The annual Cape Town conference advocates for levity in design, if not permanence. Photo courtesy Design Indaba Paula Scher and Michael Beirut at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, South Africa. South Africa's Cape Town is a city of architectural extremes, from the futuristic, 30,000-square-foot houses of the super-rich in Clifton to the corrugated metal shacks of Langa township. And it is a city of physical barriers. Prominently advertised in the Cape Times are hammer-proof, roll-down shutters that are “extremely difficult to break without the use of power tools.” Photo courtesy Design Indaba Design Indaba attendees at the Cape

At the Storefront anniversary party: Honoree Steven Holl, director Eva Franch, event co-chair Linda Pollak, and board president Charles Renfro. New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture celebrated its 30th anniversary with a benefit and silent auction on Friday night. Vito Acconci, who designed Storefront's exhibition space and its jigsaw puzzle façade, was a no show, but director Eva Franch i Gilabert presided over the event in one of her appropriately architectural dresses. An event honoree (along with Yona Friedman and Mary Miss), Steven Holl exchanged some quick banter with Franch before he spoke to the crowd, remembering the Storefront's

A proposal for New York City's East River waterfront calls for wetlands, pedestrian bridges, mini parks, and even a sandy beach. This story first appeared in GreenSource. WXY Architecture + Urban Design's Blueway Plan for New York City's East River. A river runs through it—but unless there’s a hurricane warning, you would hardly know it. To get to the edge of the East River on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, you’ll have to negotiate a maze of highways, low-visibility bike lanes, hospital and tower blocks, and other obstacles—all so you can peer down at the water four feet below as it

An exhibition at SFMOMA examines the work but not the legacy of Lebbeus Woods. Lebbeus Woods, San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City, 1995, graphite and pastel on paper, 14.5 inches by 23 inches. Lebbeus Woods, who died last year at age 72, was among the most singularly gifted and stubbornly consistent architects in American history. His fantastically dense drawings in pencil and graphite imagined not just new kinds of buildings?some burrowed into the earth and others floating in the air or through space?but new cities and new worlds. Though he is often connected with the Deconstructivist movement and

Photo courtesy The Architectural League of New York "The City That Never Was" panelists included (from left to right): Javier Arpa; Robin Nagle; Iñaki Abalos; William Braham; and Christopher Marcinkoski. Have architects been spending too much time designing buildings? That was the paradoxical question at the heart of a symposium sponsored by the Architectural League of New York on the boom years of the early 21st century. The February 22 conference, called “The City that Never Was: Urbanization After The Bubble,” was about the buildings that resulted from the mismatch “between the flows of capital and the needs of the

The roof of the cathedral will be comprised of 96 cardboard tubes when the building is completed in May. The day before the second anniversary of the cataclysmic and fatal earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, architect Shigeru Ban stood in the half-finished nave of the “cardboard cathedral” he designed for the devastated city, his largest temporary structure yet. Thirty-seven of the cardboard tubes that form the soaring A-shaped church roof were already installed, and will be covered in translucent corrugated polycarbonate panels. The project is meant to evoke the feeling of being in the 19th century Christchurch Cathedral, which toppled

A new exhibition at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute examines concrete construction, Soviet style. Installation view of Cold War Cool Digital on view at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn through March 20. Most people don’t think of Nikita Khrushchev, the former Soviet premier, as having changed architectural history. But those people haven’t been to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for the fascinating new show, Cold War Cool Digital. The exhibition, which runs through March 20th (in a building undamaged by last week’s destructive fire), traces the relationship between Soviet imperialism and the panelized building systems that were a hallmark of the Iron

A community of tiny, movable houses is taking shape a few miles north of the U.S. Capitol, on a triangular lot tucked behind traditional row houses and accessible only by alley. Called Boneyard Studios, it was conceived in 2011 by two tiny house enthusiasts—Brian Levy and Lee Pera. Lamenting the dearth of tiny houses (typically less than 400 square feet) in urban settings, the two joined forces to create a public demonstration site in Washington, D.C. Although Levy and Pera, who were later joined by Jay Austin, are designing their little structures to meet their personal needs, they do not

This article originally appeared in the Chinese edition of Architectural Record. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), which has been active in China for more than 20 years, continues to shape the skylines of rapidly growing cities around the country. In the north-central city of Zhengzhou, in Henan Province, the firm recently completed a partially hollow, 60-story, mixed-use tower with a glass-enclosed roof. The 280-meter-tall structure, which opened to office tenants in fall 2012, is the tallest building in the city. Named Zhengzhou Greenland Plaza, the office and hotel tower is located on a small peninsula at the edge of a

Elemental is at the fore of socially conscious design. Gary Hustwit featured the Chilean design office’s subsidized-housing units in Santiago in his well-received 2011 documentary Urbanized. And the firm’s monograph Incremental Housing and Participatory Design Manual appeared in time for the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale last August. Record caught up with Elemental’s executive director, Alejandro Aravena, to talk about the firm, its soon-to-be-completed housing in the Chilean city of Constitución, and Aravena’s stance on the role of architects in sheltering the world’s expanding population.