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A Fetish for Fabrication

Russell Fortmeyer
October 16, 2011
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In digitally sophisticated Los Angeles, the Southern California Institute of Architecture's new Robot House ups the ante. The architects Peter Testa and Devyn Weiser like to point out that the robots are not people. The robots, in this case, are five white robotic arm Stäubli instruments installed last spring in the new Robot House at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles. For that matter, the Robot House is not a house, but rather a converted double-height space at the south end of SCI-Arc’s main building. The room has two glass walls and a catwalk overhead, which
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Guggenheim Face-Lift Retains Original Wrinkles

Restoration team tackles thorny preservation issues while preparing a 50-year-old architectural icon for its next half-century.
Sara Hart
December 16, 2008
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The ink spilled in the media about the color of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s recently restored facade would probably cover its entire surface. The controversy has raged since the exterior restoration of the building, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, began in 2005.


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BAM's Next Wave: A Forward-Looking Institution Updates Its Own Look with a Nod to the Past

Aric Chen
May 16, 2008
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Since the 1970s, Hugh Hardy’s work for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) has run the gamut, spanning new cinemas and a café for the experimental film and performing arts venue to, most recently, a faithful restoration of the 1908 facade of its historic Peter Jay Sharp Building. But one job was left unfinished: “We needed to install a permanent entrance canopy,” says Hardy, FAIA, the principal of New York–based H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture.


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Tech Book Review

B.J. Novitski
May 16, 2008
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Three new books offer inspiration and practical advice for integrated, high-performance design. Integrated Design in Contemporary Architecture, by Kiel Moe. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008, 208 pages, $65. Green Building Through Integrated Design, by Jerry Yudelson. New York: McGraw-Hill GreenSource, 2009, 261 pages, $65. Integrated Design: GSA/Morphosis/Arup: San Francisco Federal Building, edited by Brian Carter. Buffalo, New York: School of Architecture and Planning, SUNY Buffalo, 2008, 88 pages, $16.50. It has become increasingly clear that high-performance design depends on an integrated design process. This is because sustainable, high-performing architecture is not achieved by tossing together a collection of green
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Crimps, Facets, and Folds

Josephine Minutillo
Josephine Minutillo
May 16, 2008
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An ingenious Y-shaped mullion supports a quartz-like facade on Chicago's Michigan Avenue In developing their design for the new Spertus Insitute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, architects Krueck & Sexton realized that the facade would be the public face of a very unique institution. Their solution for a triangulated, all-glass facade expressed both the diversity and oneness of the organization. Its transparency serves not only as metaphor, but practical purposes as well, bringing light into the deep, narrow lot opposite Grant Park on Michigan Avenue. Though the architects anticipated an uphill battle with the city’s landmarks commission to endorse such
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Mutsuro Sasaki

Interviewed in his Tokyo office, the Japanese structural engineer reflects on the dramatic turn his work has taken since Toyo Ito's Sendai Mediatheque, nearly eight years ago.
Russell Fortmeyer
March 19, 2008
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Interviewed in his Tokyo office, the Japanese structural engineer reflects on the dramatic turn his work has taken since Toyo Ito's Sendai Mediatheque, nearly eight years ago. 


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Mutsuro Sasaki

Russell Fortmeyer
March 19, 2008
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Interviewed in his Tokyo office, the Japanese structural engineer reflects on the dramatic turn his work has taken since Toyo Ito's Sendai Mediatheque, nearly eight years ago. The seemingly random arrangement of columns at Sendai, as well as the organic inspiration of seaweed transformed digitally into structure, suggests a strong precedent for the so-called “flux structure” that Sasaki designed for Isozaki’s Florence train station. He implemented a new shape-analysis approach, broadly described at the beginning of this article, that he calls Extended Evolutionary Structural Optimization (EESO). This is Sasaki’s own version of ESO (he added “Extended”), which is a relatively
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Groups advance two sets of high-performance building standards

Joann Gonchar
Joann Gonchar, FAIA
March 16, 2008
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In the not-too-distant future, there could be two U.S. standards for green buildings. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), in conjunction with two other industry organizations, is developing the Standard for the Design of High-Performance Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings. Meanwhile, the three-year-old, nonprofit Green Building Initiative (GBI) is also working toward establishing its Green Globes rating system for commercial buildings as an official standard. Both organizations are following the protocols of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and expect to release fully completed and approved documents by the end of 2008. Photo courtesy Green
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