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September 2011 GROUND ZERO is a buzzing hive of activity ' cranes and construction everywhere, crowds of tourists and vendors. Projects are shaping up, too. David Childs's One World Trade Center (WTC) ' the erstwhile 'Freedom Tower' ' has passed 78 stories en route to 104, the Fumihiko Maki tower at the southeast corner of the site is more than 30 and heading for 72, and the National September 11 Memorial opens this month. Although Santiago Calatrava’s bony train station — morphed by budget cuts, according to wags, from bird to stegosaurus — has yet to emerge from the ground,

Under Mayor Bloomberg, New York City planners launched an aggressive initiative to compete in the global economy.

August 2011 At two recent architectural events — one academic, the other professional — sustainability met with both skepticism and criticism in ways I hadn’t anticipated. It suggests we have reached a point where sustainable architecture needs to be addressed more rigorously. Photography: © Prakash Patel The Philip Merrill Environmental Center in Annapolis, Maryland, by SmithGroup (2000) is the subject of a lawsuit. The academic event was a conference at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning in April that focused on the place of history in architecture school curricula. Most explicit was Ellen Grimes, a

On a cool April night in 2007, I found myself in a dangerous crush of bodies trying to cross a narrow pedestrian bridge near Via Tortona in Milan.

Director Robert Lepage orchestrates an architectural feat for a new Metropolitan Opera production of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Photo © Ken Howard During the fall performances of Das Rheingold (repeating in March), acrobats stand in for singers to traverse the planks that are raised up above the stage and rotated by computer into fanlike steps. Stage design is typically an ephemeral art. Environments appear substantial, but they are often masterful imitations of the real thing made with lightweight, durable materials capable of continual setups and breakdowns. Enter Canadian director Robert Lepage, whose new production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle for New

Sir John Soane’s House Museum in London is in the midst of a much-needed expansion, renovation, and restoration. The legendary Sir John Soane’s Museum, at Number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, has been undergoing an intensive expansion and restoration program that is expected to be completed in 2013. With the help of public and private funds, already one significant piece has been has been finished: In early 2008, the museum opened a restored and remodeled structure at Number 14, which Soane designed but never used — as he did Number 12, his first residence, and the more lavish Number

In December 2009, the Glasgow School of Art celebrated its centenary.

Like most other architecture critics, I’m often asked to write essays for monographs on living architects. However, unlike some of my colleagues — especially the king of introductions, whom I dub the Grand Old Laureate and Dispenser of Bland Encomiums, Ramblings, and Gallingly Equivocal Reviews — I always decline such requests, even from those whose work I admire and despite the temptingly high honorariums. My blanket excuse is that if I agree to one I’d have to say yes to all, and because the requisite positive introduction is tantamount to a wholesale endorsement, my objectivity would be suspect when assessing

Retro-American fantasies furnished by Ralph and Barbra. America — land of the free and home of self-actualization — remains unsurpassed for the license we grant to wholesale personal reinvention, a transformative process perhaps most tellingly revealed in people’s homes. Our ingrained national penchant for imagining whom you want to be and then becoming it grew to unprecedented proportions during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Photo courtesy Polo Ralph Lauren (top); courtesy Barbra Streisand from My Passion for Design (Viking) (above) The new Ralph Lauren store at 888 Madison in New York looks like a Parisian maison particulier (top). Barbra Streisand’s

Three desert structures, designed by Arata Isozaki, strip the house to its artful basics.