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RECORD speaks with the principal of SOMA, the architecture firm behind the controversial Park51 Muslim community center proposed for Lower Manhattan. Amid the controversy surrounding Park51, the Muslim community center and worship space in Lower Manhattan labeled the “Ground Zero Mosque” by its opponents, the young New York-based firm SOMA Architects last week quietly unveiled designs for the new 15-story building. “I think the location of the center has been overexposed and overrated,” says Michel Abboud, principal at SOMA. Abboud recently sat down in the firm's new Midtown office to answer questions about Park51, its design, SOMA's history, and the

Photo © Patrick McMullan Co. Playwright June Finfer Some years back the Chicago-based playwright and filmmaker June Finfer discovered stories about architecture to be packed with drama, and increasingly focused on this topic in her work. Her play, The Glass House, a quasi-fictional account of the story behind Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, has been staged at various venues, including the terrace of the Farnsworth House. Most recently, the Resonance Ensemble company performed a short, sold-out run in New York City. Finfer hopes the play will be presented at other theaters across the U.S.; in the meantime, she’s

Photo © Vincent Starr Alain de Botton “Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design,” writes pop philosopher Alain de Botton in his heartfelt case for good building, 2006’s The Architecture of Happiness. Having grown up amid Switzerland’s clean modernism and luxuries such as underfloor heating, the now London-based author observes that in the United Kingdom, most people associate modern building with hastily constructed postwar tower blocks. By contrast, the crumbling country cottage—loaded with both history and suspect plumbing—enjoys a powerful grip on the British psyche, a condition that, he argues, has led

Photo courtesy Eva Franch i Gilabert Eva Franch i Gilabert Following a four-month international search, the Storefront for Art and Architecture has named Eva Franch i Gilabert its new director. The announcement came on May 10, after the organization’s board vetted more than 70 contenders, according to Storefront’s Web site, acknowledging the “overwhelm[ing] breadth and depth of candidates who applied from around the world.” A Catalan architect, researcher, and teacher, Franch i Gilabert, 31, is founder of the solo practice OOAA (office of architectural affairs). During the past two years, she directed the Masters Thesis studio at Rice University, where

The designer, thinker, and IDEO founder takes on an entirely new role as director of the Cooper-Hewitt. Photo Courtesy of IDEO / Nicolas Zurcher Bill Moggridge If you’re reading this on a laptop, take a second to admire Bill Moggridge’s work. His design for the GRiD Compass—a 1979 personal computer that enclosed a keyboard and screen in a clamshell-like, fold-open case for the first time—set the mold for the contemporary machine in front of you. U.K.-born Moggridge, 66, founded his first design firm in 1969, and over the next two decades the practice created innovative forms for many high-tech products.

Image courtesy Dennis Findley 'Architects in the U.S. are not looked to for leadership the way they were in the early part of the 20th century or the way they still are in European countries,' says Dennis Findley, AIA. If you follow the prevailing Washington metaphors, the United States sounds like a nation of frustrated drivers. We need a “road map” for everything from the Middle East to Afghanistan to health care. But to the McLean, Virginia, architect Dennis Findley, AIA, we’re actually more like clients with a tricky building project. Instead of a road map, he would like us

Photo © Laurie Lambrecht Donald Albrecht is the curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York. In recent years, he also has served as curator of the traveling exhibition Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, the first-ever retrospective of the influential Finnish-American architect. The exhibition was prompted by the 2002 donation of the Eero Saarinen and Associates office archives to the Yale University School of Architecture. Since opening in Helsinki in the fall of 2006, the show has been presented in Oslo, Brussels, Cranbrook, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and St. Louis. It lands in New

Whether they’re for septuagenarians who can get around on their own or older people struggling with bed-confining illnesses, senior-living communities have surged in number in the past two decades, as the country’s retirement-age population has swelled. Indeed, those aged 65 and older now represent 12.4 percent of the population, according to census figures, which is three times what it was at the turn of the last century. By 2050 that number will spike to 20.2 percent, the data show, and the supply of senior-living communities should continue to grow to match an increased demand, says Nancy Thompson, a spokeswoman for the American

When Bay Area architect Chris Downey lost his sight last year, he refused to consider a career change. Though surgery for a benign tumor near his optic nerve had left him blind, he returned to work just a month later. “I could hardly walk around,” says Downey, 46, who at the time was running a green modular-housing firm. But, he recalls thinking, “There’s something worthwhile if you can figure out how to do it.” Photo ' Curt Campbell 'You might pick a material that looks great, but so what? [That doesn't matter] if it doesn't feel good,' says Chris Downey