For this issue, which coincides with RECORD’s annual Innovation Conference, we included a little bit of everything—a museum, an airport, an aquarium, a housing project, a house, an office building, a collection of schools, and a pair of performance spaces. Needless to say, designing for such a rich variety of building types presents architects with countless challenges but also invites opportunity for inventive solutions, in many cases awe-inspiring ones.
Yet, so often these days, the completed building is met with a certain skepticism rather than congratulations, from both within the profession and those outside of it. Was the building necessary, socially and economically? What is its carbon footprint? Is it accessible? Does it equitably serve its users and the public? Is the architect still a person admired as a role model? In questioning the worth of a building, at times we lose an appreciation of architecture itself.
RECORD has celebrated architecture for 133 years, and we’re not about to stop. Let’s face it: despite the construction industry’s heavy carbon footprint, people won’t stop building, either. So, as RECORD always has, we highlight the achievement of architects who deal with the intense complexity of getting something built and getting it done right. And, sometimes, we point out where things could have gone better.
Our cover project this month, the expansion of the main terminal at Portland, Oregon’s international airport by ZGF, sets the standard for a different kind of travel experience. Sunbeams filter through expansive skylights to grace PDX’s warm, tree-filled wood interiors. The airport invites those frantically moving through it to stop for a moment and take in its grand spaces, unexpected and unprecedented as they are in the U.S., but also so connected to its place. PDX heralds a new era for civic-scale mass-timber construction, as managing editor Leopoldo Villardi, who flew in and out of that Pacific Northwest hub this summer, aptly points out.
Innovation does not only happen at a large scale. A slight twist can completely change the experience of even a small space. In our House of the Month in Toronto [online soon], by 2022 Design Vanguard firm JA Architecture Studio, an angled staircase transforms the structure’s long, narrow floor plan from a series of boxes into “something special,” as its architect says. Moreover, the city’s recently legalized “laneway suite” typology, of which this combined townhouse and ADU is part, gestures at a larger discourse in planning and urban design, with the potential to transform that Canadian metropolis’s low-rise residential neighborhoods, as Alex Bozikovic, architecture critic for The Globe and Mail, writes.
That Toronto’s Globe and Mail still has an architecture critic is a thing to be praised, as fewer and fewer newspapers, in the United States especially, retain one. In Chicago, that most architecture-friendly of cities, a critic who retired from the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin, whose post was left vacant for several years, recently established a three-year grant for a freelance architectural columnist, Edward Keegan, to continue at the newspaper. It was made possible through a fiscal sponsor, the Journalism Funding Partners in Sacramento. This is the first architecture critic the nonprofit organization has supported. While it provides an example for others to follow, it’s unfortunate that a philanthropic measure was needed to maintain discussions about architecture and planning in newsprint. RECORD’s reach to a mainly professional audience implies that our readers already have a great love of architecture. But if the general public were to engage more with architecture and the discourse around it, they too would learn to appreciate the beauty, complexity, history, and innovation that make up the built environment.
