Opening on Earth Day, a Seattle office claims to be the world’s greenest commercial building. To bring its net-zero-energy goal within reach in cloudy Seattle, the Bullitt Center has a 242-kW photovolatic array covering 14,000 square feet. It extends as much as 20 feet from the edges of the roof.

The George W. Bush Presidential Center by Robert A. M. Stern Architects is located on the campus of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. Visitors enter through the limestone portico. The George W. Bush Pres­i­den­tial Center, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects and located on the campus of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, does not reflect the colorful nature of the 43rd president’s personality. Nor does it symbolically suggest the fact that Bush was the first president of the 21st century. Although the three-story brick-and-limestone building is the first presidential library to contain e-mails—some 200 million—its design is traditional,

Architect Nathan Koren, who lived at Arcosanti from 1992-1997, reflects on his early mentor's influences and vision. Photo © Timothy Hursley Paolo Soleri Paolo Soleri—iconoclastic architect, urban theorist, philosopher, and one of the last living students of Frank Lloyd Wright—died on April 9th at 93. Soleri was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy. In 1947 he received a Ph.D. from Turin Polytechnic, then began his apprenticeship with Wright at Taliesin West. Wright’s aesthetic influenced Soleri, but his most enduring impact was to catalyze Soleri’s opposing philosophy of urban planning. Wright’s utopian Broadacre City development concept was the apotheosis of the

As of today, 9,300 people had signed an online petition demanding that Denise Scott Brown be given a retroactive Pritzker Architecture Prize as the equal partner and collaborator of her husband, Robert Venturi, who won the prize in 1991.

Building on HafenCity's success, the German city of Hamburg reinvents its Elbe Islands as a test bed for innovative and experimental mixed-use projects. This article first appeared on GreenSource. The "Building Exhibition within the Building Exhibition" is home to 18 futuristic housing complexes. In 2007 the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Hamburg – a real-time urban research and development laboratory – began to shine its spotlight on the city’s Wilhelmsburg district, the world’s largest inhabited river island outside Manhattan. IBA Hamburg follows the unmitigated, mixed-used triumph of Hamburg’s HafenCity. Ten years ago HafenCity was an abandoned port and industrial center, wasting

Five days after the Museum of Modern Art announced it would raze the former home of the American Folk Art Museum (which it purchased in 2011) for a planned expansion, the controversy continues to simmer.

Behnisch Architekten and Ayers Saint Gross consolidate the School of Law's program under one roof for the first time in its 88-year history. The University of Baltimore's John and Frances Angelos Law Center, designed by Behnisch Architekten and Ayers Saint Gross. Vice President Joe Biden, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, and other legal luminaries convene in midtown Baltimore today to attend a preview of the John and Frances Angelos Law Center at the University of Baltimore. The 192,000-square-foot building, designed by Behnisch Architekten in partnership with Ayers Saint Gross, consolidates classrooms, offices, clinics, and a library for the first time in

A look at some of the off-site exhibits during Milan’s Design Week. Composite steel-bar furnishings from the Belgian design studio Muller Van Severen on display in the Lambrate district in Milan. For those who see the Milan furniture fair as a cultural event, and are less interested in the ups and downs of the contract furniture business, it’s all about the fringe. Away from the wheeler-dealing hordes of the Saloni, the city blossoms with design exhibitions that are less commercial and more searching, more propositional. This year, however, there seemed to be less of the curated, thematic shows that have

After years of instability and sharp declines, the housing market is finally on the rebound. Both new construction and home renovations have posted recent gains, a good sign for the entire U.S. economy. Source: McGraw-Hill Dodge Analytics Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].