Not every work of architecture has to compete for our attention Building a new museum is like making a movie with a big cast of characters. There's the architect as director, the board of trustees (the producers), the curators with a story to tell in the galleries (the screenwriters), and a horde of technical consultants. Looming in the background is the reality of the budget'if value engineering is too severe, it's like canceling an Alpine location to shoot on a soundstage with fake snow. And just as Hollywood rushes to release movies before the end of the year'to be eligible
Young architects deploy new tools to advance common values Design Vanguard, our annual look at the best emerging architectural practices, is a window into the future, a glimpse of where the profession is heading. This year, two of our 10 winning firms are from Spain (despite the country's damaging recession) with work that demonstrates a powerful materiality, such as Venecia Park by Héctor Fernández Elorza Architects, featured on our cover. Other international winners come from Mexico, Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong. We're pleased, as well, to honor four U.S. practices—though young American architects have often had less opportunity to build
The end of an era in New York—and a new future for cities and technology. Two years ago, RECORD published an award-winning feature devoted to the evolution of New York City in the decade since 9/11. We gave much of the credit for the city's newfound vibrancy to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, under whose administration exemplary urban design and architecture have flourished. The vast enhancement of the public realm—hundreds of acres of new parks, especially on the waterfronts; miles of bike lanes; pedestrian plazas; handsome new civic and cultural buildings—have created a dynamic and alluring urban environment for residents and tourists,
Record looks at how interiors bring the outside in. The exhibition Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through September 23), explores a provocative theme: that the giant of 20th-century architecture is wrongly categorized as an International Style designer whose “machines for living in,” as he termed them, could be plunked down anywhere. Rather, argue the curators Jean-Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, Le Corbusier was a keen observer of nature and landscapes, which informed almost everything he touched, from the master plan for a city to the design of a single
New urban parks of all varieties are transforming neighborhoods around the country. It's August, and if you're a city dweller, it's great to be able to hang out on a summer's day in a nearby park. But just how nearby depends on what city you live in. In June, the Trust for Public Land issued its ParkScore, a rating of park systems in America's 50 biggest cities. Minneapolis came out on top, based on three criteria: the percentage of residents who live within a 10-minute walk of a park (94 percent); the median size of its parks (6.5 acres), and
For several months now, we've been reaching out to architects to talk about the status of women in the profession. Even before the Architects' Journal published its scathing survey of how women in architecture are treated in the U.K.—and well before two students at Harvard's Graduate School of Design launched their petition to pressure the Pritzker Prize committee to recognize architect and planner Denise Scott Brown, who was excluded from the 1991 award bestowed on her partner, Robert Venturi—we had begun to report on the inequities that persist in the field.
In this issue of RECORD, we explore works of architecture as urban catalysts—buildings that raise the stakes for design in their neighborhoods while successfully engaging the surrounding context.
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