Employing what they call a "research-and-diagram-based process," David Leven and Stella Betts, of New York City'based Leven Betts Studio, have been creating environments that are inventive, spare, and elegant for the past decade. Their method involves scrutiny of site, program, and material, to create an organizational framework and physical structure.
Sebastian Mariscal found his professors not in the halls of academe, but in the offices of practicing architects. Starting when he was 14, he spent afternoons and evenings after school working for his father, Raul Octavio Mariscal, a public-housing architect in Mexico City.
Like young architects everywhere, Japanese designers often get their first job from a family member or friend. Rarely, though, does the assignment involve a mental hospital in the middle of a remote, northern island buffeted by Siberian winds. But Sou Fujimoto's psychiatrist father runs a residential facility on Hokkaido.
Amid the rush to modernize, Chinese cities are becoming homogenized and losing their distinct identities, laments Pei Zhu, principal of the eponymous office, Studio Pei-Zhu, which he started in 2005, after leaving Urbanus [RECORD, December 2005, page 100], the firm he cofounded in 1999.
It’s a considerable challenge to make a large, windowless, one-story floor plate of a neighborhood health clinic into a tectonic play of solids and voids, somehow drawing daylight into the interiors from 14 small terraces, and, all the while, staying within a tight budget and adhering to the exacting standards of a public project.
Perusing Gerardo Broissin's portfolio, it's hard to believe the depth and breadth of work the 32-year-old has built in his short career, especially considering he wasn't always sure of what he wanted to do.
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