LEVS architecten’s most prominent projects include: Primary School Tanouan Ibi, Mali Doggerij, Den Helder, The Netherlands Dogger’s Corner, Den Helder, Netherlands Kaleidoscope, Nieuwkoop, The Netherlands De Bouwmeester, Utrecht, Netherlands The following statistics helped LEVS architecten achieve 8th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Finalist 2 Featured Projects 8 Total Projects 21 7. Studioninedots © Studioninedots Studioninedots is an Amsterdam-based practice for architecture and urban design. We create spaces that spark a sense of wonder. Whether we make a house, a public building or an urban concept, every design has its unexpected quality. Because we see spaces that stir a feeling as an essential human need. Spaces that are thoughtfully designed, yet where something can emerge that you couldn’t predict upfront. Established as a collective in 2011, Studioninedots consists of 25 people today. The practice is led by founders Albert Herder, Vincent van der Klei and Metin van Zijl, and associates Ike Gronheid, Jurjen van der Horst, Stijn de Jongh and Wouter Hermanns. To us, disruption is the counterpart of innovation. Some of Studioninedots’ most prominent projects include: Lieven de Key HQ, Amsterdam, Netherlands Highnote, Almere, Netherlands De Burgemeester, Hoofddorp, The Netherlands The TrueTalker, Amsterdam, Netherlands Black Swan, Amsterdam, Netherlands The following statistics helped Studioninedots achieve 7th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 11 Total Projects 25 6. Wiel Arets Architects © Wiel Arets Architects Wiel Arets Architects (WAA) is a globally active architecture and design firm, whose work extends to education and publishing, with studios located in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. Comprised of an international team of architects, designers, thinkers, and administrators, the firm is currently involved in large number of projects throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. Its architecture and design emerges from research and a balance of hybrid-programming solutions, which adapt to and anticipate future contextual change. The output of WAA is acclaimed for both its craftsmanship and tactility. Some of Wiel Arets Architects’s most prominent projects include: Jellyfish House, Marbella, Spain The Hoge Heren, Rotterdam, Netherlands Four Towers Osdorp, Amsterdam, Netherlands V’ Tower, Eindhoven, Netherlands University Library Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands The following statistics helped Wiel Arets Architects achieve 6th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 14 Total Projects 22 5. atelier PRO architekten © atelier PRO architekten We are an architectural firm founded in 1976. Since then, we have successfully completed over a thousand projects. Our work is characterized by surprising designs that create connections: designs that allow for interaction, that evolve, and that adapt to their use, all developed with a focus on sustainability. We strive to leave a better world for future generations. Architecture is teamwork. With 40 dedicated professionals, we have all the knowledge and skills in-house, from chair to city and from sketch to building. We are resourceful, loyal and straightforward. We enjoy collaborating and engaging in meaningful conversations, using our collective strength to design a better living environment. Some of atelier PRO architekten’s most prominent projects include: Graafschap college, Doetinchem, Netherlands ROC Graafschap College, Doetinchem, Netherlands Multifunctional community school Krimpen aan de Lek, Krimpen aan de Lek, Netherlands School, Child and Community Centre O3, The Hague, Netherlands Lumion, Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands The following statistics helped atelier PRO architekten achieve 5th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: Featured Projects 16 Total Projects 100 4. UNStudio © Ronald Tilleman Photography UNStudio is an international architectural practice, situated in Amsterdam since 1988, with extensive experience in the fields of urbanism, infrastructure, public, private and utility buildings on different scale levels. At the basis of UNStudio are a number of long-term goals, which are intended to define and guide the quality of our performance in the architectural field. We strive to make a significant contribution to the discipline of architecture, to continue to develop our qualities with respect to design, technology, knowledge and management and to be a specialist in public network projects. We see as mutually sustaining the environment, market demands and client wishes that enable our work, and we aim for results in which our goals and our client’s goals overlap. Some of UNStudio’s most prominent projects include: Echo, TU Delft, Delft, Netherlands Canaletto, London, United Kingdom P.C. Hooftstraat 138, Amsterdam, Netherlands Arnhem Central, Arnhem, Netherlands Shanghai jiuguang center, Shanghai, China The following statistics helped UNStudio achieve 4th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Winner 4 A+Awards Finalist 1 Featured Projects 18 Total Projects 33 3. OMA © Bloomimages, Courtesy of OMA OMA is a leading international partnership practicing architecture, urbanism and cultural analysis. OMA’s buildings and masterplans around the world insist on intelligent forms while inventing new possibilities for content and everyday use. AMO, a research and design studio, works in areas beyond architecture that today have an increasing influence on architecture itself: media, politics, renewable energy, technology, publishing, fashion. Some of OMA’s most prominent projects include: Milstein Hall, Ithaca, New York 11th Street Bridge Park, Washington, DC Rebuild by Design Faena District, Miami, Florida MPavilion 2017, Melbourne, Australia The following statistics helped OMA achieve 3rd place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Winner 4 A+Awards Finalist 4 Featured Projects 34 Total Projects 71 2. MVRDV © MVRDV MVRDV is based in Rotterdam and works in the fields of architecture, urbanism and city planning. Founders are Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. Recent projects include an urban masterplan in Oslo (Norway), Gwang Gyo (Korea), Greater Paris (France), Tianjin and Chengdu (China) and an eco-city in Logroño (Spain). Examples of projects currently in progress are a market hall and a public library in Rotterdam (Netherlands), a headquarter office in Oslo (Norway) and several housing projects in the Netherlands, Spain, and France. Well-known projects include the Netherlands Pavilion for the Expo 2000 in Hanover and the Make-It Right Housing in New Orleans.The work of MVRDV is published and exhibited worldwide and received many international awards. Some of MVRDV’s most prominent projects include: Tianjin Binhai Library, Tianjin, China Valley, Amsterdam, Netherlands Haus 1 – Atelier Gardens, Berlin, Germany Tainan Spring, Tainan, Taiwan Featured image: Depot Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands The following statistics helped MVRDV achieve 2nd place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Winner 10 A+Awards Finalist 3 Featured Projects 45 Total Projects 77 1. Mecanoo © John Bartelstone Photography Mecanoo, officially founded in Delft in 1984, is made up of a highly multidisciplinary staff of creative professionals from 25 countries. The team includes architects, interior designers, urban planners, landscape architects as well as architectural technicians and support staff. Mecanoo is led by Francine Houben (Creative Director & Founding Partner), Floris Overheul (Financial Director), Dick van Gameren (Design & Research Partner), and Partners/Architects Nuno Fontarra, Rick Splinter and Arne Lijbers. Mecanoo has extensive experience designing and realizing exceptional buildings which serve client ambitions while creating vibrant end-user spaces. Some of Mecanoo’s most prominent projects include: National Kaohsiung Centre for the Arts (Wei-Wu-Ying), Kaohsiung, Taiwan HUBB – Learning Environments, Eindhoven, Netherlands Delft City Hall and Train Station, Delft, Netherlands Tainan Public Library, Tainan City, Taiwan Palace of Justice, Córdoba, Spain The following statistics helped Mecanoo achieve 1st place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Netherlands: A+Awards Winner 12 A+Awards Finalist 10 Featured Projects 61 Total Projects 116 Why Should I Trust Architizer’s Ranking? With more than 30,000 architecture firms and over 130,000 projects within its database, Architizer is proud to host the world’s largest online community of architects and building product manufacturers. Its celebrated A+Awards program is also the largest celebration of architecture and building products, with more than 400 jurors and hundreds of thousands of public votes helping to recognize the world’s best architecture each year. Architizer also powers firm directories for a number of AIA (American Institute of Architects) Chapters nationwide, including the official directory of architecture firms for AIA New York. An example of a project page on Architizer with Project Award Badges highlighted A Guide to Project Awards The blue “”+”” badge denotes that a project has won a prestigious A+Award as described above. Hovering over the badge reveals details of the award, including award category, year, and whether the project won the jury or popular choice award. The orange Project of the Day and yellow Featured Project badges are awarded by Architizer’s Editorial team, and are selected based on a number of factors. The following factors increase a project’s likelihood of being featured or awarded Project of the Day status: Project completed within the last 3 years A well written, concise project description of at least 3 paragraphs Architectural design with a high level of both functional and aesthetic value High quality, in focus photographs At least 8 photographs of both the interior and exterior of the building Inclusion of architectural drawings and renderings Inclusion of construction photographs There are 7 Projects of the Day each week and a further 31 Featured Projects. Each Project of the Day is published on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Stories, while each Featured Project is published on Facebook. Each Project of the Day also features in Architizer’s Weekly Projects Newsletter and shared with 170,000 subscribers. We’re constantly look for the world’s best architects to join our community. If you would like to understand more about this ranking list and learn how your firm can achieve a presence on it, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at editorial@architizer.com. The post 30 Best Architecture and Design Firms in Netherlands appeared first on Journal.

From gridlock to greenways, explore how city design is shifting from car-centric planning to people-powered space-making.

The post Feet First: 6 Pedestrian-First Projects Reclaiming the Right-of-Way appeared first on Journal.

Got a project that’s too wild for this world? Submit your conceptual works, images and ideas for global recognition and print publication in the 2025 Vision Awards, The Early Entry period is underway — start your entry today. Cars have been a thorn in architects’ and urban master planners’ sides for years. Apart from their many environmental disadvantages, these vehicles also require a tremendous amount of space and planning to operate efficiently. And yet, ever since cars were invented, cities have prioritized individual transportation and convenience over pedestrian-friendly setups. Fortunately, following the Covid-19 pandemic, a quiet revolution is gradually taking place, where cities turn to people-centric design, thus reshaping urban living. These six transformative initiatives reclaim space and improve the quality of life — oftentimes within vast urban metropoles. Taken together, these urban transformations illustrate that pedestrian-first urbanism is no longer a utopian idea, but rather a tangible, growing movement. By reclaiming car-dominated space, repurposing parking lots and shaded walkways, these designs prove that even the busiest urban cores can become livable, walkable, and inspiring places. The Urban Gallery at Hyperlane By ASPECT Studios, Chengdu, China The Hyperlane is a 1.5 mile (2.4 kilometer) multi-level linear sky park situated within Chengdu’s music and arts university district. The project acts as a replacement for a disused carpark and is comprised of an urban promenade, a “water carpet” landscape and a performance gallery. Specifically, the “water carpet” is made of shallow water ponds, playful urban seating, vegetation and impressive lighting displays that shape a performative urban “walk” along the district. Future additions to the project will be a performance gallery and a social terrace. Erie Street Plaza By Stoss Landscape Urbanism, Milwaukee, Wisconsin The project is located in the Historic Third Ward district of Milwaukee and is the final link in a series of public space activators along the riverwalk. The site used to be a large industrial parking lot, which after the project’s completion became a part of a larger three-mile pedestrian and bicycle street that connects the district with the city center. Programmatically, the plaza is conceived as a civic plane that has the potential to host art festivals, communal gatherings, concerts, farmer’s markets etc. This open-ended design encourages social interaction. Ample vegetation, discrete paving materials and carefully curated benches made of fiberglass populate the field. Urban design on both sides of Zhongxing Road in Shaoxing Ancient City By Tongji Architectural Design (Group), Shaoxing, China The ancient city of Shaoxing is comprised of many cultural monuments and is linked through the Zhongxing Road to the rest of the city. However, prior to the area’s regeneration , the central road-axis faced many functional challenges such as traffic congestion and a general disassociation within the ancient cityscape. The project’s main goal was to weaken ground traffic by separating the arrival and departure points in the area and creating a high-quality walking space. Functions such as the waterfront market, the port head and an old stage were reintroduced, integrating both ancient and modern activities to the site. Yibin Yangtze River Melody Commercial Street By Sichuan Provincial Architectural Design and Research Institute, Yibin, China The project is located in Xuzhou District at the confluence of three rivers. The site is a large commercial land that occupies approximately 1.3 acres (0.52 hectares) and is adjacent to both a business and residential area. The project’s aim is to build an ecological riverside leisure and fashion commercial street to meet the programmatic needs of the region as well as eliminate high-traffic roads and create a more people friendly experience. Pedestrians and vehicles are separated by integrating a road canopy greenway within the site and building an additional aerial corridor. Current elements found on site such as retaining walls and service rooms are preserved and turned into ramps and seating areas, becoming links in-between boardwalks and outdoor staircases. Finally, functional spaces such as a sports field and a playground are introduced. One Green Mile – Public Space and Streetscape Design By StudioPOD, Mumbai, India Jury Winner, Sustainable Transportation Project, 11th Annual A+Awards This project description begins with the following phrase: ‘in cities like Mumbai, finding synergies between mobility, infrastructure and open spaces is required to create livable urban environments.’ Consequently, the intent behind the One Green Mile was to develop a “complete street” within the city’s hectic financial hub that is both a vibrant public space and an efficient circulation space for city vehicles. The masterplan was comprised of three main strategies: (i) streamlining traffic movement and street geometry, (ii) efficiently allocate space for all users and (iii) develop the underused space below the flyover. Following a detailed traffic survey, the necessary modifications took place were footpaths and cycle routes were introduced, while the excess open space was planted with local tree species and populated with custom street furniture. Under-utilized pocket spaces under the flyover were turned into small plazas, play areas and an amphitheater. Shenzhen Yulong District Urban Design Competition By Aedas, Shenzhen, China The proposal placed a strong emphasis on the site’s ecological restoration, development and construction, suggesting a localized solution that conserves the utilizes different large spaces such as equipment rooms and parking spaces. A central green area connects the different spaces that are adjacent to the main water system, ensuring that water prevention systems are in effect. Smart and interactive infrastructure such as technology hubs, public spaces and social communities, Finally, both short-term and long-term traffic guidance systems and a new pedestrian bridge aim to control the disruptions caused by the urban expressway, while the scheme reconnects this urban gateway with the rest of the city. Got a project that’s too wild for this world? Submit your conceptual works, images and ideas for global recognition and print publication in the 2025 Vision Awards, The Early Entry period is underway — start your entry today. Featured Image: Yibin Yangtze River Melody Commercial Street by Sichuan Provincial Architectural Design and Research Institute, Yibin, China The post Feet First: 6 Pedestrian-First Projects Reclaiming the Right-of-Way appeared first on Journal.

Literal and figurative learning landscapes, a new generation of library design looks outside for inspiration.

The post The New Library Typology: Open, Adaptive and Rooted in Place appeared first on Journal.

Architizer’s Vision Awards are back! The global awards program honors the world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery. Start your entry today, and take advantage of the Early Entry prices! In many parts of the world, libraries are being reimagined as more than quiet spaces for reading. Lately, they are becoming active parts of the community and everyday life. Modern library design now focuses on creating community spaces that connect people not only with knowledge but also with nature and one another. Instead of being closed off, many of these libraries now include features that let the outside in. Architects use large windows, open courtyards, rooftop gardens and outdoor patios to bring in natural light, fresh air and views of the surrounding landscape. The buildings are often shaped by local conditions, like nearby mountains, forests, or even the patterns of wind and sunlight. These choices help create calm and beautiful spaces that feel part of the land around them. At the same time, these libraries are designed to support community life. They include flexible areas that can be used for different activities, such as group meetings, children’s programs, workshops, or just a quiet place to relax. Some even have cafes, open reading gardens or public squares. So, instead of only focusing on storing books, these spaces support learning in all its forms. From Chengdu to Arizona, these libraries show how architecture shapes our connections with each other and the world. They unite learning, landscape, and community, creating inspiring and useful spaces. Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art, Tianfu Library of Humanity and Art By CSWADI, Chengdu, China Jury Winner, Libraries, 12th Annual A+Awards Tianfu Art Park, located on North Third Ring Road in Chengdu, houses the Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art and the Tianfu Library of Humanity and Art. These two museums aim to create a platform for urban public culture, intertwining art and nature. The pavilion features two curved roofs mimicking the nearby mountains, shaping a soothing skyline aligned with Chengdu’s climate. The museum spans 355,210 square feet (33,000 square meters), serving as a contemporary art exhibition and research center, showcasing installation and multimedia art. The Tianfu Library focuses on art literacy and aesthetics, its name translating to “Book Mountain.” Shenzhen Reef Library By Wildurban Architects, Shenzhen, China The initial design of the Shenzhen Reef Library aimed to develop a varied and complex public space on a compact site. The project seeks to create a peaceful environment to promote the interaction between human and non-human elements. The area is organized using a grid consisting of nine squares, with the building’s four corners drawn inward, which reduces its overall volume while allowing sufficient space around neighboring structures. The internal spatial relationships and scale evolve through a sequence of retreating actions. The project is inspired by the red reefs formed from ancient volcanic activity on the Dapeng Peninsula, and this unique material features prominently in both the façade and interiors, fostering a connection between people and nature. Square volumes paired with curved openings create a dynamic form. The robust red walls provide a stable framework, contrasting sharply with the transparent white book tower. The ground floor includes a red cave-like area, designed with curved bookshelves reminiscent of a reef. Asante Public Library By Richärd Kennedy Architects, Surprise, Arizona The library sits on a 12-acre park in Arizona, overlooking White Tank Mountains. Its folded perforated metal baffles in white powder coat create a canopy that filters sunlight, emulating a tree’s diffused light for occupants. The continuity of vertical and horizontal planes, in both exterior and interior design, forms a dynamic façade of light and shadow, reminiscent of the park’s tree canopy. This architecture abstracts the experience of reading under a tree, creating a sheltered and dynamic space in the desert. The park currently serves as a regional retention basin that drains along the local green belt. In order to reduce overall site disturbance, four-foot retaining walls serve as an elevated plinth. Inside, the library offers a large, open reading room where full-height glazing affords sweeping views of the nearby mountain range. Tainan Public Library By Mecanoo, Tainan City, Taiwan Popular Choice Winner, Libraries, 12th Annual A+Awards Tainan Public Library represents the intersection of cultures, generations, and histories. It is mainly inspired by local culture and designed with consideration for Tainan’s climate. The building houses the city’s heritage, art, music and films, and has more than a million books from different periods of history. The library features a stepped shape and slender columns that are rhythmically placed. This stepped structure offers shelter to visitors both inside and outside and creates a smooth transition between the exterior and interior. Beneath the cantilevers are four sunken patios for outdoor activities, with the largest accessible from the square; lectures, concerts, and exhibitions can be organized here. There are also four outdoor areas arranged as roof gardens, as well as three multifunctional spaces for classrooms, workshops, and a café. Flint Public Library By OPN Architects, Flint, Michigan In 2022, the Flint Public Library has transformed into an equitable, confident and aspirational community space. Retaining the building’s original footprint, its 94,000 square feet (8,732 square meters) have been redesigned with new openings between the first and second floors. Windows were added or replaced, and architectural fins reflect the surrounding mid-century architecture of the cultural campus. The new floor plan enhances efficiency by reclaiming 16,000 square feet (1,486 square meters) of underutilized space and relocating staff offices from exterior walls to the lower level with historic archives. This layout creates quiet reading areas and various meeting rooms that allow natural light for formal meetings, community groups and informal discussions. A modern service model replaces the traditional circulation desk, improving staff and visitor interactions in first-floor collection areas. Children’s services and tech spaces have doubled in size, and interactive kiosks on the second floor highlight the library’s African American Sports Hall of Fame archives. Atherton Library By WRNS Studio, Atherton, California The multifaceted project encompasses the renovation of the historic town hall, the construction of a modern library, and the development of a California Mission-style town center that will house city administration, public works, community meeting spaces and the police station. Atherton Library connects to the historic city hall building (where the library is currently located) through a spacious outdoor patio, envisioned as a front porch for the community. The library reflects current research on how facilities can best serve our communities now and in the future, featuring a flexible design that can adapt to community needs as technology and work evolve. Tianmu Lake · LI City Library By Greater Dog Architects, Liyang, Changzhou, China The LI City Study is situated in the Tianmu Lake Resort in Liyang City, built in 2023. This government-sponsored public welfare initiative facilitates access to shared urban cultural spaces and offers a free reading area for citizens and tourists, open 24 hours a day. Originally, the building served as an office. The government has introduced new social functions to meet public needs and demonstrate a commitment to the community’s well-being. Architizer’s Vision Awards are back! The global awards program honors the world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery. Start your entry today, and take advantage of the Early Entry prices! The post The New Library Typology: Open, Adaptive and Rooted in Place appeared first on Journal.

Restoring a 1939 icon gave Dutch architects hands-on access to a decades-old humanist modernism that's never been more relevant.

The post Architectural Archive: Rediscovering the New Hague School Through Adaptive Reuse appeared first on Journal.

Got a project that’s too bold to build? Submit your conceptual works, images and ideas for global recognition and print publication in the 2025 Vision Awards! Take advantage of our Early Entry discount and start your entry today. Admitting to an architect that you’re not always interested in talking about architecture is risky. But architecture for architecture’s sake often misses the point — blueprints and buildings are relevant and interesting when they have a tangible impact on our lives. Sitting in the stunning mid-century modern-styled Albert Bar & Lounge on the ground floor of The Hague’s newest landmark hotel, De Plesman, Dennis Hofman couldn’t be more reassuring. “I’m also not always interested in talking about architecture,” says the architect, whose career now spans three decades. His belief that the profession defines how our world works and interacts, not just how it looks, puts us at ease. Nevertheless, our conversation over a cup of English breakfast tea and fresh coffee begins with the roof over our heads. De Plesman is a masterpiece of restoration, comprising more than 100 hotel rooms, 20 private apartment ‘Residences’, its own deli, gym, and Restaurant Suus, among other facilities. The stunning Albert Bar in De Plesman lobby | Image courtesy of De Plesman (C) Mae Daniels Located inside Dirk Roosenburg’s 1939 icon, a building originally made to give KLM a purpose-built headquarters, despite the overhaul the pioneering attitude of aviator Albert Plesman, the first administrator and later director of the Netherlands’ iconic airline, can be felt in every corner of the (re)finished product. References to aircraft and travel are abundant, if you’re paying attention. Marauding the corridors the previous afternoon reveals many highlights. Stunning light fittings overhead and lining corridor walls, a beautiful circular staircase, the incredible wood-lined Plesman Suite, room fittings inspired by the distinct Bruynzeel aesthetic — a domestic Dutch staple famously used in kitchens — are just a few examples. Created in collaboration with Amsterdam interior studio, Nicemakers, the result is like stepping back in time to the Golden Age of travel, but also feels resolutely timeless. Rooms inside De Plesman hotel, including Bruynzeel detailing | Image courtesy of De Plesman (C) Chantal Arnts “This is not quick and dirty architecture,” says Hofman, whose firm ArchitektenKombinatie has been responsible for much 0f the work beyond surface level. This includes a total overhaul of efficiency measures, replacing original steel profile window surrounds with insulated aluminium alternatives, cleaning and restoring the masonry and concrete facade frames, and introducing new exterior, roof and floor insulation from the inside. In the basement, an aquifer thermal energy storage system provides heating and cooling, while passivhaus principles can be seen in the return of external sun shading awnings. As a result, observant boffins may pick up on the fact there’s more than a hat tip to Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium when looking at De Plesman from the outside. Brick exterior of De Plesman hotel in The Hague | Image courtesy of De Plesman (C) Mae Daniels A seven year undertaking so far, there’s still much work to do before the new Plesmanduin neighborhood is finally finished. Twenty minutes by foot from The Hague’s historic city centre in one direction, and slightly less to Scheveningen, the city’s seaside area, complete with beach bars, outdoor sports facilities and 19th Century pier, the location is enviable. Flanked by parkland decorated with sculptures — including a statue of Plesman — we’re on the route of a 6 mile (10 kilometer) walking trail leading to the coast and historic Scheveningse Forest. Combining rural and urban, it’s an act of placemaking in the definitive sense. “What I think was very nice about the original building is that it had so much to do with the future. It was built like a skyscraper, one of the first like this in the Netherlands, so a steel and concrete structure, which made it very special,” Hofman says. “And the philosophy for the office was also interesting, because it was so transparent. It was enlightened, so to speak, for the people. “It presented a different view — how do we want to work at KLM? At the time, workplaces were more closed environments, with a lot of hierarchy. This was very open plan, so it was very modern,” he continues. “If I would design it in the same way now, it would still be perfect because it wants to connect itself to the people. You have a lot of windows, but also the structure, the monumentality of the entrances have a lot of impact on people and the guests, on the spatial design, the staircases.” Ceiling inside De Plesman, a nod to aircraft propellers and one of many subtle references to the building’s original role as KLM’s headquarters | Photo by author, Martin Guttridge-Hewitt Hofman tells us the design is “just beyond or on the edge of” the New Hague School, an architectural style that emerged in the namesake city post-First World War. Tentatively, given our mutual aversion to getting lost in conversations about nice looking buildings, we ask what the movement was and, more importantly, what its aims were. “Of course, it had to do with architecture and classical brick structures, design issues, but there was a social component,” Hofman explains. “There was a lot of debate about the typology of residential units, how it should be formed, what it could bring to the people in terms of their identity. These are the same things we need to address these days as well. I think that’s why in The Hague there is still a strong connection to that era. “We have to translate this, of course, to a different regime of rules today. Nevertheless, I think this social connection between people and architecture can inspire us in how we work,” he tells us. “They were really starting new neighborhoods, bringing people together. So we have a lot of areas with this similar collective architectural identity… Now we are building a neighborhood again.” Corridor lighting conjures borrowed memories of a Golden Age of travel inside De Plesman hotel | (C) Martin Guttridge-Hewitt Hofman compares The New Hague School to early 20th century English housing typology, wherein developments incorporated large numbers of homes for specific demographics alongside amenities and services — an idea that died in the devastation of World War Two, and the need to urgently rebuild with less time for more thoughtful, person-centric modernism. It’s about the specificity of a place and location, an idea he believes is mounting a comeback. “20 years ago, Rem Koolhaas defined the architectural tabla rasa [blank slate] — ‘fuck the context’,” Hofman quips, quoting arguably the most famous 21st Century Dutch architect’s most famous statement. “We have been in a period of modernism which was very global. Building a skyscraper in Dubai was the same as New York, or somewhere else, more or less. Now I think people want to reconnect building purpose and local community, and context… The tabla rasa is no longer an option. Really, you can question if it ever was.” Got a project that’s too bold to build? Submit your conceptual works, images and ideas for global recognition and print publication in the 2025 Vision Awards! Take advantage of our Early Entry discount and start your entry today. The post Architectural Archive: Rediscovering the New Hague School Through Adaptive Reuse appeared first on Journal.

Holl will bring unmatched insight into the power of architectural ideas, spatial imagination and visual storytelling.

The post Steven Holl Joins the 2025 Vision Awards Jury, Bringing a Lifetime of Creative Vision to the Panel appeared first on Journal.

Architizer is thrilled to announce that Steven Holl, one of the most celebrated architects of our time, has joined the jury for the 2025 Vision Awards. A visionary in every sense of the word, Holl’s inclusion brings unmatched insight into the power of architectural ideas, spatial imagination and visual storytelling. Holl will review entries submitted in an expanded Vision Awards program, which invites architects, designers, photographers, videographers, rendering artists, model makers and students to enter their work for global recognition and publication in print. Get started on your entry today: Enter the Vision Awards Over the course of five decades, Holl has established himself as a singular force in contemporary architecture, realizing projects across the globe that are as poetic as they are conceptually rigorous. His portfolio includes iconic works like the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, the Linked Hybrid in Beijing, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and The REACH expansion of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. — each one a manifestation of his deep commitment to architecture as a generator of experience and meaning. More than just a designer, Holl is also a passionate advocate for architectural representation as tools for innovation and creative expression. His watercolor sketches — works of art in their own right — are not just artifacts of process but portals into the thinking behind his spatial compositions. “I used to do pencil drawings. Those took eight hours,” reflects the architect. “Around 1979, I streamlined it to five-by-seven-inch watercolors. With the watercolor, in the quickest way, I can shape a volume, cast a shadow, indicate the direction of the sun in a very small format. And I can carry these things around because I am always traveling.” It’s this ability to communicate architecture through image and intuition that aligns Holl perfectly with the ethos of the Vision Awards, Architizer’s annual celebration of conceptual architecture, images, films, drawings and models that define the visual culture of architecture. Watercolor sketch for Meander Housing by Steven Holl Architects, Helsinki, Finland As a juror, Holl will lend his expertise to evaluating entries across conceptual design, visualization and architectural representation, helping to spotlight those who are pushing their mediums — and the discipline — forward. Holl’s presence on the jury is particularly significant for categories that celebrate the art of architectural representation, including the drawing categories — with accolades on offer for best sketch, hand drawing and computer-aided drawing — and physical model categories, including prizes for best conceptual model and presentation model. His own practice has long emphasized the importance of hand-drawn sketches and physical models in the design process, making him an ideal judge for submissions that explore the tactile and expressive qualities of these creative mediums. Left: Conceptual model for Ex of In House by Steven Holl Architects, Rhinebeck, New York; right: Steven Holl inspects construction progress on the project © Steven Holl Architects. Learn more about this project here. Joining Holl on the 2025 Vision Awards jury is a distinguished panel of professionals from various disciplines, including: Keely Colcleugh, Founder and CEO of Kilograph, known for her expertise in architectural visualization. Ema Peter, Principal & Owner of Ema Peter Photography, renowned for capturing the essence of architectural spaces. Marcelo Coehlo, Head of Design at Formlabs, bringing a perspective on digital fabrication and innovation. Carlotta Cominetti, Co-Founder of VirginLemon, with a focus on creative direction and storytelling in architecture. Arjun Desai and Katherine Chia, Founders of Desai Chia Architecture, recognized for their thoughtful and context-driven designs. This multidisciplinary jury reflects the Vision Awards’ commitment to honoring a broad spectrum of architectural creativity and innovation. View the complete Vision Awards jury here. As a tenured professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Holl has also played a pivotal role in shaping the next generation of architects, and will be looking forward to reviewing student entries for this year’s Vision Awards. His presence on the jury ensures that creative integrity, conceptual depth, and formal invention will be recognized and rewarded. Enter the 2025 Vision Awards for the chance to have your work seen by Steven Holl and many more global design leaders. The Early Entry Deadline is May 9th, 2025, so be sure to submit your work before then to secure your place in the world’s leading celebration of architectural images and ideas: Start My Entry Top image: Watercolor sketch for Ex of In House by Steven Holl Architects, Rhinebeck, New York The post Steven Holl Joins the 2025 Vision Awards Jury, Bringing a Lifetime of Creative Vision to the Panel appeared first on Journal.

OpenAI’s newly released 4o Image Generation, when used alongside other AI tools, can help you move from a floorplan to a rendering. Here’s how it works.

The post Tech for Architects: How to Create a Stunning Rendering from a Simple Floorplan Using AI appeared first on Journal.

For more ways to supercharge your workflow, check out more articles in our Tech for Architects series, which includes our recommendations of Top Laptops for Architects and Designers. Architects, like other creatives, tend to dislike AI — until they face a deadline. While serious criticisms have been leveled against deep learning programs like Chat GPT and Midjourney, the fact of the matter is, these are powerful tools when used by discerning architects. They are especially useful when it comes to ideation, or fleshing out your ideas by considering a plan from multiple perspectives. In recent weeks, AI became even more useful for architects following the release of Open AI’s new 4o Image Generation tool with Chat GPT integration. As with most new AI releases, it took a little user experimentation for people to figure out the program’s real potential. One of the earliest users to discover a new potential for this tool was Amir Hossein Noori, co-founder of AI Hub, who realized that using 4o image generation, an architect can quickly move from a floorplan to a rendering. However, there was a catch. Users quickly found that the process was hit or miss, with the chatbot frustratingly making errors. Keir Regan-Alexander, an architect who specializes in the use of AI, ironed out some of the kinks. The following tutorial owes much to his trial and error work. We hope it will help you in your design endeavors. 1. Highlight the view angle in your floor plan using an arrow. Emulate those “You are Here” arrows that are posted in the maps at the mall. Be as precise as you can with the angle and placement of the arrow. Image generated by the author using Chat GPT. 2. Upload the floorplan into either GPT o3 Mini or Claude 3.7. NOT GPT 4.0! Screenshot generated by the author. The webpage displayed is the interface of Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Amir Hossein Noori recommends using GPT o3 Mini for this step because it is better with image processing than the standard version. Keir Regan Alexander adds that Claude 3.7 also works well, and this is the bot I used. The goal of this step is to produce a written description of the space based on the floorplan. Upload the image and politely ask the chatbot to describe what a human being would see from the angle indicated by the arrow. Make sure to specify that the human being is facing in the same direction the arrow is pointing. Your bot of choice will create a description that looks something like this: Screenshot generated by the author. Text by Claude 3.7 Sonnet. 3. Hop over to GPT 4.0 to generate the rendering using the text produced by Claude or GPT o3 Mini. Screenshot generated by the author. Webpage displayed is the interface of Chat GPT 4.0. After the description, if you are using GPT o3 Mini it might ask if you want a 3D rendering of this viewpoint. (Claude doesn’t offer this). Don’t say yes right away! Instead, upload the floorplan with the arrow into GPT 4.0 and enter this prompt: “create an image of a 3D space from the angle shown on the floorplan as if you are a human standing there.“ Then copy and paste the text generated in step 2, sit back, and wait. Eventually, you will get an image that corresponds to your floorplan: Image produced by the author using Chat GPT 4.0. 4. Make Adjustments by prompting GPT 4.0 Screenshot generated by the author using GPT 4.0. If you are not happy with the first draft or want to change the decor, simply describe these changes to GPT 4.0. It will do its best to follow your suggestions. Make sure to specify that you do not want it to change anything about the layout of the room. (That is, if the bot generated the room correctly the first time.) Keir Regan-Alexander notes that there are limitations to this process, impressive as it is. Complex room shapes, like L-shaped or stepped rooms, don’t work well. But simple rectangular and square rooms can usually be generated quite easily. In the end, this trick is a major time saver. And like all generative AI features, it will only improve in the coming years. For more ways to supercharge your workflow, check out more articles in our Tech for Architects series, which includes our recommendations of Top Laptops for Architects and Designers. Cover Image: Generated by the author using Chat GPT. Prompt: Create an architectural rendering of the interior of a magnificent modern home. The post Tech for Architects: How to Create a Stunning Rendering from a Simple Floorplan Using AI appeared first on Journal.

In the age of urgent transformation, visualization defines how we communicate architecture’s purpose—not just how it looks, but how it lives.

The post Drawing the Line: Where Representation Ends and Design Begins in Architectural Visualization appeared first on Journal.

Architizer’s Vision Awards are back! The global awards program honors the world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery. Start your entry today, and take advantage of the Early Entry prices! Learn More About Vision Awards The architecture industry has always been caught between the speculative and the practical. Unlike most other design disciplines, architects are asked to visualize their end product long before it becomes reality. We don’t just draw things to explain them. We draw things to make them possible. That process, however technological it becomes, starts with the image. In that sense, visualization — whether by hand, CAD, photograph, model or AI — has never been neutral. It carries intention. It selects what to show, what to obscure, and what to imply. This has been true since the early architectural futurist movements, the time of Antonio Sant’Elia and his La Città Nuova in 1914. A design that imagined an electrified metropolis of mechanized vertical transport and monumental concrete infrastructure. None of it was buildable. That wasn’t the point. The drawings were a provocation. An architectural polemic dressed as a proposal. Later, Archigram, the avant-garde British architectural group from the 60s, Superstudio of the same time, and the Metabolists from Japan each used drawing to challenge the profession’s own assumptions. The images they produced were designed, and although they were considered impossible to replicate, the designs themselves were a form of critique. Image by Wendy W Fok You can see echoes of that in today’s visualization culture, albeit with a different tone. The futurism of 2025 is a little more cautious, more grounded, if you will. It reflects a profession wrestling with its own complicity in climate breakdown, social inequity and urban dysfunction. What’s interesting is how much of that reckoning now plays out through visual culture. You only need to look through the hundreds of entries to Architizer’s Vision Awards to see where architectural ambition is currently pointed. The imagery is flooded with regenerative materials, energy systems, climate buffers, wild landscapes stitched into the city fabric. Architects are drawing futures that feel socially generous and ecologically literate. In short, it’s no longer just about what a building looks like. It’s about what it does and how it helps. Learn More About Vision Awards Over the last decade, architectural visualization has evolved from a client-facing add-on into a central mode of design thinking. Real-time rendering software like Twinmotion and Enscape has accelerated the speed and fluency of design iteration. Meanwhile, the rise of speculative, informative and theory-forward studios like Feral Partnerships, False Mirror Office or Climate Designers have reframed unbuilt work as serious cultural production. Instagram, for better or worse, has given these images a public audience. Some of them go viral before a feasibility study has even been run. However, the image isn’t a misrepresentation of the possible. It’s a proposition. It allows architects to present a version of the world that is not yet available to us as an invitation to imagine what could be built if we make the right choices. Te Arai | Dune House by Dawid Wisniewski What’s fascinating, looking across so many of Architizer’s Vision Awards entries, is the clarity with which a new architectural vocabulary is beginning to emerge. The imagery doesn’t just look different from a decade ago. It shows a genuine shift in our culture and our desire for a better world. The climate emergency is not considered a specialist issue, siloed off in the technical report. It’s embedded in the visual logic of the design from the very beginning. You see it in the materiality represented. Products like mass timber, rammed earth and concrete alternatives all feature heavily. While buildings are often rendered as part of a larger ecology. They collect water, generate energy and host an array of biodiversity. The architecture is not the lone object to be admired and looked at it is part of an infrastructure that has a broader environmental ambition. Image by Ander Alencar | Professional Winner, Architectural Visualizer of the Year, Inaugural Vision Awards Social values, too, are finding visual expression. Renderings of housing show spaces that are shared, adaptable, and clearly lived in. Schools and cultural centers are imagined as generous and porous. Urban projects put as much care into the street-level experience as the skyline. This reflects a profession that’s trying to align what it draws with what it believes it can achieve. For this reason, the images carry weight. They’re so legible that they make complex ideas feel accessible and give form to an intent. That clarity matters in an industry where a project may take five, ten, or even fifteen years to reach completion — if it gets built at all. A good visualization, however represented, shouldn’t just show a desired outcome. It creates momentum. It can align a team, attract a client, or convince a jury. More importantly, it can shift the conversation around what architecture is for. And because these images circulate so widely, often reaching far beyond professional circles, they help shape how the public understands the value of design. They act as shorthand for architectural intelligence and in the best cases, for architectural ethics. Image by Amir Hossein Noori That’s why it’s worth emphasizing that visualization is design, not just representation. These images are doing real cultural work. They’re where architecture proposes its next move. Of course, the image is never the whole story. Anyone who’s taken a project from concept to completion knows how much shifts along the way. Program changes, planning conditions, budget rounds. The garden might shrink. The structure might simplify. The barefoot toddlers might disappear altogether. Yet, that doesn’t make the original image redundant. If anything, it makes it more important. Because even if the rendering is never realized in full, it sets the tone. It creates the expectation. Sometimes, it even opens the door to conversations that wouldn’t otherwise happen. That’s what the best visualizations do. They don’t just illustrate a solution. They frame a question. How could this building do more? What if this space were open instead of closed? What happens when we design with care, not just efficiency? It’s where architects get to speak in their own voice, without interruption from procurement or planning or politics and that freedom matters, especially in a profession where compromise is a daily reality. Letters from Jean-Michel by Okdraw The Vision Awards acknowledge this by treating imagery not as an end in itself but by recognizing its role in shaping what architecture strives to become. They reward ambition, not polish. They spotlight the work that dares to be clear about its values and unapologetic about its optimism. If architects are, in some sense, futurists, then visualization is the medium through which those futures get proposed. Of course, much of the challenge, as always, is to carry that vision through. But it starts with having the courage to draw it in the first place. Architizer’s Vision Awards are back! The global awards program honors the world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery. Start your entry today, and take advantage of the Early Entry prices! Enter the Vision Awards Featured Image: Gardens in a Factory: The Education Agenda by Tom Gardner. The post Drawing the Line: Where Representation Ends and Design Begins in Architectural Visualization appeared first on Journal.

The Corona–Vantage workflow brings photorealistic visual storytelling into every stage of design, from early concept to final presentation.

The post The Art of Rendering: Creating Real-Time, Photoreal Architectural Visualizations with Corona and Vantage appeared first on Journal.

What if you could render architectural scenes in seconds — without ever stopping your design flow? With the release of Corona 12 and its new integration with Chaos Vantage, architectural visualization professionals now have access to a faster, more interactive toolkit — one that combines the realism of ray-traced rendering with the speed of real-time tools, without the need for compromise. Whether framing the perfect shot for a client or exploring design options live with a team, this new capability unlocks more intuitive ways to visualize architecture and interior spaces. We took a deep dive into the latest versions of both applications to explore this fresh interoperability and see how it can foster new creative workflows in real-time rendering. How It Works: Real-Time Feedback Inside Your Workflow The Corona to Vantage Live Link, introduced in Corona 12 Update 1, allows users to connect their 3ds Max or Cinema 4D scene directly to Chaos Vantage, an industry-leading real-time renderer built for speed and visual fidelity. Once activated, any changes made in the scene — like moving objects, updating lights, editing materials, or switching cameras — are instantly mirrored in Vantage’s real-time viewport. Enabling Live Link is simple: Within 3ds Max, users open the Render Setup, navigate to the System tab, and click “Vantage Live Link.” Alternatively, within Cinema 4D, click on the Corona tab in the top menu, navigate down to “Chaos Vantage” and then click “Start Vantage Live Link”. Vantage launches automatically, loads the scene, and begins responding live to any updates. From this point forward, artists can move freely between modeling, lighting, and composition without interrupting their workflow to export or render previews. This integration transforms Vantage into an always-on visual companion. Architects and visualization artists can evaluate daylight scenarios, test material palettes, set up composition options, and save out high-quality preview images, all within seconds. Camera adjustments, lighting tweaks, and object placement can all be iterated live, making this integration ideal for presenting multiple options to a client or efficiently collaborating with a design team. When it’s time to produce a final rendering, Vantage’s ultra-fast GPU engine makes it possible to generate polished stills directly from the working scene. This all sounds compelling, but how does it translate into a real-world project? Enter narrativ, a UK-based visualization studio that works across creative disciplines. narrativ’s Triple Test: Envisioning Architecture, Product and VFX With Vantage To put the integration through its paces, narrativ created a series of one-minute animations focused on architectural space, product design, and visual effects. Robin Walker, the studio’s director, said each theme “was designed to push Vantage in its very own way while also showing its versatility.” Their architectural scene — set inside a tranquil chapel with soft pink lighting and reflective materials — was selected to challenge how Vantage handled nuanced lighting conditions and surface behavior. According to the team, “The team chose this serene chapel setting to challenge Vantage’s ability to render complex lighting interactions and reflections in a highly controlled environment. And it did not disappoint.” The results are stunning, forming a remarkable exhibition of the dynamic material and lighting effects made possible by Vantage. In another test, a rugged muscle car, complete with worn, weathered textures, demonstrated Vantage’s accuracy with fine material details — “All of the stuff we get excited by as 3D artists,” Walker explained. The resulting video is a powerful demonstration of how Corona and Vantage can produce subtle surface textures and imperfections with outstanding realism. For their final piece, narrativ turned to The Old Gods, an in-house VFX sequence featuring a dramatic battle in a dense forest. Thousands of trees, animated elements and cinematic lighting pushed the scene’s complexity to the limit. “Given the high stakes of rendering such a multifaceted scene, this project was the perfect test to push Vantage’s real-time capabilities to their limits,” the team said. The payoff wasn’t just visual quality — it was also creative freedom. “With Vantage, you feel like you’re there, in the scene, just shooting with a camera,” said Walker. “Without Vantage and its ultra-fast GPU rendering, along with its ability to quickly light scenes and find camera angles, this wouldn’t have been possible.” All three animations were rendered in minutes to hours on a single machine—transforming what would typically be a multi-day pipeline into a streamlined, intuitive process. Why This Matters for Architects and Visualization Studios For architects and visualizers, time is always tight — especially given that clients increasingly expect to see high-end imagery early in the design process. The Corona–Vantage workflow offers a powerful new way to meet those demands without slowing down production. Instead of waiting for time-intensive renderings or settling for low-fidelity previews, users can now explore light, space and materiality in real time. That means faster decisions, better design feedback and higher-quality visuals earlier in the project timeline. Studios are already folding this workflow into their daily process. The narrativ team, for example, now uses Vantage for early-stage clay model visuals and camera selection. “The narrativ team has already found another great use for the interoperability, using it for clay renders during the view selection for clients,” they reported, made possible thanks to Vantage’s “blisteringly fast” speed. The software’s combination of efficiency and utility has the narrativ team convinced. “I think everyone should try it out. It has a lot of power, and the speed is unmatched,” said Walker. But the advantage of this new integration is larger still — the real-time feedback loop changes the nature of the work, according to Walker. He added: “Vantage hasn’t been all about speed for narrativ; it also allowed the team to get back to their creative roots. Anything which makes us 3D artists less of technicians and more of artists is a way forward.” For architects and visualizers, this shift offers an exciting prospect — to bring photorealistic visual storytelling into every stage of design, from early concept to final presentation. To try both Corona and Vantage for free, click the following links: Try Corona for Free > Try Vantage for Free > Hero image by narrativ. The post The Art of Rendering: Creating Real-Time, Photoreal Architectural Visualizations with Corona and Vantage appeared first on Journal.

Expo 2025 Osaka unites Kengo Kuma, Lina Ghotmeh, Carlo Ratti and more to show how architecture can shape the future, one pavilion at a time.

The post Architizer’s Choice: 10 Notable National Pavilions at Expo 2025 Osaka appeared first on Journal.

Architizer’s Vision Awards are back! The global awards program honors the world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery. Start your entry today, and take advantage of the Early Entry prices! Expo 2025 Osaka is officially open, offering a rare chance to experience some of the world’s most inventive architecture in one place. Held on the artificial island of Yumeshima in Osaka Bay, this year’s World Expo brings together 158 participating countries under the theme “Designing Future Society for Our Lives.” The six-month event runs through October 13 and is anchored by the Grand Ring — a 675-meter-wide timber structure designed by Sou Fujimoto that connects the entire site. Built using traditional Japanese joinery and recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest wooden architectural structure, the Ring acts as the physical and symbolic spine of the Expo, guiding visitors through a landscape of global ideas. From bold visions about climate and health to more personal explorations of culture, identity and cooperation, Expo 2025 presents architecture as one of its most immediate storytellers. Pavilions by celebrated names like Lina Ghotmeh, Coldefy, Carlo Ratti Associati and Kengo Kuma are already drawing attention, along with thoughtful contributions from Dutch, Swiss and Uzbek teams focused on reuse, material cycles and cultural exchange. This collection highlights 10 national pavilions worth seeking out, digging into the ideas behind their designs and what may happen to them once the Expo wraps. Brazil Pavilion By Studio MK27, Osaka, Japan This pavilion explores water as the source of life through the concept of “Flying Rivers” — moisture-laden clouds that drift above the Amazon. A curved canopy rises over Osakan soil, sheltering a vapor-filled interior wrapped in a fluid metallic mesh. Visitors follow a slow, upward path through ramps that build anticipation, leading to a rooftop experience where an artificial river reflects the exhibition. The structure uses rented modular metal elements, commonly found in temporary construction, reducing waste and allowing for easy disassembly. Built with the logistical challenges of the site in mind, the pavilion is both atmospheric and efficient. Designed to leave a light footprint, the structure is built to be taken apart as effortlessly as it was raised. France Pavilion By Coldefy and Carlo Ratti Associati, Osaka, Japan Image courtesy of Carlo Ratti Associati Image courtesy of Carlo Ratti Associati The French Pavilion, titled Theatrum Naturae (“Theatre of Nature”), invites visitors on a sensory journey through France’s diverse ecosystems. Designed as a continuous path, the experience unfolds in three acts: Ascent, Discovery and Return, culminating in a rooftop garden that mirrors the country’s natural landscapes, from mountains to coastline. The pavilion explores how architecture can support coexistence between human and non-human life, reflecting Expo 2025’s sub-theme of “Empowering Life.” Built using prefabricated components and natural materials, the structure follows a circular design logic to minimize environmental impact. The experience is both theatrical and reflective, encouraging visitors to consider their place within nature. Plans for the structure after the expo have not been detailed. Qatar Pavilion By Kengo Kuma & Associates, Osaka, Japan Photo by Iwan Baan, Courtesy of Qatar Museums Photo by Iwan Baan, Courtesy of Qatar Museums The Qatar Pavilion focuses on the sea as a shared space for trade, culture and exchange between Qatar and Japan. Designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates, who also designed the Portugal Pavilion, the structure uses traditional Qatari boat-building methods and Japanese wood joinery. A timber frame is covered in a white fabric that refers to dhow sails, giving the building a clear identity without heavy materials. Inside, a multimedia exhibition by OMA*AMO looks at Qatar’s 563-kilometer coastline and how it connects to the country’s cultural and economic goals. The second floor includes a small library and artworks from Qatar and Japan. The pavilion highlights Qatar’s development story, with no plans announced for its future use. Netherlands Pavilion By RAU Architects, Osaka, Japan Photo by AND BV & Plomp Photo by AND BV & Plomp “Common ground” is the guiding theme of the Dutch participation at Expo 2025, shaped by a history of collective action in the face of rising water. At its center is a large mirrored sphere, inspired by Expo ’70’s Tower of the Sun. The structure is made from over 1,600 tons of steel — almost double what would be used in Europe — due to Japan’s strict regulations for earthquakes and typhoons. Visitors receive an Orb, a personal device that activates parts of the experience across exhibitions, events and shared spaces. Every element of the building is designed for disassembly and reuse. After the Expo, the pavilion will be taken apart, packed into containers and relocated for a new purpose, yet to be announced. Bahrain Pavilion By Lina Ghotmeh Architecture, Osaka, Japan View this post on Instagram A post shared by Bahrain at Expo (@bahatexpo) Another big name in the Expo 2025 lineup, Lina Ghotmeh brings a careful and material-focused approach to the Bahrain Pavilion. The design draws from the country’s maritime heritage, using 3,000 pieces of “un-engineered” wood joined without concrete or adhesives. Built with minimal foundations and cooled naturally by coastal winds, it’s one of the most resource-conscious structures at the Expo. Inside, a multi-sensory exhibition explores Bahrain’s legacy of trade, pearling and sea-based culture. The pavilion also features a café by chef Tala Bashmi, a business floor and a gift shop. All materials are intended for reuse, but no future plans have been announced. Japan Pavilion By Nikken Sekkei, Osaka, Japan Courtesy of Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Courtesy of Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry As the host nation, Japan sets the tone for Expo 2025 with a pavilion that takes its message seriously. The structure follows the theme “Between Lives,” focusing on interdependence, regeneration and circular thinking. Built with 1,600 cubic meters of cross-laminated timber supported by steel, the circular building is both a stage and an exhibit. A biogas plant onsite converts food waste into energy and the CLT panels are designed for disassembly and reuse after the event. Nothing is hidden—mechanical systems, structural joints and material seams are all exposed, inviting visitors to see how architecture can support life without excess. It’s a thoughtful, stripped-back answer to the Expo’s big questions. Uzbekistan Pavilion By Atelier Brückner, Osaka, Japan Uzbekistan Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka. Photo © ATELIER BRÜCKNER. Courtesy of ACDF. Uzbekistan Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka. Photo © ATELIER BRÜCKNER. Courtesy of ACDF. “Garden of Knowledge” brings together Uzbekistan’s heritage and future ambitions through a clear architectural narrative. A reclaimed brick base represents the earth, while a timber upper level—sourced from local Osaka forests — evokes growth and renewal. Visitors move through exhibits focused on education, sustainability and innovation, many tied to Uzbekistan’s Strategy 2030 goals. A central platform slowly rises through a 360-degree media installation, connecting the two levels in a way that’s both technical and symbolic. Each timber column includes an NFC tag, letting visitors trace its origin. After the Expo, the pavilion is set to be dismantled and rebuilt in Uzbekistan, where it will take on a second life as a studio, school or cultural space. USA Pavilion By Trahan Architects, Osaka, Japan Photo by Hufton+Crow Photography Photo by Hufton+Crow Photography Positioned near the East Gate of the Expo site, this pavilion puts cultural exchange and public diplomacy front and center. An open-air courtyard hosts daily performances from artists across the United States, while an American garden showcases native flora. Inside, five themed exhibits highlight national achievements in space, technology, education and innovation. Visitors are guided by a virtual mascot and a multilingual team of Youth Ambassadors representing 45 states. The pavilion also includes a restaurant serving American cuisine and private event spaces. Its focus is on storytelling and engagement, presenting the U.S. as a partner in shaping the future. No public plans have been announced yet for what will happen to the structure after the Expo. Switzerland Pavilion By Manuel Herz Architekten, Osaka, Japan Photo courtesy of FDFA, Presence Switzerland Photo courtesy of FDFA, Presence Switzerland This pavilion has the smallest ecological footprint at Expo 2025, achieved through a lightweight membrane structure and efficient use of materials. Titled “From Heidi to High-Tech,” the exhibition explores Switzerland’s shift from Alpine traditions to a focus on cutting-edge innovation. Visitors move through four spheres that center on human potential, sustainability and future science. Projects include edible robotics, soft machines for ecosystem monitoring and a data-driven portal that explores scientific breakthroughs. The design prioritizes low-impact construction and immersive storytelling. A rooftop café and shop round out the experience with Swiss flavors and products. While no post-Expo plan is confirmed, the modular structure hints at a future beyond Osaka. Luxembourg Pavilion By STDM architects & urban planners, Osaka, Japan Photo by Ondrej Piry Photo by Ondrej Piry Small but mighty, “Doki-Doki Lux” presents Luxembourg as a country with a broad global view. Visitors move through a series of sculpted volumes reflecting three core ideas: unicity, diversity and territory. A stretched canvas roof responds to light and daily events, acting as a living signal of the pavilion’s energy. Inside, the path mirrors Luxembourg’s layered identity — from global innovation to local tradition. Built on a Japanese tatami grid, the structure is designed for low environmental impact and complete disassembly, with components intended for reuse in future Japanese buildings. It’s a compact, expressive pavilion that treats circularity as part of its architectural and cultural story. Architizer’s Vision Awards are back! The global awards program honors the world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery. Start your entry today, and take advantage of the Early Entry prices! The post Architizer’s Choice: 10 Notable National Pavilions at Expo 2025 Osaka appeared first on Journal.

These architecture firms are leading the way in Brazil and beyond.

The post 30 Best Architecture and Design Firms in Brazil appeared first on Journal.

These annual rankings were last updated on April 25, 2025. Want to see your firm on next year’s list? Continue reading for more on how you can improve your studio’s ranking. Colors, culture, connectivity: Brazil’s architectural legacy is a vibrant composition painted by tradition, foreign influence and radical modernism, all situated within a vast tropical landscape. Home to numerous heritage sites, Brazil’s vernacular architecture is attributed to its Indigenous communities. Meanwhile, a European undertone is still prevalent today in cities like São Paulo and Salvador, and especially in Ouro Preto — a city recognized today as a goldmine for architectural monuments. When it comes to modernist experimentation and innovation, Brazilian architects are global trailblazers. From the establishment of the modernist city Brasília to the free-flowing mammoths in the nation’s existing metropoles, Brazil’s modernist history cannot be told without recognizing architects like Oscar Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa and Lina Bo Bardi. A distinct new architectural language emerged in 20th-century Brazil, defined by concrete, minimalism and functionality that notably moved away from the previously strong Eurocentric influences. And today’s contemporary designs continue to uphold this modernist legacy. Brazilian architects of today are known to embrace an architectural language that champions minimalism, innovation and, most importantly, the stunning tropical Brazilian outdoors. With so many architecture firms to choose from, it’s challenging for clients to identify the industry leaders that will be an ideal fit for their project needs. Fortunately, Architizer is able to provide guidance on the top design firms in Brazil based on more than a decade of data and industry knowledge. How are these architecture firms ranked? The following ranking has been created according to key statistics that demonstrate each firm’s level of architectural excellence. The following metrics have been accumulated to establish each architecture firm’s ranking, in order of priority: The number of A+Awards won (2013 to 2025) The number of A+Awards finalists (2013 to 2025) The number of projects selected as “Project of the Day” (2009 to 2025) The number of projects selected as “Featured Project” (2009 to 2025) The number of projects uploaded to Architizer (2009 to 2025) Each of these metrics is explained in more detail at the foot of this article. This ranking list will be updated annually, taking into account new achievements of Brazil architecture firms throughout the year. Without further ado, here are the 30 best architecture firms in Brazil: 30. Estudio Guto Requena © Estudio Guto Requena Estudio Guto Requena aims at the reflection on cyberculture and digital poetic narratives in design. The practice encompasses varied design scales – objects, interiors, buildings and cities, investigating the impact of digital technologies in the fields of information and communication on our daily lives, as well as its deployments regarding project. Some of Estudio Guto Requena’s most prominent projects include: My Heart Beats Like Yours, São Paulo, Brazil The Year, São Paulo, Brazil The Dancing Pavilion, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil D3 Office, São Paulo, Brazil Disco Club, São Paulo, Brazil The following statistics helped Estudio Guto Requena achieve 30th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Finalist 1 Featured Projects 3 Total Projects 5 29. Laurent Troost Architectures © Laurent Troost Architectures Laurent Troost Architectures is based in Manaus, Amazon, Brazil. The office’s work is mostly centered around residential architecture. Some of Laurent Troost Architectures’ most prominent projects include: Casarão da Inovação Cassina / Cassina Innovation House, Manaus, Brazil Manga Building, Manaus, Brazil INGÁ Co-living, Manaus, Brazil Casa Campinarana, Manaus, Brazil Casa Tarumã, Manaus, Brazil The following statistics helped Laurent Troost Architectures achieve 29th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Finalist 1 Featured Projects 3 Total Projects 6 28. Padovani Arquitetos © Padovani Arquitetos Padovani is a Brazilian architecture and design office, which weaves its narrative with lines that seek to express personality with simplicity, establishing an intense dialogue with nature. We conceive the uniqueness of projects by investigating the best technical response in harmony with conceptual poetics and client needs, a ritual that is repeated in every detail. Our identity is marked by elegance, applied to a design that breathes tropicality and expresses the essence of these characteristics in our creations. Some of Padovani Arquitetos’ most prominent projects include: Valencia House, Porto Feliz, Brazil LR House, Bragança Paulista, Brazil JR House, Bragança Paulista, Brazil LEMA House, Campinas, SP, Brazil The following statistics helped Padovani Arquitetos achieve 28th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 1 Featured Projects 2 Total Projects 4 27. BASICHES ARQUITETOS ASSOCIADOS © BASICHES ARQUITETOS ASSOCIADOS ‘Basiches Arquitetos Associados’ is an architecture office that is way ahead in the quest for a contemporary language, that is, out of the commonplace, for many types of projects: residential, commercial or institutional, such as condominiums, lofts, shops, offices, night houses and fitness centers. Founded in 1999, ‘Basiches Arquitetos Associados’ works with every architectural field, including interior design projects, from creation, conception until the end of the detailed project itself. Some of BASICHES ARQUITETOS ASSOCIADOS’ most prominent projects include: Colormix Store, São Paulo, Brazil UNITT URBAN LIVING, São Paulo, Brazil The following statistics helped BASICHES ARQUITETOS ASSOCIADOS achieve 27th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 2 Total Projects 2 26. Arquitetura Gui Mattos © Arquitetura Gui Mattos Arquitetura Gui Mattos is an architecture and urbanism firm based in São Paulo, Brazil, which reverberates since 1987 in its production, the diversity of projects as a result of an unusual and propositional architecture that seeks to reinvent spaces, make them expressive and allow integration with the landscape. Some of Arquitetura Gui Mattos’ most prominent projects include: Residencia Itamambuca , SP, Brazil Residência Conchas, São Paulo, Brazil Residência Quinta da Baroneza VII, São Paulo, Brazil Residência Camburi I, São Sebastião, Brazil Mandi Jardim Paulistano, São Paulo, Brazil The following statistics helped Arquitetura Gui Mattos achieve 26th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 2 Featured Projects 1 Total Projects 32 25. Isay Weinfeld © Isay Weinfeld Over the past 45 years we have developed works in very diverse fields, from Architecture to Cinema. Such diversity — the effect of clear resolve, rather than luck or chance — is grounded on the belief that the experience in different themes greatly contributes to the better performance of our responsibilities, and on the certainty that in Architecture, inasmuch as in any other trade, broadening horizons is crucial and part of a lifelong learning process. Some of Isay Weinfeld’s most prominent projects include: Fasano Las Piedras Hotel, Punta del Este, Uruguay Sumaré House, São Paulo, Brazil 360° Building, São Paulo, Brazil RIO DE JANEIRO MUSEUM OF IMAGE AND SOUND COMPETITION, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil The Four Seasons Restaurant, New York, NY, United States The following statistics helped Isay Weinfeld achieve 25th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 3 Total Projects 5 24. ARCHITECTS OFFICE © ARCHITECTS OFFICE ARCHITECTS OFFICE is located in São Paulo, Brazil. Their work revolves mostly around residential architecture. Some of ARCHITECTS OFFICE’s most prominent projects include: PACE Building, Curitiba, Brazil AGE360, Curitiba, Brazil Casa PAR, Monte Mor, Brazil L Apartment, São Paulo, Brazil VIVO Theatre, São Paulo, Brazil The following statistics helped ARCHITECTS OFFICE achieve 24th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 1 Featured Projects 3 Total Projects 17 23. vão arquitetura © vão arquitetura Founded in 2013, Vão is an architecture and urbanism office based in São Paulo, Brasil, that works on different scales, typologies and contexts. Its production is the result of constant architectural research, both theoretical and technical, and also from the enriching experience within the field of plastic arts that is realized through collaborations with contemporary artists. In 2014, Vão was awarded second place in the ‘Anexo BNDES National Competition’ in Rio de Janeiro and in 2015 won the ‘Invisible Geometries International Competition’ organized by LIGA in Mexico City. Vão is composed by the architects Anna Juni, Enk te Winkel and Gustavo Delonero. Some of vão arquitetura’s most prominent projects include: Viadutos Apartment, Bela Vista, São Paulo, SP, Brazil Ownerless House nº 01, Avaré, Brazil Antonio Bicudo Apartment , São Paulo, Brazil Sumarezinho Apartment, Sumarezinho, São Paulo, SP, Brazil Subsolanus, Roma Sur, Ciudad de México, Mexico The following statistics helped vão arquitetura achieve 23rd place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 12 22. BCMF Arquitetos © BCMF Arquitetos Established in 2001, by partners Bruno Campos, Marcelo Fontes and Silvio Todeschi, BCMF Architects has been involved in the development of a broad range of outstanding projects, being acknowledged in Brazil and abroad as one of the leading practices of the new generation of Brazilian architects. Our studio seeks to be highly diversified in terms of scale and typology, ranging from interior design, commercial and residential buildings to large-scale projects (arenas, sports facilities, shopping malls, hospitals, industries, parks and urban masterplans). Some of BCMF Arquitetos’ most prominent projects include: Bar Stella Artois, Belo Horizonte, Brazil Mineirão Stadium, Belo Horizonte, Brazil Brazilian National Shooting Center, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Bar-Pool-Gallery , Nova Lima, Brazil Cebrace, Jacareí, Brazil The following statistics helped BCMF Arquitetos achieve 22nd place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 22 21. mf+arquitetos © Renato Moura Mariana Garcia Oliveira and Filipi Oliveira, both graduated in architecture and urbanism, met in their first year of college. Graduated in 2009, they got married and founded the office MF architects. In 2015 the office is restructured and is renamed mf+arquitetos. Located in the city of Franca, in the interior of São Paulo, it works on projects in the residential, commercial, industrial and interior areas. It stands out for its contemporary style, always proposing a design concept that seeks to integrate the interior with the exterior, combined with formal purity, straight lines and the Brazilian-ness of materials that print a new concept of living. Some of mf+arquitetos’ most prominent projects include: Lake house, Uberlândia, Brazil Collectors Nook, Franca, Brazil PZ house, SP, Brazil House Q04L63, Rifaina, Brazil casa MCNY, São Paulo, Brazil The following statistics helped mf+arquitetos achieve 21st place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Finalist 1 Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 6 20. Estúdio MRGB © Estúdio MRGB Estúdio MRGB is an architecture and urban planning firm founded in 2004 in Brasília, Federal District. It brings together the experiences of architects, engineers, and professionals from various fields who collaborate on its architectural production. The visual identity of the studio, characterized by the letters M R G B, has a close connection with Brasília. The acronym symbolizes the four scales that configure the city’s architecture and urban planning – monumental, residential, gregarious and bucolic. The admiration, respect and recognition for the contribution of architect Lucio Costa, not only in the construction of the new capital of the Republic, a cultural heritage of humanity, but also in the consolidation of the profession in Brazil, guide the practice and craft of architecture and urban planning at MRGB Studio. Some of Estúdio MRGB’s most prominent projects include: Ribeiro House, Padre Bernardo, Brazil AL Residence Casa | LK, Brasília, Brazil Habka House, Brasília, Brazil Ribas House, Brasília, Brazil The following statistics helped Estúdio MRGB achieve 20th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 9 19. TFArq © TFArq Our practice is in search for good and timeless architecture with 15 years long we have projects of many typologies: industrial, multifamily housing, commercial, offices and single family residences. Some of TFArq’s most prominent projects include: Adelainde Previdi, Brazil MADEC, Caxias do Sul, Brazil PIER 31, Flores da Cunha, Brazil CASA FRANCA, Garopaba, Brazil La Vie Dor, Caxias do Sul, Brazil The following statistics helped TFArq achieve 19th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 10 18. AMZ Arquitetos © AMZ Arquitetos Founded in 2009, AMZ is a São Paulo based architecture firm with works ranging from the urban scale to the object scale. Composed of a collaborative and complimentary team, they operate seeking a multifocal projecting approach combining architectural concept with interior design, environmental and constructibility concerns since the beginning of every project. They aim to combine pure and conceptually free project solutions with adequate constructive methods through a cooperative process that connects clients, consultants and constructors in all stages of any given project. Some of AMZ Arquitetos’ most prominent projects include: Salto House, Salto, Brazil Guaecá II House, São Sebastião, Brazil Belgica House, São Paulo, Brazil Green House, São Paulo, Brazil Guaeca I House, São Sebastião, Brazil The following statistics helped AMZ Arquitetos achieve 18th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 5 Total Projects 6 17. Nommo Arquitetos © Nommo Arquitetos Nommo Arquitetos is an executive office company based in Curitiba, Brazil. The firm specializes in residential architecture, interior design and refurbishment work. Some of Nommo Arquitetos’ most prominent projects include: House AC, Curitiba, PR, Brazil Guará House, Curitiba, PR, Brazil Brigadeiro Apartment , Curitiba, Brazil Grena House, Campo Largo, PR, Brazil Lounge Y, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil The following statistics helped Nommo Arquitetos achieve 17th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 13 16. Mariana Orsi arquitetura + design © FELIPE ARAUJO Based on the premises of simplicity of creation, from the rationalization of resources and the optimization of elements to compose spaces and projects, always taking into account beauty, humor and timelessness, these aspects are clearly expressed in all their projects , from a simple piece of furniture to a large building. Some of Mariana Orsi arquitetura + design’s most prominent projects include: BETA HOUSE, Ribeirao Preto, Brazil O.A. HOUSE, Brazil OFICINA MUTANTE, Ribeirao Preto, Brazil BREATH HOUSE, Ribeirao Preto, Brazil LL HOUSE, Ribeirao Preto, Brazil The following statistics helped Mariana Orsi arquitetura + design achieve 16th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 5 Total Projects 6 15. ARQBR © ARQBR Brasília-based practice founded in 2013 by architects Andre Velloso and Eder Alencar. Project scale ranges from interiors architecture and residences to cultural and institutional spaces. Some of ARQBR’s most prominent projects include: Church of the Holy Family, Brasília, Brazil Güths House, Brasilia, DF, Brazil Park Way House, Brasilia, DF, Brazil Couri House, Brasília, Brazil Finantial Center 205, Brasília, Brazil The following statistics helped ARQBR achieve 15th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 1 Featured Projects 4 Total Projects 24 14. Studio Guilherme Torres © Studio Guilherme Torres Founded in 2001, Studio Guilherme Torres develops projects in the most diverse areas, from architecture to design. This company is personified in the figure of its founder, a perfectionist. In his left arm of his, a great tattoo says, through the words extracted from a Daft Punk’s song, “work it, harder, better, faster, make it over”. This unofficial motto describes the ethics and commitment to quality that is readily apparent in his work. Minimal details and palettes of rich but reserved materials that characterize his work are consistently applied in single-family homes, interior projects and retail projects. Balancing the rigorous aesthetics of architecture, a certain playful lightness can be found in the interior design of your projects. Some of Studio Guilherme Torres’ most prominent projects include: SN House, Londrina, Brazil Studio GT SF House BT House, Brazil AN HOUSE , Maringá, Brazil The following statistics helped Studio Guilherme Torres achieve 14th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 6 Total Projects 9 13. MAPA Architects © MAPA Architects MAPA Architects it’s a binational collective that works on architectural projects in Brazil and Uruguay. From this double geographical condition, MAPA explores the limits of non-conventional production formats. The studio has originally established itself from professional and academic grounds: two complementary fields that create and shape our work. STUDIOPARALELO and MAAM ARQUITECTOS were born during the first century’s decade as independent architectural studios. In 2008 they started sharing works and competitions, such as expositions and conferences. After five years working together, both studios merged in one, establishing in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Montevideo, Uruguay. MAPA is integrated by Luciano Andrades, Matías Carballal, Rochelle Castro, Andrés Gobba, Mauricio López, Silvio Machado. Some of MAPA Architects’ most prominent projects include: MINIMOD, Porto Alegre, Brazil CREA-PB Headquarters, Campina Grande, Brazil MINIMOD Catuçaba, São Luís do Paraitinga, Brazil XAN House, Rio Grande, Brazil Retreat in Finca Aguy, Maldonado Department, Uruguay The following statistics helped MAPA Architects achieve 13th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 5 Total Projects 5 12. Estudio HAA! © Estudio HAA! The Estúdio HAA! (Homã Alvico Arquitetura) develops multidisciplinary projects that have the thematic of architecture as a structuring agent, ranging from projects of organizations to the design of artifacts. We use innovation as a guiding concept for new projects, not only for a search for novelty, but for being the way we express discontent, transforming what does not please new possibilities to do — whether it’s making a physical change in the urban fabric, providing formal critical content, or developing new, possible forms of organizations. Some of Estudio HAA!’s most prominent projects include: Box St., São Paulo, Brazil Santander Parklet, São Paulo, Brazil Henrique Monteiro Parklet, São Paulo, Brazil Cel. Emidio Piedade Parklet, São Paulo, Brazil Nossa Senhora do Ó Parklet, São Paulo, Brazil The following statistics helped Estudio HAA! achieve 12th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 7 Total Projects 17 11. FCstudio © FCstudio FCstudio was founded by the architect Flavio Castro after he spent a 3 year period in Spain studying at the Catalunha Polytechnic University. Before that, he worked in several different national and international architectural firms such as MAB Arquitectura, Arteks Arquitectura and Hidalgo&Hartmann in Spain and Núcleo de Arquitetura, AR.CO., Fundação MASP and MMBB Arquitetos in Brazil. He has also taken part in many architectural competitions in collaboration with the above-mentioned firms and also on his own. At the moment a multidisciplinary team that is put together according to the characteristics and complexity of the projects and the collaboration of associated architects staffs the studio. Some of FCstudio’s most prominent projects include: Ibirapuera Apartment, São Paulo, Brazil Planalto House, São Paulo, Brazil Box House, São Paulo, Brazil Ruda Huts, Gonçalves, Brazil Mirante do Horto House, São Paulo, Brazil The following statistics helped FCstudio achieve 11th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 1 Featured Projects 6 Total Projects 71 10. FGMF © FGMF Created in 1999, FGMF produces contemporary architecture, without restraints regarding the use of material and building techniques, seeking to explore the connection between architecture and its environment. In these few years of existence, we’ve had the opportunity to deal with a wide range of architectural scales and programs, what enhances our belief that, just as life itself, architecture ought to be plural, heterogeneous and dynamic. Our dedication and hard work led us to the satisfaction of receiving relevant national and international awards, among which some from the Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil (IAB), Chicago Athenaeum, AIT, Living Steel, Editora Abril and Dedalo Minosse. Some of FGMF’s most prominent projects include: House 4×30, São Paulo, Brazil Casa Rex BPGM Law Firm Natura’s Showroom Santo André Corujas Building, São Paulo, Brazil The following statistics helped FGMF achieve 10th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 1 Featured Projects 7 Total Projects 17 9. CANDIDA TABET ARQUITETURA © Romulo Fialdini Daring, versatility, and balance are the principal characteristics of the work of Candida Tabet’s architectural office. Based in Sao Paulo since 1982 the studio has realized residential, commercial, and institutional projects around the globe creatively combining architecture and interior design. The designs are developed on the basis of research into materials and on elaborate construction, always taking into consideration the environments in which they are to come to life. The projects are marked by contemporary design complemented by convenient and authentic solutions. There is no pre-determined script for the architectural incursions. In general they start with the overall layout and might terminate with the design of a very special lamp. Some of CANDIDA TABET ARQUITETURA’s most prominent projects include: MURILLO Housing, Montevideo, Uruguay PIX House, Campos do Jordão, Brazil BARONEZA House, Bragança Paulista, Brazil LUNA LLENA House, Punta del Este, Uruguay ACP House, Porto Feliz, SP, Brazil The following statistics helped CANDIDA TABET ARQUITETURA achieve 9th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 1 Featured Projects 8 Total Projects 17 8. Gustavo Penna Arquiteto & Associados © Gustavo Penna Arquiteto & Associados In 1974, Gustavo Penna founded GPA&A, an architecture office that still occupies the same centennial, eclectic-style house that once belonged to his grandparents in downtown Belo Horizonte. In that inspiring building, a team of 30 professionals think, design and build under the assurance that architecture is key to shaping the identity of a country. GPA&A’s projects present, upon modernist and baroque heritages, a look that is sensitive to architecture’s contemporary issues. Some of Gustavo Penna Arquiteto & Associados’ most prominent projects include: CarmoCoffees, Carmo de Minas, Brazil BRT Station, Belo Horizonte, Brazil All Saints Chapel, Martinho Campos, Brazil Community Center Serra Dourada, Vespasiano, Brazil Ateliê Wäls , Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil The following statistics helped Gustavo Penna Arquiteto & Associados achieve 8th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 3 Featured Projects 6 Total Projects 15 7. BLOCO Arquitetos © BLOCO Arquitetos BLOCO Arquitetos was founded in Brasília by Daniel Mangabeira, Henrique Coutinho and Matheus Seco. The three lead a team of architects with diverse backgrounds, experiences and interests. Most of the projects that are present on this site are presented through photographs of built works, reflecting the firm’s wide experience in the materialization of projects of different scales and programs, from houses and buildings to interiors and temporary installations. BLOCO’s projects are directly related to specific constraints that can range from the topography and solar orientation of a land to the budget and available labor. The limits imposed by each program are seen as opportunities for creation. Some of BLOCO Arquitetos’ most prominent projects include: Paineira House, Brasília, Brazil Outsider Store, Brasília, Brazil Revitalization of Oscar Niemeyer’s Tea House, Brasilia, Brazil Migliari Guimãraes House, Brasília, Brazil POSEAD Building, Brasília, Brazil The following statistics helped BLOCO Arquitetos achieve 7th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 9 Total Projects 16 6. Arquitetura Nacional © Arquitetura Nacional We believe that the design process is similar to a puzzle. Each project’s different and relevant aspect represents one piece. Our challenge ends the moment we get the perfect fit for all parts, creating an unique, timeless and universal outcome. In order to achieve this goal, we respectfully look back at the past and try to put into practice principles that make architecture recognized and admired nowadays, with special attention to new technologies that can help us make ideal projects in accordance with local needs. Some of Arquitetura Nacional’s most prominent projects include: thyssenkrupp global shared services, Porto Alegre, Brazil Lua House, Xangri-lá, Brazil Praça Municipal 47, Porto Alegre, Brazil Kiev 104, Porto Alegre, Brazil Enseada House, Xangri-lá, Brazil The following statistics helped Arquitetura Nacional achieve 6th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: Featured Projects 10 Total Projects 56 5. STUDIO ARTHUR CASAS © STUDIO ARTHUR CASAS From inside to outside, from object to landscape, Studio Arthur Casas’ creations are intrinsically connected in a horizontal scale. Dialogue is the key for conceiving projects that range from a chair to an urban plan, influenced by a spirit both modern and contemporary, Brazilian and cosmopolitan. The Studio works in several areas, including residential and commercial architecture, public competitions, interior and product design. Projects are guided by the quest for essential elements, from raw materials to refined details that showcase our concern with excellence in every scale. From our offices in São Paulo and New York, our team works in simultaneous projects in several countries. Some of STUDIO ARTHUR CASAS’ most prominent projects include: Boa Vista House, Porto Feliz, SP, Brazil Quinta da Baronesa Casa Itu, Brazil JY House, Porto Feliz, SP, Brazil Coudelaria, Itu, SP, Brazil The following statistics helped STUDIO ARTHUR CASAS achieve 5th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Finalist 1 Featured Projects 14 Total Projects 77 4. TETRO ARQUITETURA © TETRO ARQUITETURA Based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the office is formed by architects Carlos Maia, Débora Mendes and Igor Macedo. The office’s professional practice is based on the careful study of the premises and conditions of the site and the client, seeking a unique and unrepeatable solution to each project. Fundamentals such as integration with nature, use of natural materials and exploration of architectural voids are characteristics that permeate every project, from urban scale to furniture design. The office was awarded with the first prize in the competition for the Minas Gerais Symphony Orchestra Headquarters. It is responsible for projects of museums, venues, commercial, residential and industrial buildings in various states of Brazil. Some of TETRO ARQUITETURA’s most prominent projects include: Açucena House, Nova Lima, Brazil Inclined Slab House, Brazil Serra do Cipó House, Brazil Parque do Rola Moça Visitors Center, Brazil Xingu house, Nova Lima, MG, Brazil The following statistics helped TETRO ARQUITETURA achieve 4th place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 1 Featured Projects 13 Total Projects 66 3. Jacobsen Arquitetura © Leonardo Finotti Paulo Jacobsen, after doing great partnerships with three generations of Bernardes (internship with Sergio Bernardes, partner of Claudio Bernardes for 25 years and partner of Thiago Bernardes for 10 years), founded in 2012 the office Jacobsen Arquitetura, with your son Bernardo Jacobsen and Eza Viegas, as partner in interior design department. Jacobsen Arquitetura has joined the experience of over 800 projects developed by Paulo in several segments of the architecture, but with an emphasis on high standard residential architecture, with the international performance of Bernardo, who worked with architects such as Christian de Portzamparc and Shigeru Ban. Some of Jacobsen Arquitetura’s most prominent projects include: MAR – Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil JN House, Petrópolis, Brazil BV House, Porto Feliz, Brazil RT House, Paraty, Brazil NUBE Building, São Paulo, Brazil The following statistics helped Jacobsen Arquitetura achieve 3rd place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 1 A+Awards Finalist 2 Featured Projects 19 Total Projects 28 2. Studio MK27 © Studio MK27 Studio MK27 located in the chaotic city of São Paulo was founded in the late 70’s by architect Marcio Kogan and today is comprised of 40 architects and various collaborators worldwide. The architects of the team, great admirers of the Brazilian modernism generation, seek to fulfill the task of rethinking and giving continuity to this iconic architectural movement. Some of Studio MK27’s most prominent projects include: Flag House, Whistler, Canada Skyspace Amarta, Maldives Micasa Vol.C, São Paulo, Brazil Sand House, Trancoso, Brazil Patina Maldives Hotel, Maldives The following statistics helped Studio MK27 achieve 2nd place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 3 A+Awards Finalist 9 Featured Projects 20 Total Projects 27 1. Bernardes Arquitetura © Leonardo Finotti Bernardes Arquitetura is the result of a history that spans generations. It is a space created in 2012 by Thiago Bernardes where he seeks to deepen his authorial work and create new partnerships. Today the partners are Nuno Costa Nunes, Márcia Santoro, Camila Tariki, Dante Furlan, Francisco Abreu, Rafael de Oliveira,Thiago Moretti and Antonia Bernardes. Bernardes Arquitetura develops projects across various programs and scales. With offices in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Lisbon, the team is made up of 130 professionals who work in the areas of architecture, urbanism and interior design. The office’s portfolio ranges from residential and commercial projects, including hotels, restaurants, cultural and educational institutions, to urban projects, which include condominiums, neighborhoods and masterplans. Our multidisciplinary team is composed of professionals who share a philosophy of collaborative work with the objective of achieving excellence and efficiency in each project. Some of Bernardes Arquitetura’s most prominent projects include: Asa House, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil MAR – Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Featured image: Delta House, Guarujá, Brazil Joá Chapel, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Península House, Guarujá, SP, Brazil The following statistics helped Bernardes Arquitetura achieve 1st place in the 30 Best Architecture Firms in Brazil: A+Awards Winner 7 A+Awards Finalist 2 Featured Projects 20 Total Projects 46 Why Should I Trust Architizer’s Ranking? With more than 30,000 architecture firms and over 130,000 projects within its database, Architizer is proud to host the world’s largest online community of architects and building product manufacturers. Its celebrated A+Awards program is also the largest celebration of architecture and building products, with more than 400 jurors and hundreds of thousands of public votes helping to recognize the world’s best architecture each year. Architizer also powers firm directories for a number of AIA (American Institute of Architects) Chapters nationwide, including the official directory of architecture firms for AIA New York. An example of a project page on Architizer with Project Award Badges highlighted A Guide to Project Awards The blue “+” badge denotes that a project has won a prestigious A+Award as described above. Hovering over the badge reveals details of the award, including award category, year, and whether the project won the jury or popular choice award. The orange Project of the Day and yellow Featured Project badges are awarded by Architizer’s Editorial team, and are selected based on a number of factors. The following factors increase a project’s likelihood of being featured or awarded Project of the Day status: Project completed within the last 3 years A well written, concise project description of at least 3 paragraphs Architectural design with a high level of both functional and aesthetic value High quality, in focus photographs At least 8 photographs of both the interior and exterior of the building Inclusion of architectural drawings and renderings Inclusion of construction photographs There are 7 Projects of the Day each week and a further 31 Featured Projects. Each Project of the Day is published on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Stories, while each Featured Project is published on Facebook. Each Project of the Day also features in Architizer’s Weekly Projects Newsletter and shared with 170,000 subscribers. We’re constantly look for the world’s best architects to join our community. If you would like to understand more about this ranking list and learn how your firm can achieve a presence on it, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at editorial@architizer.com. The post 30 Best Architecture and Design Firms in Brazil appeared first on Journal.

Dedicated to modern design

Zaha Hadid Architects transforms public transit at the KAFD Metro Station in Riyadh with futuristic architecture, innovation, and urban connection.

A striking blend of futuristic design and advanced transit planning has emerged in Riyadh, where Zaha Hadid Architects has redefined public transportation with the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) Metro Station. As part of the massive Riyadh Metro project, this architectural landmark plays a pivotal role in a transformative network set to reshape urban life in Saudi Arabia’s capital. The Riyadh Metro system, developed by the Royal Commission for Riyadh City, stands as the globe’s longest automated rail network, stretching across more than 176 kilometers. With six lines and 85 stations, the system connects key destinations across the city, addressing growing urban demands with an environmentally conscious approach. At full capacity, the network is expected to accommodate up to 3.6 million passengers daily, helping to cut reliance on private vehicles and ease city-wide congestion. Strategically situated within the bustling KAFD, the station designed by ZHA functions as a central hub that links air travel, metro lines, and local monorail services. Its location enables fluid movement between Riyadh’s financial core and King Khalid International Airport, while also offering easy access to nearby bus connections and walkable public spaces. What sets the KAFD station apart is its sculptural and performance-driven architecture. ZHA’s design draws on patterns of movement – both human and environmental – to shape the structure’s layout and skin. The core design features a three-dimensional matrix of flowing forms inspired by traffic modeling, where undulating sine waves reflect the station’s pulse throughout the day. These dynamic lines influence both internal circulation and the rhythm of the external cladding. The facade comprises precision-cast concrete panels, serving a dual purpose: it delivers a distinctive aesthetic and moderates the desert climate. The perforated outer shell takes cues from traditional Middle Eastern shading techniques, reinterpreting them through a contemporary lens. The result is a surface that not only reduces heat gain but also mirrors the intricate patterns etched into desert landscapes by shifting sands and winds. Internally, the station is arranged across four levels and includes six platforms, creating a seamless multi-modal experience for commuters. ZHA’s meticulous design process prioritized functionality as much as form – balancing spatial elegance with structural efficiency. Elements such as passive cooling strategies, energy-efficient systems, and responsive climate controls contribute to a significantly reduced carbon footprint. In recognition of its environmental credentials, the KAFD Metro Station has been awarded LEED Gold certification, a testament to the design’s sustainability and innovation. This achievement aligns with the broader vision of the Riyadh Metro to promote green infrastructure while meeting the transportation needs of a rapidly expanding urban population. In the first 11 weeks alone, over 18 million passengers used the station, which is now a symbol of Riyadh’s ambition to harmonize cutting-edge architecture with sustainable urban growth. The KAFD Metro Station exemplifies how thoughtful design can elevate everyday experiences, transforming routine travel into an encounter with visionary urbanism. To learn more about Zaha Hadid Architects, visit zaha-hadid.com. Photography courtesy of © Hufton+Crow.

Palette Architecture designed the modern Shift House in East Hampton, New York out of prefabricated modules, creating a compact yet striking home.

Tucked into a tree-lined area of East Hampton, New York, the Shift House is a new residential project by Palette Architecture that embodies a new paradigm in modern living, where design integrity meets the efficiencies of prefabricated construction. At just 1,600 square feet, this compact yet striking home is a compelling example of how modular building methods can coexist with high-end design and a deep connection to the natural world. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many New Yorkers found themselves reconsidering the environments they called home. The appeal of urban life – with its density, energy, and constant motion – gave way to a desire for peace, privacy, and proximity to nature. For one family of four, who already owned a townhouse in Brooklyn, the solution came in the form of a second home – one that would serve as a retreat, a workspace, and a space for togetherness in the calm of East Hampton’s wooded neighborhoods. This desire for a timely and affordable build led Palette Architecture to suggest an unconventional approach: modular prefabrication. With traditional construction plagued by material delays, workforce shortages, and rising costs, the firm saw an opportunity to sidestep these issues by turning to factory-fabricated modules. But this wasn’t simply a matter of expediency. The architects were determined to prove that modular design could be not just practical, but beautiful – and expressive of their clients’ values and lifestyles. Modular construction often carries a reputation for compromise: cramped layouts, uninspired aesthetics, and limited flexibility. Palette Architecture sought to break these assumptions from the start. The design of Shift House was driven by both the possibilities and the constraints of prefabrication. With transportation size restrictions dictating module dimensions, the team had to think creatively about spatial composition. The final configuration is deceptively simple: three main modules form the structural core of the home – housing bedrooms, bathrooms, and a generous open-plan living area. To add volume and light to the central gathering space, five prefabricated panels were designed to lift the ceiling height well beyond standard modular limits. This move not only enhanced the interior experience but also demonstrated how strategic interventions can elevate prefab architecture into something truly special. The modules were manufactured offsite with remarkable precision, arriving ready for rapid assembly. In fact, the entire structure was erected in a single day, complete with mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems in place. Afterward, onsite crews completed the finishes, cladding, and select millwork – blending factory efficiency with handcrafted detail. The residence is thoughtfully sited at the edge of a grassy backyard, forming a gentle L-shape that embraces a private lawn. This layout creates a natural courtyard, framed on one side by the house itself and on the others by a minimalist swimming pool and carefully planted rows of trees. The resulting outdoor space feels protected and intimate – a quiet oasis removed from the outside world. The landscaping is intentionally dualistic: the rear yard is lush and inviting, while the front comprises drought-resistant plants and gravel, offering a low-maintenance, understated approach to curb appeal. Large windows dominate the living and dining areas, turning the interior into a frame for the outdoors. Whether cooking in the kitchen, relaxing with family, or waking up in one of the bedrooms, views of the verdant surroundings are always close at hand. The house departs from the sterility sometimes associated with modular construction. Instead, it’s warm, textural, and carefully curated. Custom millwork is used not only to add to the aesthetics but also to help visually tie the modular components together. Each room is given a distinct material identity – through cabinet finishes, wood tones, and subtle design cues – creating a sense of discovery and depth within a relatively modest footprint. The natural materials selected for the interiors further echo the surrounding landscape. Wood grains, organic textures, and earthy tones are paired with minimalist forms to create a modern yet inviting atmosphere. This balance between simplicity and character is a hallmark of Palette Architecture’s approach. For more information on Palette Architecture or Shift House, visit palettearch.com. Photography by Jody Kivort, courtesy of v2com.

Naki Atelier carefully curates a blend of old and new, where industrial elements feel fresh, in a vibrant apartment in Ermionida, Greece.

In the heart of Ermionida, Greece, a former machinery workshop has been given a vibrant new identity as a dynamic and contemporary living space. Apartment V, a project by Anastasia Naki of Naki Atelier, breathes new life into a once-industrial setting, integrating modern design elements while paying homage to its past. Spanning 807 square feet, the residence is strategically designed to optimize natural light. A wall of glass blocks surround the front entrance allowing light to enter the space while also prioritizing privacy. With only one external-facing facade, the architectural team prioritized its design to flood the interior with daylight, enhancing both ambiance and energy efficiency. The layout is thoughtfully structured, dividing the home into two primary zones. The private section, containing two bedrooms and a bathroom, is accessible via a corridor that extends from the kitchen. Meanwhile, the public area of the apartment is an expansive, open-plan living area that combines various functions without compromising comfort or aesthetic appeal. A defining feature of the renovation is a suspended steel loft – in a cherry red hue that is seen throughout the space – which serves multiple purposes. Hovering above the kitchen and dining space, this mezzanine area acts as an additional relaxation zone while simultaneously shaping the perception of height in the room. The elevated structure provides a sense of intimacy, counterbalancing the generous 14-foot-high ceilings. By incorporating this level, the design maintains an open connection between different parts of the apartment while ensuring a warm and inviting atmosphere. Leading up to the mezzanine and suspended from the back of the kitchen island, the floating staircase makes a 90-degree turn midway up and continues to the top with added treads that tie the red between the two floors. The material selection reflects both the industrial history of the space and a bold contemporary vision. A red steel framework anchors the design, echoing the building’s original function, while stainless steel custom-made furniture reinforces the industrial aesthetic. To balance these raw, robust elements, the interior features Tinos green marble, bold-hued tiles, thick textiles, and raw birch plywood – each adding texture and warmth to the space. For more information on Naki Atelier, click here. Photography by Thanos Palaskos / Bessawissa Studio.

More than just a residence, OZA Design's Milo Apartment is an homage to Colmar, France's artistic heritage and a testament to local creative genius.

Forward-thinking design ideology from Gustave Eiffel’s era echoes in the modern sensibilities behind contemporary interior architecture found in urban French dwellings. But what throughline links structures like the famed tower with local architecture in a place such as Colmar, France? Borrowing a term coined by the late engineering scholar David Billington – structural art. Fine artists hailing from the area like Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who collaborated with Gustave Eiffel to create the equally famous Statue of Liberty, left the northeastern Alsace region with an indelible creative charge. An OZA Design project, the Milo Apartment, shares unique DNA with other works whose structural efficiency and material economy yield an expressive personal style. Paralleling Paris’s Haussmannian apartments (rational plans, geometric elements, streamlined adornments) and tangential to the opulent châteaus around its periphery, this residence blends French and German influences with historical references and the surrounding material vernacular sans period style. Özge Öztürk and Alexandre Simeray, the principal architects behind OZA, imbue their work with a sense of nostalgia without pandering to the past. “In our quest to honor Colmar’s artistic heritage, we collaborated closely with local artisans, ensuring that every detail of Milo Apartment reflects the city’s creative spirit. From custom metal fixtures to bespoke furnishings, each element was crafted with care, preserving the essence of Colmar’s artisanal tradition.” The residence occupies part of a former commercial building constructed in 1912 by local architect Georg Bloch. It is situated on Place des Martyrs de la Résistance and surrounded by colorful timber-framed houses, narrow streets, and lively balconies. It stands as a testament to the staying power of progressive design showcasing modern, brutalist properties that were far ahead of their time. An early example of reinforced concrete architecture, the structure boasted integrated electricity, a secured generator, an elevator with an operator, and iconic retail establishments on the ground floor. Businesses continue to fill that space through today. Leaning into the site’s daylit factory concept, the apartment home celebrates the residents’ desire for a more connected family lifestyle within the 2,700-square-foot floor plan, which becomes more expansive in sections that enjoy 12-foot ceilings. The public spaces comprise an entryway, kitchen, living, and dining area – all with dramatic sight lines that bear witness to elegant material play. The private spaces, which can be made more public through architectural devices, include a luxurious variety: the primary bedroom with spa-like ensuite and dressing room; two guest bedrooms that share a large full bathroom; a modest powder room; a generous utility area; and 860 square feet of storage space hidden above some of the secondary spaces. Aesthetics and layout composition follow Frank Lloyd Wright’s oft-represented adage “form and function are one.” The apartment is a captivating amalgam of sheer glass, matte metal, concrete, white brick, light linen curtains, and dark wood paneling that serve to please the eye, make space, and articulate programming in plan. “As we resolved the challenges we had and provided a serene space with a muted color palette that allows the exterior view to become an artwork in the project,” the duo adds. “We presented an extremely cosy and comfortable feeling inside as a result with the idea of ‘comfort via minimalism.’” The foyer’s deep paneling pulls guests in and pushes them out to the trio of spaces comprising the main great room – another nod to Wright’s work. Bespoke kitchen details and long countertop surfaces span the room to suggest places for family and friends to cook or casually commune. In gentle contrast, the dining area, which is framed by open shelving and a tubular metal structure, proposes a more formal space for long dinners and gatherings. Black mullions and corresponding kick plates fix tall glazed panels and doors to the floor. Each length is lined with floor-length, light, cotton-linen panels that can be drawn closed from inside the bedrooms at each resident’s discretion. And black stained wood is juxtaposed with white gypsum wall finishes as a direct reference to Colmar’s coal industry. Milo’s monochrome palette, technical execution, and artistic principles are underpinned by exemplary structural art. The designers continue: “Raw ironwork, locally sourced and assembled with meticulous craftsmanship, pays homage to Bartholdi’s artistic vision and the region’s storied iron industry. The use of brick, concrete, and dark timber further reinforces the industrial aesthetic, while subtle nods to the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower evoke a sense of timeless grandeur.” OZA Design To see other projects by the inimitable duo, visit ozadesign.com. Photography by Edvinas Bruzas.

Aanandam is a wellness-inspired penthouse in Gurugram by Logic Design + Build that combines brutalism, modern elegance, and biophilia.

In the bustling core of Gurugram, India, a tranquil escape comes to life – Aanandam, a 4,800-square-foot penthouse reimagined by Logic Design + Build, transcends the conventions of metropolitan living. Conceived as a sanctuary for holistic wellness, this space reflects a thoughtful evolution into a modern villa-like haven, rooted in mindfulness, individual identity, and understated grandeur. At the intersection of architectural rigor and sensory refinement, Aanandam navigates the fine line between the raw and the refined. Here, elements of urban boldness – exposed concrete, linear forms, and open structural expanses – are carefully softened with tactile natural finishes and curated warmth. Every room has been developed with the resident’s lifestyle in mind, turning everyday routines into intimate experiences through a deeply customized approach. Central to the project’s brutalist design language is the celebration of light as more than mere illumination. It shapes moods, sculpts materials, and sets the tone for each zone within the home. Broad apertures, thoughtful spatial orientation, and strategic reflections allow sunlight to become an active participant in the design, revealing textures, enhancing volumes, and offering moments of pause throughout the day. Beyond aesthetics, Aanandam presents a fresh narrative in wellness-centric urban design. By reinterpreting spatial planning, the designers have fostered an atmosphere of openness, fluidity, and stillness. Nature subtly weaves through the apartment – be it through organic textures, curated greenery, or the earthy hues that ground the interiors. A biophilic focal point boldly climbs up the double-height living room in the form of a living wall housing a variety of green plants. Adding to the grandeur of the wall is an arched accent of three-dimensional wood panels displaying the familiar arch shape oriented in different directions. The result is a living environment that encourages emotional equilibrium, mindfulness, and rejuvenation. Craftsmanship plays a pivotal role in establishing the project’s bespoke character. Every element, from hand-selected stone surfaces to tailor-made furnishings, embodies a commitment to authenticity and quality. The contrast between raw materials like lime plaster and exposed brick, and the sophistication of marble, brass, and glass, adds visual depth while preserving a cohesive tone of relaxed luxury. Opposite the garden wall is another visually compelling element that connects the two floors of the penthouse. The stunning staircase comprises floating brass treads, uniquely shaped as parallelograms, flanked on one side with black and white marble and panels of glass on the front side as not to block the beauty of the stairs behind it. A tube of brass cascades from the ceiling to form a minimalist handrail to complete the look. Aanandam also takes a progressive step in sustainability, integrating eco-conscious materials and smart systems that support energy efficiency without compromising on elegance. Its minimal ecological footprint complements its forward-thinking design ethos – fusing environmental responsibility with aesthetic intention. For more information on Logic Design + Build, visit logic.co.in. Photography by Ashish Sahi.

LA Cool is a Sydney outdoor project, complete with an infinity pool and pavilion by Carter Williamson, that gives nod to California modernism.

Situated high above Newport Beach in Sydney, Australia, LA Cool is a outdoor living space that completes the original vision of Newport House, a 2015 project by Carter Williamson Architects. This addition transforms the property into a seamless blend of indoor and outdoor luxury, creating an environment that feels equally inviting throughout all seasons. Designed with a deep understanding of the coastal landscape and inspired by the sleek, understated elegance of Californian modernism, LA Cool celebrates natural beauty while enhancing functionality and comfort for year-round enjoyment. The project embodies the essence of indoor-outdoor living – a concept synonymous with the laid-back lifestyle of the Southern California coast. Drawing influence from iconic mid-century designs that emerged in Palm Springs and Los Angeles during the 1950s and 60s, the space adopts the philosophy of creating fluid transitions between indoor and outdoor areas. Just like the low-slung, minimalist pavilions that dotted the Californian landscape, LA Cool prioritizes openness, blurring the boundaries between home and nature. These iconic Californian designs, pioneered by architects such as Richard Neutra and Pierre Koenig, emphasized simple, geometric forms and expansive glass walls that dissolved the line between indoors and outdoors. Similarly, LA Cool channels this spirit with its open-plan design and expansive pavilion that invites the surrounding landscape into the living space. Positioned to maximize panoramic views of Newport Beach and Pittwater, the addition takes full advantage of its elevated position, offering breathtaking vistas that become an integral part of everyday life. The design pays homage to the principles of California modernism by embracing a minimalist aesthetic that prioritizes clean lines and simplicity. The pavilion’s low-profile structure allows it to sit unobtrusively within its coastal surroundings, ensuring the focus remains on the breathtaking 180-degree views that envelop the site. By using a pure, natural material palette that mirrors the existing Newport House, LA Cool maintains a balance between indoor and outdoor spaces, reinforcing a sense of cohesion. A hallmark of LA Cool is its adaptable pavilion, meticulously crafted to suit the ever-changing Australian climate. Unlike traditional outdoor spaces that are limited to summer use, this pavilion offers both covered and uncovered sections, ensuring it remains functional and comfortable regardless of the season. A series of strategically placed skylights punctuate the roof, flooding the space with natural light while maintaining a sense of openness and connection to the outdoors. Equipped with thoughtful amenities, LA Cool transforms outdoor living into a year-round experience. A cozy fireplace warms the pavilion during cooler months, creating an inviting atmosphere perfect for gathering with family and friends. Meanwhile, the fully equipped outdoor kitchen, complete with a woodfire pizza oven, encourages leisurely al fresco dining. The selection of materials, including natural stone, timber, and neutral hues, reflects a deep respect for the surrounding landscape. These elements echo the tactile qualities of California’s desert modernism while simultaneously celebrating the coastal textures and tones of Sydney’s Northern Beaches. The result is a space that feels effortlessly integrated into its environment, where every element has been carefully curated to enhance the experience of living by the sea. Drawing inspiration from the play of light and shadow in California’s desert homes, the design incorporates sculptural cut-outs in the pavilion’s western wall, allowing the golden hues of the evening sun to filter through the living space. This careful interplay of light creates a dynamic, ever-changing atmosphere that shifts with the time of day and the seasons. For more information on LA Cool and Carter Williamson Architects, visit carterwilliamson.com. Photography by Ben Guthrie.

SHED Architecture & Design reimagines a 1970s Gordon Walker condo in Seattle to blend its mid-century charm with modern conveniences.

Perched on the edge of Seattle’s lush St. Mark’s Greenbelt and a short walk from the vibrant Capitol Hill neighborhood, a 1979 condo designed by renowned architect Gordon Walker recently underwent a transformative remodel by SHED Architecture & Design. Walker, co-founder of Olson Walker (now Olson Kundig), left an indelible legacy in the Pacific Northwest, and this project aimed to honor his original vision while adapting the space for contemporary living. The condo’s owner was initially drawn to the property’s serene views of the densely forested Greenbelt and its close proximity to Volunteer Park, an ideal setting for daily walks with his two Akitas, Chela and Bosco. While the architectural framework of the 1,675-square-foot space remained strong, the interiors needed updates to better suit modern needs. The remodel sought to preserve Walker’s original design principles – prioritizing a connection to nature and contextual harmony – while incorporating influences from the owner’s global travels, particularly to Australia, Korea, and Japan. SHED’s approach blended respect for Walker’s architectural sensibilities with the owner’s desire for a space that balances openness and privacy. Key goals included creating an inviting and functional kitchen for a professionally trained chef, enhancing natural light, and crafting luxurious yet serene bedroom suites. As a professionally trained chef, the owner envisioned a kitchen that was both highly functional and visually striking. SHED transformed the space into a culinary haven with rift-sawn white oak cabinetry crafted by Henrybuilt. The new layout allows for multiple cooks to work comfortably while maintaining a clean, minimalist aesthetic that encourages social interaction and ease of movement. Natural light floods the living room through expansive floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the Greenbelt views, creating a seamless indoor-outdoor connection. A refined material palette enhances the space, with a modernized fireplace clad in blackened steel and set atop a quartzite hearth. Quartzite remnants were repurposed to craft a custom coffee table and side table, adding continuity and sustainability to the design. The open-plan layout effortlessly connects the living room to the dining area, kitchen, and outdoor patio, where a custom concrete fire pit anchors a wood bench – an inviting space for gatherings and quiet reflection alike. The condo’s unassuming exterior maintains its quiet presence amid Capitol Hill’s bustling environment, but stepping inside reveals a striking transformation. The double-height entryway now features a sage-green front door, a sculptural chandelier, and a reimagined stairway enclosed with a white powder-coated steel guardrail. The formerly open-tread staircase was enclosed, not only providing additional closet storage but also carving out a cozy nook for the dogs. The upper level was reconfigured to accommodate two private bedroom suites – one primary and one for guests – each designed to evoke a sense of calm and sophistication. Grasscloth accent walls, white oak paneling, and custom casework create warm and inviting spaces. The bathrooms, compact yet luxurious, feature milestone plaster walls, Japanese-inspired tile, and a steam room, offering a spa-like experience. Thoughtfully integrated storage enhances functionality without compromising aesthetics. A private patio adjacent to the suites provides a peaceful outdoor retreat and a subtle visual connection to the street below. Throughout the condo, SHED introduced new glazing, electric shades, and improved insulation to address the challenges of temperature control, transforming previously stuffy interiors into a comfortable, climate-controlled sanctuary. The remodel successfully balances reverence for Walker’s original design with the demands of modern living, resulting in a timeless yet contemporary home that reflects both the heritage of the Pacific Northwest and the unique experiences of its owner. Before photos: For more information on SHED Architecture & Design, visit shedbuilt.com. Photography by Rafael Soldi.

Michael Hsu's renovation of Travis Heights Historic Home preserves a Texas landmark while introducing contemporary elements.

In the heart of Austin’s Travis Heights neighborhood, the afternoon sun streams through the vast north-facing glass addition of the Travis Heights Historic Home by architect Michael Hsu Office of Architecture. Light casts geometric shadows across limestone floors embedded with ancient fossils – 145-million-year-old remnants of giant clams that once inhabited this land, now preserved alongside 19th-century horseshoes and indigenous arrowheads. This juxtaposition forms the conceptual foundation of this renovation project, highlighting how time and place can be interpreted. James Gibson Swisher, Texas Ranger and signatory of the Texas Declaration of Independence, built the brick home in 1851 using materials fashioned from a kiln he constructed along the Colorado River. Today, it stands as the second oldest brick residence in Texas, its original foundation now serving as the first floor – a testament to the resourcefulness of frontier craftspeople working with local resources and traditional techniques. The current owner, driven by a deep appreciation for Austin’s architectural heritage, approached the renovation with reverence. They wanted to be sure the addition would not mimic or be confused with the rare original structure, and instead, it should be true to its time. This philosophy manifests in the contemporary glass structure that frames downtown views and creates an intimate connection with the surrounding landscape. The landscape design extends onto a rare 1.25-acre urban plot. Native gardens, a prairie roof meadow atop the cabana, and thoughtfully integrated recreational spaces create a sustainable backdrop that spotlights Texas’ natural surroundings while providing contemporary amenities. When craftsmen discovered charred wood remnants from a 1920s attic fire, rather than discarding these damaged elements, they repurposed them as ceiling material for the ground floor spa bathroom – transforming damage into design. As such, the interiors create a dialogue between different eras. The preserved historic sections embrace a lounge-like atmosphere with rich textures and ambient illumination, while the modern addition offers bright, airy spaces ideal for gathering. A grand spiral staircase connects these four distinct levels. Visit Michael Hsu Office of Architecture’s website for more information. Photography by Chase Daniel.

In a California coastal community, Minarc designed Zen House for indoor/outdoor living with a tranquil, nature-inspired ambiance.

Nestled in the heart of Manhattan Beach, California, Zen House by Minarc fuses modern design with a tranquil, nature-inspired ambiance. Created for software developers and their family, this residence accommodates both daily living and visiting loved ones, all while emphasizing an active and outdoor lifestyle. The property consists of a sleek two-story main residence and a well-integrated Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) guest suite. Zen House draws heavily from the family’s travels, particularly their fondness for Bali, Indonesia. Guests are welcomed by an inviting outdoor courtyard featuring a koi fish pond and a calming water feature, which serves as a natural buffer to minimize street noise. The soothing sounds of flowing water and the visual serenity of the pond create a meditative environment. Complementing this serene entry, olive trees evoke cherished memories from family vacations in Greece and Italy, reinforcing the home’s connection to nature and travel. A key element of the design is the fluidity between indoor and outdoor spaces. Large sliding doors and expansive windows maximize natural light and facilitate cross-ventilation, ensuring that the home remains airy and bright throughout the day. An open roof deck, strategically placed above part of the first floor, provides a versatile outdoor area with sweeping views of the pool and surrounding landscape. Additionally, a basketball court adjacent to the pool links the ADU to the main home, establishing a dynamic recreational space for the family and their visitors. The interior of Zen House reflects a carefully curated blend of natural materials and a restrained color palette. Wood, concrete, and fire elements come together to create a warm, peaceful atmosphere that encourages relaxation. The subdued hues allow the raw beauty of these materials to take center stage. The homeowners played an active role in the design process, with the husband handcrafting all the cabinets throughout the home. Using sustainable Valchromat MDF, finished with natural wood veneers or high-pressure laminates, the custom cabinetry adds a personal and environmentally conscious touch to the living spaces. The residence balances openness and privacy by incorporating modest yet functional private spaces. Bedrooms and five accompanying bathrooms provide ample room for both family members and guests, ensuring comfort without compromising the home’s minimalist aesthetic. Thoughtful space planning allows for easy transitions between communal and private areas, enhancing the overall livability of the home. Minarc’s dedication to sustainability is evident throughout the project. The home utilizes Kebony modified lumber for cladding, decking, and fencing, chosen for its durability and minimal environmental impact. Prefabricated mnmMOD panels were employed during construction, offering superior insulation and reducing waste through precise assembly. This approach not only enhances energy efficiency but also helps maintain consistent indoor temperatures, minimizing the need for traditional heating and cooling systems. The integration of radiant floor heating powered by heat pumps and high-efficiency appliances further reduces the home’s carbon footprint, contributing to a sustainable and comfortable living environment. To learn more about Minarc, visit minarc.com. Photography by Art Gray, courtesy of Minarc.

The futuristic XR Lab in the U.K. was designed by WindsorPatania Architects for collaboration and development around mixed reality tech.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), collectively known together as Mixed Reality (XR), are rapidly advancing as companies focus on miniaturizing AR technology and enhancing VR capabilities. While fully immersive virtual collaboration may be the future, today’s priority is to develop, learn, and collaborate on XR technology in the physical world. This vision is at the heart of the new XR Lab, designed by WindsorPatania Architects. The new XR Lab space is located at West Suffolk College in the United Kingdom, and was recently awarded the Inspiring Learning Space Award at the 2024 Education Estates Awards. The lab is an impressive high-tech space featuring a “Collaboration Theatre,” a Green Room, and a Conference Room. But this Green Room isn’t the typical waiting area used in theaters or backstage of a concert venue – it’s a fully immersive environment with green ceilings, walls, and floors, designed to make it easier to isolate real-world objects by removing the background, similar to green screen effects used in film production. Though it might seem that interior design wouldn’t be a priority in a space dedicated to virtual experiences, the architecture is striking. The XR Lab repurposes an old workshop hangar and incorporates acoustic insulation to enhance XR immersion. Inside, high-end cameras and microphones are strategically placed to create a more natural and seamless XR experience. Beyond serving as a cutting-edge learning environment, the lab is also positioned as a business hub for the surrounding region, particularly focused on the development of XR projectors. “The XR Lab is truly an inspired learning space, where ambitious architecture embodies the function of the building,” says Giovanni Patania, co-director of WindsonPatania. “We are very proud to have been part of this exciting and game-changing educational initiative.” The design of the lab’s other spaces leans into a futuristic, modern aesthetic. This is emphasized by the 3D triangular mesh adorning the building’s exterior, symbolizing the advanced 3D technology being explored and developed within. “We had different sources of inspiration for this project, which combined helped us deliver the wow factor our client wanted,” Patania says. “We reimagined the likes of the Tesla factories in the United States and the boxy Tesla Cybertruck, and even the minimalistic, monochrome interiors from the Men in Black films.” Ultimately, the space will hopefully facilitate the development of new and exciting XR tech and software. You can learn more about it at windsorpatania.com. Photography courtesy of WindsorPatania Architects.

BOND redesigns a Tribeca loft in New York City honoring the loft’s industrial heritage while infusing it with a modern, luminous aesthetic.

Lofts have long been an integral part of New York City’s architectural identity, evolving from industrial spaces into some of the most sought-after residences in the city. Originally built as warehouses and manufacturing hubs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these expansive spaces featured soaring ceilings, exposed brick walls, and large windows designed to flood interiors with natural light. By the mid-20th century, as industry moved out of Manhattan, artists and creatives began reclaiming these buildings, transforming them into raw, flexible living and working spaces. Today, lofts represent a seamless blend of historic character and contemporary design, offering an ideal canvas for innovative transformations. One such transformation has recently been brought to life by BOND, the design studio led by Noam Dvir and Daniel Rauchwerger. Tasked with reinvigorating the 1,000-square-foot Tribeca Loft in a landmarked New York City building, the duo set out to honor the loft’s industrial heritage while infusing it with a modern, luminous aesthetic. Like many historic lofts, this particular space had remained largely untouched since the 1980s, requiring a complete overhaul to meet the demands of contemporary living. While many loft renovations risk stripping away the very elements that define their charm, BOND’s approach was one of careful preservation and enhancement. The team undertook an extensive renovation, replacing outdated wiring, removing dropped ceiling panels, and integrating a central air conditioning system – an essential upgrade for comfort without compromising the integrity of the space. A key aspect of the redesign was opening up sightlines to create a sense of fluidity and connection. The introduction of a glass partition between the bedroom and the living area allows natural light to permeate the entire loft while maintaining a sense of separation. This technique, often used in contemporary loft conversions, enhances the airy, expansive feel that makes these spaces so desirable. One of the defining characteristics of New York City loft living is the emphasis on communal spaces – areas where people can gather, work, and engage. Understanding this, BOND placed a strong focus on the kitchen as the heart of the home. A striking 15-foot-long island, designed with waterfall edges and a unique cut-in detail, serves as both a functional workspace and a centerpiece. Lined with walnut ‘Tractor’ stools from BassamFellows, the island encourages social interaction, echoing the loft’s history as a place for creativity and connection. The beauty of a historic loft lies in its ability to evolve over time while maintaining its original character. In keeping with this philosophy, BOND curated a space that is at once minimal and warm, using carefully chosen design elements to create balance. The bathrooms introduce subtle yet playful pops of color, adding an unexpected contrast to the otherwise neutral palette. Shades of gold and brown echo the natural light that filters in the west-facing windows in the main living space. Sculptural furniture pieces, such as a statement metal coffee table, further elevate the aesthetic while maintaining a sense of fluidity. The loft also serves as a backdrop for the owners’ personal art collection, which includes geometric works by Mika Tajima and whimsical pieces by John Armleder. This integration of art into everyday living reflects the legacy of the city’s early artist-inhabited lofts that once doubled as both homes and creative studios. For more information on BOND, visit bond-ny-com. Photography by Chris Mottalini.

Architect + artist Leo Marmol, co-founder of Marmol Radziner, shares his love of artist Robert Motherwell, Albert Camus, a fave museum, and more.

When architect and painter Leo Marmol was a student, he was an awkward and shy boy. His sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Laurie, had him give presentations to the class until he was more comfortable. His instructor not only helped young Leo gain self-confidence, he also sparked his love for learning beyond the standard curriculum. The Salk Institute, by Louis Kahn, made a lasting impression on Marmol. As he learned about the architect in college, he was drawn to more than his structures. “Kahn in particular resonated deeply with me – not just for his buildings but for his philosophical musings on architecture,” Marmol says. “Kahn’s idea of moving from ‘silence to light’ spoke to me in a profound way.” Leo Marmol \\\ Photo: Jesse Green In 1989, Marmol and Ron Radziner founded their eponymous practice, Marmol Radziner. The firm is noted for its holistic approach to every element of design-build, from construction to furniture. But even with a full roster of projects on tap, Marmol still finds time to indulge in other pursuits. He enjoys saltwater fly fishing, which allows him to connect with nature. He visits museums when he travels, where he’ll often find a spark of unexpected inspiration. Marmol not only admires fine artists, he is one himself. He started painting as a way to help manage the pressures he faced while in architecture school. Painting allowed Marmol to unwind and express himself, free of restrictions. Yet he never imagined that a creative outlet would someday become a key facet of his life. Marmol often experiments with oil paint and cold wax, and he has exhibited his work in galleries throughout California and other locales. “Painting began as something playful and personal,” he notes. “It was only after I had my first solo show that I began to see painting as more than a hobby. That experience was transformative, and the opportunity to showcase my work to a broader audience made me realize that this was no longer just a private endeavor.” Today, Leo Marmol joins us for Friday Five! 1. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus One of my favorite works is Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In this essay, Camus reimagines the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who is condemned to eternally push a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down each time. Camus suggests that despite the endless repetition and futility of Sisyphus’ task, we must “imagine Sisyphus happy” – finding meaning and joy in the struggle itself. I first encountered this text in an existential philosophy course at Cal Poly. The idea of embracing the process, knowing the outcome will never fully satisfy, resonates with the creative journey as an artist and architect. Each time I approach a new painting, I feel like Sisyphus – pushing that boulder up the hill, knowing it will fall, yet finding fulfillment in the act of creation itself. For me, the boulder acts as a metaphor for the love of a new creative endeavor, the belief we have while creating that this will somehow be worthwhile, only for the work to never reach the top. We have no choice but to delight in the process not the outcome. Photo: Courtesy of Leo Marmol 2. Robert Motherwell painting Seeing Robert Motherwell’s work in person during a recent visit to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth was a deeply moving experience. Motherwell has long been a hero to me. Standing before pieces like “Elegy to the Spanish Republic,” I was struck by the power of his bold composition, where thick black ovals and vertical bands are both confrontational and gentle. There’s a visceral quality to Motherwell’s work, a rawness that transcends the canvas and speaks to the struggles and themes of his time. There was a major retrospective on view, Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting, which beautifully captured the evolution of his art. From the earlier abstracted figurative works to his later, more explosive explorations, each piece offered insights into his journey. I found myself reflecting on the balance of control and spontaneity and, moreover, the physical power of painting – brilliantly illustrated by Motherwell’s practice, which articulates the philosophical weight of a simple stroke or form. Photo: Courtesy of Leo Marmol 3. Salt Water Fly Fishing in Catalina Saltwater fly fishing is another one of my favorite escapes. I love the rhythm of casting into the clear waters, feeling the pull of the current, and the anticipation of that first strike. There’s something meditative about it—being surrounded by the beauty of the ocean, all while focusing on the cast. The challenge of fly fishing in saltwater, with its unpredictable conditions, keeps it exciting. My teenage son and I spent a couple of weeks last summer fly-fishing in Montana. It was a perfect way to end the summer season before he returned to school and me to work. It’s a chance to disconnect, get lost in nature, and experience the power of the water. Photo: Jaime Kowal, courtesy of Sparrows Lodge 4. Sparrows Lodge The Sparrows Lodge is a mid-century gem I hold especially dear to my heart. Located in Palm Springs, the Sparrows Lodge has enjoyed many incarnations, epitomizing the adaptive reuse of the most lasting Modernist structures. Originally built as Castle’s Red Barn in 1952 by MGM actor Don Castle, it was one of the original glamorous getaways for the Hollywood Elite. Restored in 2013, the lodge retains its original charm while embracing a rustic simplicity – exposed beams, pebble-inlaid floors, and reclaimed horse troughs as bathtubs – creating a serene yet tactile experience. What draws me to the desert, and to Sparrows Lodge in particular, is the tension between the harshness of the desert environment and the myth of Modern luxury that has been cultivated in Palm Springs. In the desert, the extremes of heat and light choreograph moments of intense vitality that feel both chaotic and calming. The desert is beautiful and strange, deadly yet teeming with life. Sparrows Lodge makes space to ponder this duality – a place where simplicity invites reflection, offering the rare luxury of slowing down and reconnecting with the rhythms of nature within an oasis of classic 1950s modern design. Photo: Courtesy of Kimbell Art Museum 5. Kimbell Art Museum Standing inside the Kimbell Art Museum during a recent visit was a profound experience. Designed by Louis Kahn, the architect’s use of natural light, filtered through skylights and reflectors, transformed the space into something sacred. The interplay of concrete, travertine, and oak created a Modern yet timeless atmosphere, with the Roman-inspired vaults evoking a sense of quiet grandeur. It was incredible to see how the architecture itself became part of the art, shaping my experience with its simplicity and elegance. The way light constantly shifts throughout the day felt like stepping into one of Kahn’s reflections on space and silence. Works by Leo Marmol and Marmol Radziner: The Desert House by Marmol Radziner \\\ Photo: Benny Chan, courtesy of Marmol Radziner Scottsdale House by Marmol Radziner \\\ Photo: Bill Timmerman, courtesy of Marmol Radziner Scottsdale House by Marmol Radziner \\\ Photo: Bill Timmerman, courtesy of Marmol Radziner Point Dume House by Marmol Radziner \\\ Photo: Manolo Langis, courtesy of Marmol Radziner Point Dume House by Marmol Radziner \\\ Photo: Manolo Langis, courtesy of Marmol Radziner Garcia House by Marmol Radziner \\\ Photo: Richard Powers, courtesy of Marmol Radziner Garcia House by Marmol Radziner \\\ Photo: Benny Chan, courtesy of Marmol Radziner Leonardo E. Marmol, Wind’s Caress, 2022, Oil and cold wax on board, 30″ x 40″ Leonardo E. Marmol, Eulogy for Yesterday’s Dawn, 2022, Oil and cold wax on board, 30″ x 40″ Leonardo E. Marmol, Pastoral Views in the Borrego I, 2022, Oil and cold wax on board, 40″ x 30″ Leonardo E. Marmol, Pastoral Views in the Borrego II, 2022, Oil and cold wax on board, 40″ x 30″ Leonardo E. Marmol, Poets Call It Sleep I, 2022. Oil and cold wax on board, 40″ x 30″ Leonardo E. Marmol, Poets Call It Sleep II, 2022. Oil and cold wax on board, 40″ x 30″

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A community for students, professionals, and lovers of architecture.

Welcome to the What Style Is This? / What Is This Thing ? megathread, an opportunity to ask about the history and design of individual buildings and their elements, including details and materials. Top-level posts to this thread should include at least one image and the following information if known: name of designer(s), date(s) of construction, building location, and building function (e.g., residential, commercial, industrial, religious). In this thread, less is NOT more. Providing the requested information will give you a better chance of receiving a complete and accurate response. Further discussion of architectural styles is permitted as a response to top-level posts. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

Please use this stickied megathread to post all your questions related to computer hardware and software. This includes asking about products and system requirements (e.g., what laptop should I buy for architecture school?) as well as issues related to drafting, modeling, and rendering software (e.g., how do I do this in Revit?) submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

The painted havelis of Shekhawati are grand mansions built by Marwari merchants, known for their intricate frescoes and rich architectural details. The region was a crucial trade route and home to rich traders and merchants. There are over 2000 such havelis dotted across dozens of villages in this part of North western India. Most of them were built in the second half of 19th century. Now that the trade routes have changed in modern times, few subsequent generations have moved to cities, while most have fallen back into hard times and can barely get by let alone maintain such intricate art pieces. While a few have been restored as hotels for tourists, majority are in a near ruined state, waiting to be taken care of. submitted by /u/Fluffy_Inspector_628 [link] [comments]

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It always feels that it's not done yet and it can be improved. I never reach the satisfaction of finishing the design of a residential project, as I always keep on going in a loop inside my mind of how I can improve the functional and spatial relationships. What is the threshold that makes me stop overthinking the plans and proceed with the next phases? Do you suffer from this problem as well? submitted by /u/basstr0nn [link] [comments]

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we have to design a career house (120m maximum) what do you think about this plan what can i change (im first year btw) submitted by /u/Glittering_Leave_104 [link] [comments]

Hi, I have this masterplan of a border condition urban project I am working on, I am still working on the lines and stuff so it looks a bit messy but I wanted advice on colors, representation, hatches, and how to just elevate this drawing 10x. Any advice appreciated submitted by /u/kamilion51 [link] [comments]

The first two photo’s show a famous dormetory building that has been built in the 19th century as an extension of the Golestan Palace in Tehran, demolished in 1920s. The last photo however is not really famous and I found it on an occult Persian Site few years ago. It is only now that I notice these buildings have uncanny simularities. Are these the same buildings only in a different era? submitted by /u/QajarLegitimist [link] [comments]

https://preview.redd.it/rxo40lrwggye1.png?width=1187&format=png&auto=webp&s=69d76f4f2130875fb20e4038b436b77289c53e7f Hi everyone, I'm working on a first year university project where I need to measure and digitize irregular, curved cardboard pieces that were cut by hand. These pieces are part of physical architectural models, and I want to capture their shape and dimensions as precisely as possible in 2D to later replicate them digitally (in CAD or similar). Here's what I have so far: I've taken high-resolution top-down photographs of each piece, next to a known scale reference (a ruler). The photos may not be perfectly orthogonal, but I’m planning to use perspective correction (homography) if needed. I want to extract the outline and get accurate length measurements of the curves or sides. My questions: Is using i2pdf a good method for this kind of 2D shape measurement and calibration? Are there better or easier alternatives for accurately measuring physical cutouts from images? Any tips on best practices when photographing these kinds of objects to minimize distortion or errors? Any help or resources would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance. submitted by /u/Far_Suggestion_9504 [link] [comments]

In high-school, doing pob, poa, economics, IT, Food and Nutrition, integrated science, maths and english, don't do any art and was wondering what do I need to know like qualifications to apply to colleges, like what courses should I do to better my chances of being considered, Is being accepted into architecture school a low rate or high rate? submitted by /u/ArchiBoss32 [link] [comments]

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How do you guys decide how big and where windows should go? Im currently working on a model and my windows dont feel right in my elevations. Once im close to finishing im planning on using ladybug tools (in grasshopper) to calculate sun studies but until then I dont know how to make them look and feel intentional/purposeful. Any tips? submitted by /u/Tight-Work-4524 [link] [comments]

What do you think of the detailing i’ve done on these pillars using sand and cement by running them in situ if you were the one hiring or the client? It’s in Nairobi Kenya 🇰🇪 submitted by /u/Reddit_PatrolOfficer [link] [comments]

Hi everyone, I am currently in year 12 and am deciding what I want to study in uni. I am a very creative person and also very good at maths and problem solving. Architecture has always interested me and now I am considering it as a profession, however I don't know much about it at all. What are the different types of architecture that can be studied? What do you all recommend studying? What are some things/people I could research to learn more? What is the pay and hours like? Is it a job that is safe in the future? I would love to own my own business one day- how possible would that be in architecture? Is it a rewarding and interesting career? Please tell me all of your experiences! I would love to know. I would also really appreciate any recourse recommendations. Thank you so much! :)) submitted by /u/Intelligent_Order266 [link] [comments]

How much overtime do you work in the industry? whether you are a junior, mid level, associate, senior, licensed, or partner / principal. curious to know if everyone is working overtime and if the work life balance is not great submitted by /u/Better_Variety9442 [link] [comments]

Hi! Does anyone have any info on YACademy courses? I looked into their website and found their fashion course pretty interesting, but would like to know how accurate their descriptions are. Basically, I would like to know if it is a scam or not lol Thanks! submitted by /u/TableAffectionate140 [link] [comments]

I am an architecture graduate , I just graduated past week and ever since I am questioning myself do I want to practice in this field. During my exploration in 5 years i stumbled upon product design, game design, furniture design and honestly felt myself more involved in these processes. Do you think I can switch to these for my master's ? submitted by /u/Scared-Dust5832 [link] [comments]

Hi! I’m 16 and currently a Grade 11 student here in the Philippines and I’m planning to take Architecture in college. I’ve been researching a lot lately, and I’m torn between Benilde and Bulacan State University. Benilde seems really promising with its facilities and program, but BulSU is closer and my parents recommend it since the architecture department there has a good reputation too. My long-term goal is to become a sustainable architect and hopefully work abroad—either in Australia or Singapore (my dad says both offer better pay and growth in architecture). One of my dreams is to work at a firm like CPLUSC in Australia. I know that path won’t be easy or direct, but I’m committed to working toward it. That said, if architecture doesn’t work out, I’m considering structural engineering or interior design as alternative career paths. I want to stay within the design/build field, just in case. I’d love advice or insights from fellow students, professionals, or anyone in the field: Any college recommendations in the Philippines for architecture, structural engineering, or interior design? What’s working as an architect really like in Australia or Singapore? Is it smart to have a backup like structural or interior, or should I focus fully on archi? What are tips to prepare as early as now (before college)? Any schools with strong sustainable architecture or international ties? Feel free to share your experiences—local or international—I’d really appreciate it! Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/FishermanFast8329 [link] [comments]

Hey guys, I've recently graduated with an undergraduate degree in architecture (3 years). I've been applying to jobs in my home city (London) with no success. To be honest, I'm still unsure whether the work I've produced is acceptable enough even to land me a job. I would love for some of you to heavily criticise my work so I can get a better idea of what I'm doing wrong. For a bit of context, the building is a museum that showcases elements of my university's city history and looks to evoke debate. Many of the objects displayed were hard to convey in a render, however, I gave it a go anyway. I've attached a few renders. I'd love to get criticism on how I can improve my rendering skills and also where my design is lacking. Of course, my actual portfolio includes all my details, ortho drawings etc. Thanks! submitted by /u/Ill-Wallaby-8729 [link] [comments]

I dont personally know anyone, but curious if others in the architecture industry know any designers who lost their job to AI submitted by /u/Better_Variety9442 [link] [comments]

Hey guys, I'm a current university student who just finished their first year in an architectural design bachelor program. I'm seeing that a lot of my classmates are getting internships for the summer, and as we have a small class size (>60 people) I'm mostly worried and feeling behind. Is there anything I should do in order to catch up for the summer? What is there to learn in a summer internship after first year? I feel like we did not learn that much architectural related things in first year and it was mostly design exploration/urban planning knowledge. I was planning on learning some programs over the summer but is there anything else I should do? Should I make some personal projects for a portfolio? Just feeling kind of lost rn, and anything could help, thanks guys!! submitted by /u/Terrible_Tear4256 [link] [comments]

5 interviews from 30-40 applications sent out in the past two months, all followed up by email with some variation of "thanks for the great conversation, you have good qualifications and a nice portfolio" and still they'll end up moving forward with another candidate. Feel like it's time to start applying to places like Target & Walmart just to pay rent for the next few months. Don't really have enough money to apply to firms outside of the city I'm going to school in at the moment. At this point I've applied to every open job posting and cold-emailed most firms in the city that would have the capacity for an intern. Surely there's things I can improve in my portfolio, but I've gotten nothing but positive feedback from people that have looked it over in the school & at career reviews for this application season. The window for those changes is over. Genuinely unsure of what to do. Advice? Any way to make this summer not completely useless on my end? submitted by /u/TAaltt [link] [comments]

i´ve been learning collage illustration, these are some of the better results, feedback welcome submitted by /u/Omg_its_a_Dino [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/mjomark [link] [comments]

What are your lists of tips, courses & resources that helped you pass the NCARB exams? submitted by /u/bonjourblingbling [link] [comments]

Before London, there was Londinium, its ancient Roman predecessor, and there are remnants of this ancient city dotted around today. Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Today, Architectural Digest presents summer-ready celebrity yards and outdoor spaces. From Diplo’s infinity pool overlooking the Jamaican jungle to Benny Blanco’s impressive vegetable garden, these outdoor spaces are sure to get you excited for the summer sun. 00:00 Intro 00:28 Benny Blanco 02:42 Troian Bellisario & Patrick J Adams 05:28 RuPaul 06:15 Orville Peck 08:36 Justina Blakeney 10:08 Diplo 12:00 Demi Lovato 12:56 Troye Sivan 15:22 Yolanda Hadid 16:22 Viola Davis & Julius Tennon Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Penn Badgley takes you around the set of Mooney's for 'You' season 5. Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Today Architectural Digest visits a masterful example of Ken Kellogg's organic architecture nestled in the mountains northeast of San Diego, California, The Bailey House. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10) Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Today, AD joins Penn Badgley to tour the ‘You’ season 5 set. From the cage underneath Mooney’s to Joe Goldberg and Kate's billionaire NYC apartment, take a look at the sets where the final chapter of the hit Netflix series will unfold. The final season of You is available to stream exclusively on Netflix. Hosted by: Penn Badgley; Madeline Brewer Director: Skylar Economy Director of Photography: Eric Brouse Editor: Ron Douglas Featuring: Adam Scher Senior Producer: Alyssa Marino Williams Line Producer: Joe Buscemi Associate Producer: Noah Bierbrier Production Manager: Melissa Heber Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila Camera Operator: Duell Davis Sound Mixer: Brett Van Deusen Production Assistant: Francis McNeill Entertainment Editor: Mica Medoff Entertainment Editor (On- Site): Jenna Caldwell Director of Creative Development: Morgan Crossley Director of Content: Keleigh Nealon Director, Post Production: Nicholas Ascanio Post Production Supervisor: Andrew Montague Post Production Coordinator: Holly Frew Supervising Editor: Christina Mankellow Additional Editor: Letícia Villarinho Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds Colorist: Oliver Eid Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Zaha Hadid's design process revolutionized architectural design–a process first inspired by the artwork of Kazimir Malevich. Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Today, AD joins architect Nick Potts in London to uncover the city’s ancient Roman origins. Before London, there was Londinium, the capital of Roman Britain, and although it was abandoned by AD 450, the influence and some remnants of the ancient city still remain. Join Pott’s as he explores how modern London rose up from Roman ruins. Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Lenny Kravitz has come into possession of clothes belonging to some of music's biggest legends. Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Today, AD100 interior designer Brigette Romanek joins Architectural Digest to answer your top living room design questions. What’s the best couch for kids and pets? How do you create a living room space in a studio apartment? Romanek shares her expertise to help solve your interior design problems. 00:00 Intro 00:18 Best places to find affordable pieces that still look polished? 01:38 How to honor a home with period features with a modern style? 02:54 How to create a living room space in a studio? 03:44 Is it ever ok to cover original parquet flooring? 04:30 Lighting tips for high ceilings? 05:25 I want to get rid of my coffee table. What can I replace it with? 06:05 How to design a living room to maximize conversation? 07:16 What’s the best couch to get if you have kids and pets? 08:49 What shape of coffee table works best with a sectional? 09:45 What piece of furniture should I design my living room around? ART: © Tyler Mitchell. Christopher Astley/Martos Gallery. John Henderson. © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne / ARS, New York, 2024. © Herb Ritts Foundation; Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles. John Chamberlain © 2024 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © Adam Fuss/Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Joe Bradley and Venus Over Manhattan. Martin Disler, Lukasz Stoklosa/Amity Gallery, New York. Abel Guzman/la BEAST gallery, Los Angeles, Edward Burtynsky, Krystian Lipiec, Rebecca Jack, © Rudolf Polanszky. © 2025 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY., Timur D’vatz, Fondation Lurçat / Artists Rights Society (ARS), © 2024 Comissió Tàpies / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid. María Oriza Pérez. Henry Diltz Photography/Morrison Hotel Gallery. Maripol. Jake Clark/Albertz Benda & Rodolphe Janssen. Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Lenny Kravitz receives guests in the presence of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who has dedicated a space to him in his Paris home. Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Lenny Kravitz has dedicated his Paris home to his mother, Roxie Roker, who always dreamed of living in Paris one day. Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Today, AD is welcomed by Lenny Kravitz to tour his regal home in Paris. The superstar musician has loved Paris since he first visited in 1989 but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that he decided it was time to get a place in the city. With a small apartment on the Seine in mind, Kravitz's vision deviated a little when he ended up viewing the grand mansion of Countess Anne d’Ornano. Having started his AD100 studio, Kravitz Design, Lenny spearheaded the design of his home. Soulful elegance was Kravitz’s design philosophy, filling his home with photographs, artwork, and artifacts connecting him to his ancestors and influential figures from throughout his life. However, the true heart and soul of the house lies downstairs in the boiler room Kravitz converted into his own speakeasy-style club. See more of the musician's Paris home: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/inside-lenny-kravitzs-paris-refuge Shop picks inspired by the musician’s home: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/shopping/lenny-kravitz-open-door Artwork © Nathaniel Mary Quinn 00:00 Intro 00:28 Entry Hall 03:11 Petit Salon 05:09 Grand Salon 07:28 Dining Room 09:17 Library 10:11 Studio 10:58 Bedroom 13:27 Basement Club Feeling inspired? Subscribe to AD and get a free tote with your subscription! → https://bit.ly/4jBCUMl Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Today, AD is welcomed by Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, and Nathan Lee Graham to tour the ‘Mid-Century Modern’ set. As big fans of mid-century architecture, series creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan knew Palm Springs would be the setting for their show; the vision was an old Hollywood oasis, which proved a joy to create for production designer Greg Grande and set decorator Peter Gurski, filling it with hidden treasures from vintage markets, and even an easter egg from Mutchnick and Kohan’s iconic show ‘Will & Grace’. 00:00 Intro 00:26 Living Room 05:00 Backyard 05:43 Kitchen 07:36 The Den 09:54 Sybil’s Bedroom 10:37 The Grotto Want even more AD? Subscribe to the magazine and get a free tote ►► https://bit.ly/3Oh8McU Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Samuel L. Jackson's wrap gift for The Hateful Eight hangs pride of place in Walton Goggins's home. Want even more AD? Subscribe to the magazine and get a free tote ►► https://bit.ly/3Oh8McU Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

Walton Goggins has filled his home office with mementos of his career and family, including his time playing Boyd Crowder alongside Timothy Olyphant in Justified. Want even more AD? Subscribe to the magazine and get a free tote ►► https://bit.ly/3Oh8McU Still haven’t subscribed to Architectural Digest on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/2zl7s34 ABOUT ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST The leading international design authority, Architectural Digest features articles and videos of the best in architecture, style, culture, travel, and shopping.

In this week's episode, we meet Lana and David, an inspiring couple who built a stunning tiny house with classic cottage charm on 25 acres of farmland in rural Victoria, Australia. What began as a DIY project has grown into a beautiful, heritage-inspired tiny home and a flourishing homestead filled with creativity, character, and soul. Nicknamed “River”—after the beloved TV series River Cottage—this tiny house is anything but ordinary. Designed with nods to Australia’s federation-era architecture (think vintage details, ornate woodwork, and timeless style), this home feels like a storybook cottage—yet it’s cleverly compact and incredibly functional. From a full-sized kitchen and cosy lounge to a loft bedroom, craft room, and thoughtful storage, this tiny house proves you don’t need to be a minimalist to live tiny—you just need to be intentional. Each space is filled with meaningful items, souvenirs from travels, and creative expressions that turn this small home into something truly special. And the story doesn’t stop at the front door. On their 25 acres, Lana and David have planted orchards, started market gardens, and built a large polytunnel—laying the foundation for a life of self-sufficiency and purpose. 🏡 Tiny house design inspiration 🌱 DIY homesteading in Australia 🎨 Big personality in a small space 🚜 Starting a small farm from scratch 💡 Living large with intentional design If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented and Produced by: Bryce Langston Camera: Rasa Pescud & Bryce Langston Editing: Sarah Binder & Rasa Pescud Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #tinyhouse #hometour #cottagecore #homedesign #hometour #homestead #federationstyle #tinyhousetour

Set on a peaceful farm with sweeping views of the countryside, Maddison and Kyle’s stunning tiny home looks like it’s been lifted straight from the pages of Pinterest. With its soft, earthy tones, natural materials, and elegant curves, this beautifully styled home is a true reflection of thoughtful design and simple living. After years on the road travelling Australia in a van, Maddison and Kyle were ready for a new chapter—one that would keep them grounded, mortgage-free, and close to their children. Their tiny house gave them the freedom to slow down and create a home that feels calm, intentional, and connected to nature. From the warm, neutral colour palette to the clever layout and breathtaking surroundings, every detail of this home has been carefully considered. It’s a space that proves you don’t need a lot of room to live beautifully. Join us as we tour this incredible tiny home and hear Maddison and Kyle’s inspiring story. Maddison beautifully documents her families tiny home life on her YouTube channel. You can follow here: https://www.youtube.com/@UCTCV42K3jdHRma6TGHUILAg If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented and Produced by: Bryce Langston Camera: Rasa Pescud & Bryce Langston Editing: Sarah Binder & Rasa Pescud Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #tinyhouse #tinyhousetour #homedesign #hometour

Would you live in a home made from tyres, bottles, and dirt? This stunning Earthship tiny home is a masterclass in sustainable architecture and off-grid living—proving you can live beautifully and self-sufficiently, even in extreme environments. Built using recycled materials like car tyres, glass bottles, and compacted earth, this tiny Earthship home collects solar energy, harvests rainwater, and reuses greywater to grow food in an indoor greenhouse. It’s a powerful example of eco-friendly design that works in harmony with nature. Earthships hold a very special place in my heart. They were one of my first introductions to the world of alternative architecture and radically changed how I think about home design. When I started designing my first tiny house, the Seed of Life, I was, in a big way, trying to create a tiny house version of an Earthship. In this episode, I reconnect with Earthship designer and builder Dr. Martin Freney, and we dive into one of his latest off-grid creations. It’s compact, resilient, and packed with clever features designed for maximum efficiency and minimal impact. This Earthship isn’t just sustainable—it’s stunning. With curved walls, organic forms, and smart passive ventilation, it blends post-apocalyptic resilience with fantasy-like beauty. It performs year-round in both hot and cold climates, requires no connection to outside utilities, and looks like it belongs in a storybook. We hope you enjoy this tiny house tour and deep dive into one of the most inspiring Earthship designs we’ve seen—a small but mighty home built to meet the challenges of the future. The full build of this Earthship was brilliantly documented in the film Grounded By Design. The filmmakers kindly allowed us to use shots from this documentary. You can watch the full film on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GGh6ZE_yvUA?si=0ow7nhnlhB5eY0kH - It’s a great film and I highly recommend checking it out. To find out more about Marty’s Earthship designing and building adventures, check out his website: https://www.earthshipecohomes.com.au This epic Earthship is a BnB, so you can experience the place for yourself! Book your stay here: http://airbnb.com.au/h/earthbnbwillunga If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented and Produced by: Bryce Langston Camera: Rasa Pescud & Bryce Langston Editing: Sarah Binder & Rasa Pescud Additional footage used with permission from the film Grounded By Design: https://youtu.be/GGh6ZE_yvUA?si=ud0EoWaemZKvXfYv Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #Earthship #TinyHouse #OffGridLiving #SustainableHome #RecycledArchitecture

At just 30 years old, Lexie and Jed are living mortgage and debt free in a stunning off-grid tiny house they built themselves — despite only having very limited building experience. In this week’s episode, we meet a young couple who set out to create their dream home with only the most basic DIY knowledge under their belts. Undeterred by the scale of the project, they took on the challenge of designing and building their own tiny house from the ground up — learning along the way, problem-solving, and building something truly beautiful. Their fully off-grid home runs on solar power and collects rainwater, which means their living costs are kept to a bare minimum. With no mortgage, no debt, and only a nominal rent for their parking space, they’ve created an enviable lifestyle of freedom and simplicity. Set on a private site with expansive views across a 200-acre farm, their parking spot is nothing short of spectacular — the perfect setting for their peaceful, off-grid home. This is a story of determination, growth, and the power of creating your own path. Whether you're dreaming of off-grid living, financial freedom, or building your own home, this episode will leave you inspired. We hope you enjoy the episode! If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented and Produced by: Bryce Langston Camera: Rasa Pescud & Bryce Langston Editing: Sarah Binder & Rasa Pescud Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #TinyHouse #MortgageFree #DIYBuild #OffGridTinyHouse #DebtFreeLiving #TinyHouseTour #AlternativeLiving #LivingBigInATinyHouse

Now here is a tiny house made for adventure. Built on the back of an ex-army Unimog, this 4x4 camper is a fully featured tiny home on wheels that’s designed to go anywhere! Fully off-the-grid and built tough for some big trips, this is a tiny home like none we have visited before. Kyla and Louis want to live an extraordinary life filled with travel and adventure. What better way to kickstart that journey than by building an extraordinary home! Louis is a professional carpenter and so had the skills to convert this ex army vehicle into a stunning home. And what a home it is! Inside, this utilitarian looking vehicle quickly transforms into a stunning home, with kitchen, lounge, bathroom and a bed that comes down from the ceiling at the press of a button. This home is designed to give Kyla and Louis the feeling of home, no matter where they park it! It’s also got some never before-seen features too, such as a full gym for this couple who love to train! If you crave some adventure in your life, this is a home tour you won’t want to miss! We hope you enjoy the tour! Kyla and Louis are documenting their tiny home adventures via their own YouTube channel called Out The Gate. You can check that out here: https://www.youtube.com/@UCer2-YwI5MQrrRxuw36cNhQ If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented and Produced by: Bryce Langston Camera: Rasa Pescud & Bryce Langston Editing: Sarah Binder & Rasa Pescud Additional travel footage supplied by: Out The Gate Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #tinyhouse #offroad4x4 #camper #unimog #adventure

In this weeks episode we meet a wonderful young family who have built an incredible not-so-tiny, 3 bedroom tiny home! This is a super spacious, well designed home that’s perfectly designed for family life. With three bedrooms, a great sized lounge, kitchen and a huge outdoor covered deck extension, this tiny house really does have a huge amount of living space. With Truely’s parents living next door, this home is not just a house—it’s a space for connection, culture, and whānau (extended family). I’m a huge proponent for multigenerational living and it’s so beautiful to see this so wonderfully embraced in this home. We hope you enjoy the tour of this fantastic family not-so-tiny home! Truely and Mahue have a huge online platform where they share their hilarious family tiny house antics. On their socials, they aim to encourage other young Māori families to explore tiny house living as an option. Check them out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/our_not_so_tiny/ and TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@our_not_so_tiny If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented and Produced by: Bryce Langston Camera: Rasa Pescud & Bryce Langston Editing: Sarah Binder & Rasa Pescud Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #tinyhouse #tinyhousetour #tinyhousefamily #hometour

In the subtropical far north of New Zealand, James and Leonie have created a truly breathtaking off-grid tiny home surrounded by simply spectacular food forest gardens combining both syntropic and permaculture principles. Crafted with beautiful timbers, brilliant spatial design, and creative flair, this DIY-built home is a testament to craftsmanship and sustainable living. Beyond the home itself, James and Leonie have cultivated an extraordinary small-scale syntropic food forest. Syntropic agroforestry is a regenerative agroforestry system that mimics natural ecosystems to produce abundant food while restoring soil health and biodiversity. Unlike conventional farming, syntropic agriculture works with nature rather than against it, creating a thriving, self-sustaining environment. Alongside this, the couple also integrates annual permaculture plantings, making their property a model for sustainable food production. James has even launched a business helping others plan and implement their own syntropic food forest gardens. Their tiny house journey didn’t begin here—before building this home, they lived in a van while traveling, followed by a house truck. Now, after three years in their beautifully crafted tiny home and growing their thriving food forest, they are preparing for an exciting new chapter: welcoming a baby! It will be fascinating to see how their home and lifestyle evolve to accommodate a growing family. Join us as we tour this stunning tiny house, explore the incredible food forest, and learn more about James and Leonie’s inspiring tiny house journey. James has started a business, Simply Syntropics, where he helps others to both design and implement their own syntropic forest gardens. You can find a link to that here: https://www.simplysyntropics.co.nz Leonie also has a fantastic business that she runs from her tiny home where she helps people with website creation and graphic design: https://www.collectivedesignery.com If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented and Produced by: Bryce Langston Camera: Rasa Pescud & Bryce Langston Editing: Sarah Binder & Rasa Pescud Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #tinyhouse #tinyhousetour #syntropic #foodforest #permaculture #architecture

This is a tiny house that immediately captured my heart. There's something about the curved roof, the stained glass windows and the rounded doors that remind me of a modern hobbit-like home that just radiates warmth, character and comfort. Philippa is a remarkable woman. I enjoyed my time with her immensely. I can always tell when I meet a kindred spirit and I felt this way with her. You know that when you meet a person who can talk with penguins, you've met someone very special indeed. She has lived a big life and done some remarkable things, One of those things is building her tiny house. A very bespoke home that sings to her soul. And this home! Beautiful and character filled. It's enough, and yet it's so much more. From the beautiful shapes and all the wonderful adornments this is a house that radiates a very real sensation of home. Nature has very few right angles, and that trait is shared with this tiny home. A true labour of love for Philippa and her builders, this is a tiny house not to be forgotten. Crafted with sacred geometric principles in mind, this could very easily be your new favourite tiny home. We very much hope you enjoy the tour. You can find out more about Philippa, her writing and links to listen to her podcast via her website: https://philippaross.com If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented and Produced by: Bryce Langston Camera: Rasa Pescud & Bryce Langston Editing: Sarah Binder & Rasa Pescud Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #tinyhouse #tinyhousetour #sacredgeometry #simpleliving #homedesign #architecture

When Guillaume was diagnosed with a rare and life-threatening disease, everything changed. Faced with the reality that his time could be cut short, he was encouraged to reevaluate what truly mattered. Determined to live more intentionally, Guillaume designed and built a stunning tiny home in Deux-Sèvres, France—a space that reflects his new perspective. Compact, moveable, and crafted to meet his exact needs, his home is free from excess and full of purpose. With a unique semi-industrial yet homely design, his home, affectionately named 'Marrow' after the transplant that saved his life, is a perfect balance of style and simplicity, allowing him to focus on what truly brings him joy. Join us as we step inside this incredible tiny home, and hear Guillaume’s deeply inspiring story of resilience, gratitude, and the pursuit of a meaningful life. We hope you enjoy the tour of this very special tiny home. Guillaume's life was saved thanks to a bone marrow transplant. You can find out more information about signing up to be a bone marrow donor using the links below. FR : https://www.dondemoelleosseuse.fr/ USA : https://bloodstemcell.hrsa.gov/donor-information/donate-bone-marrow NZ : https://www.bonemarrow.org.nz/join-us/how-to-join/ If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented by: Bryce Langston Filmed bv: Gabrielle Vnd (https://www.instagram.com/gabrielle.vnd/) Editing by: Gabrielle Vnd & Rasa Pescud Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #tinyhouse #hometour #simpleliving #intentionalliving

Download Midas Merge for free using my link to discover the cutest creatures and explore the most adorable gardens! https://midasmerge.sng.link/Djplk/b0kvh/od1t Thanks to Midas Merge for sponsoring. Christina’s tiny home is more than just a house—it’s a sanctuary. Thoughtfully designed to meet her every need, this stunning off-grid home allows her to embrace simplicity while being completely supported by her surroundings. With a strong connection to nature and a design that nurtures both body and soul, this space truly takes care of her. Every inch of this home has been customized for Christina’s lifestyle, creating an effortless flow between comfort, function, and beauty. From its natural materials to its serene atmosphere, this is a home built for peaceful living. Join us for an inspiring tour of this breathtaking tiny home and see how Christina has crafted a space that feels like a warm embrace. We hope you enjoy the tour of this very special home. If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented and Produced by: Bryce Langston Camera: Rasa Pescud & Bryce Langston Editing: Sarah Binder & Rasa Pescud Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #tinyhouse #tinyhousetour #hometour #simpleliving #tinyhome #naturalhome

In the heart of Paris, an extraordinary experiment in urban living is taking place. Welcome to the Urban Biosphere, a one-of-a-kind apartment designed to push the boundaries of low-tech, ultra-efficient city living. This innovative space grows its own food—including crickets!—and integrates sustainable, low-tech solutions to reduce waste, conserve energy, and create a self-sustaining ecosystem in the middle of the city. From ingenious water-saving methods to growing food and natural climate control, the Urban Biosphere is redefining what’s possible in small-space urban design. Join us as we step inside this groundbreaking apartment and meet the people behind the experiment. Could this be the future of urban living? You can find out more about this incredible apartment here: https://www.youtube.com/@BiosphereExperience If you enjoy our show and would like to help support our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/livingbig Our Socials and Links: https://linktr.ee/livingbig Find out more about this tiny house and others on our website: https://www.livingbiginatinyhouse.com/ Please subscribe for more videos on tiny houses, architecture, DIY, design, and sustainable, off-grid living. Presented by: Bryce Langston Filmed bv: Gabrielle Vnd (https://www.instagram.com/gabrielle.vnd/) Editing by: Gabrielle Vnd & Rasa Pescud Title music in this video by Bryce Langston: http://www.youtube.com/brycelangston 'Living Big in a Tiny House' © 2025 Zyia Pictures Ltd #Apartment #UrbanBiosphere #SustainableLiving #GreenLiving