To attract the best and brightest faculty and students, universities today are asking architects for buildings that not only serve their academic goals but also bring prestige to their campuses through innovative design.
Sculpting the Skyline: Architects, engineers, and contractors tackle a challenging geometry to build a supertall tower with a striking silhouette for a desert city.
It is in the nature of tall buildings that rankings are short-lived, but at least for the moment, the 1,354-foot-tall, 77-story Al Hamra Firdous Tower, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), is the tallest building in Kuwait City.
While India's Park Hotel group has forged a reputation over its 44-year history for boutique luxury establishments, its brazenly sculptural, 270-room hotel in Hyderabad is the first it has built from scratch.
There is no denying that One World Trade Center (WTC), the 104-story tower now rising at the northern end of the Ground Zero site, is a tremendously ambitious commercial real estate venture.
From a distance, the half-mile-high Burj Khalifa in Dubai tapers to a near imperceptible spire like a mirage along the windswept desert coast of the Persian Gulf.
Given the complex forces connecting China and the United States, the new U.S. Embassy in Beijing, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s San Francisco office, had to negotiate difficult political, cultural, and architectural terrain.
It comes as a shock to discover one of the Bay Area’s most riveting examples of recent architecture is not the work of international highfliers imported to San Francisco and its environs to rev up the local landscape.