This issue features several Pritzker Prize–winners and AIA Gold Medalists but is geared not only to architects at the top of their games, but, even more, to those just starting out.
The announcement last month that Riken Yamamoto had won the 2024 Pritzker Prize came as a surprise to most, including Yamamoto himself. He spoke with longtime RECORD Japan correspondent Naomi Pollock, FAIA, about his early days as an architect and the work he’s done in over 50 years of leading his own practice. Of note to those of us at the magazine was his declaration, “I have been reading Architectural Record since I was a student!”
Of course, that not only thrilled us, but served as a reminder that the magazine’s mission is to be an important resource for architects. With this goal in mind, our focus in this issue on “Sustainability in Practice” pairs with an event of the same name that we are hosting this month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is the second year of our collaboration, this time with the hope of reaching more students—future architects who will inevitably be drawn into a profession where designing sustainable buildings is no longer a choice or a preference but an integral part of practice.
Another section of this issue highlights interiors, which at first may not seem to have much to do with sustainability. But of the five interior projects featured, four are contained within well-known historic buildings. From a new office for Gensler inside Daniel Burnham’s 1892 Mills Building in San Francisco and an art library in a Holabird & Roche Chicago landmark to a new lobby for Eero Saarinen’s famed CBS headquarters in Manhattan and a renovated apartment on a high floor of SOM’s 55-year-old Hancock Center in Chicago (aka 875 North Michigan Avenue), the ability to refresh and reimagine interior spaces extends the lives of these architecturally significant structures.
Lessons about sustainability, likewise, can benefit from a look back in time. We talk to 2024 AIA Gold Medalists David Lake and Ted Flato, speakers at our MIT event, who have repurposed more than 3 million square feet of space over the course of their careers. Even more important, they incorporate long-proven passive strategies as well as state-of-the-art technology in their sustainable designs. And we excerpt a personal passage from The Future is a Journey to the Past, a book by Italian architect Mario Cucinella, who is another presenter at MIT, along with Felix Heisel and 2023 AIA Gold Medalist Carol Ross Barney.
Perhaps fittingly, our cover this month is in black-and-white. The immense solar array topping Smith-Miller+Hawkinson’s Energy Advancement and Innovation Center at Ohio State proclaims the project’s forward-looking agenda, while the beautifully evocative image of the building captured by photographer Michael Moran illustrates that such “futuristic” structures are an increasingly familiar part of the contemporary landscape.
