As more architects get their hands literally dirty with the design-build process, this form of project delivery is resulting in some quite elegant structures.
A house by architect Ben van Berkel rarely could be described as a glass box. Instead the principal of the Amsterdam-based UNStudio avoids the rectilinear modernist approach for a more organic direction.
A ribbon of glass, steel, and wood floats through a hilly landscape, serving a nonprofit foundation dedicated to bringing people closer to art, nature, and faith.
There’s a disconnect that runs through your mind when you set foot inside the Forum, an addition to Marvin Hall, the School of Architecture, Design & Planning at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
Town Meets Gown: With a renovation and a new building, a university redefines an important plaza and establishes a stronger connection between campus and the city.
The four buildings and two outdoor spaces that define Upper and Lower Sproul Plaza and together constitute the Student Center at the University of California, Berkeley, were a veritable minefield for any architect or university administrator thinking of redeveloping the area.
It’s an urban oasis, an indoor landscape, and an effective solution to brand a university campus otherwise lost in the chaos of downtown Toronto. Designed by Snøhetta in collaboration with local firm Zeidler Partnership Architects, Ryerson University’s new Student Learning Centre is an audacious bid to redefine the concept of an inner-city student commons. “The program is amazingly open,” says project architect Michael Cotton, of Snøhetta’s New York office. “It’s almost like a 10-story lobby. Sometimes we call it a library without books.”
The City College of New York (CCNY) is a bit like an academic Acropolis. Situated in Upper Manhattan on one of the island’s highest points, its collection of early 20th-century neo-Gothic buildings, by George B. Post—and more recent additions by architects that include Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Rafael Viñoly—sit high above the surrounding neighborhood of townhouses and low-scale apartment buildings.
In developing the ceramic facade for a revamped studio-art wing for Macalester College’s Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, the architects at Minneapolis-based firm HGA started to feel as if they had enrolled in an art class of their own.