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Image courtesy Van Alen Institute A rendering for the redesign of the Van Alen Institute's storefront by Collective-LOK (Jon Lott, William O’Brien Jr., and Michael Kubo). In 2008, after holding several positions in design publishing and communications in both Rotterdam and New York, David van der Leer shifted gears, becoming the first member of the Guggenheim Museum’s architecture and urban studies–focused curatorial team. At the Guggenheim, van der Leer steered the museum on a course of public outreach on city-related issues, including the BMW Guggenheim Lab, the recently concluded project in which experts and residents in New York, Berlin, and

Photo courtesy Friends of the High Line © Liz Ligon Jenny Gersten, executive director of Friends of the High Line, on the elevated rail line. The term “Off Broadway” may assume a vertical dimension as Jenny Gersten’s vision for the High Line takes shape. In January, Gersten officially started as executive director of Friends of the High Line (FHL), the nonprofit responsible for the elevated park, which connects New York’s West Village neighborhood to the future Hudson Yards development. In addition to management and fundraising, the role will have her focusing on the High Line’s cultural programming, to which Gersten

Buildings are the source of one half to three-quarters of greenhouse-gas emissions in most American cities. Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Houston, and six more large cities have joined forces to tackle the problem by targeting their biggest buildings. “The largest buildings tend to be 3 to 4 percent of the overall number of buildings but account for 40 to 50 percent of the square footage and energy consumption. You have this terrific opportunity to work with a handful of buildings and make a big dent,” says Laurie Kerr, director of the City Energy Project (CEP), which launched in late January.

Panama's instant icon has taken shape—and inches toward the finish line. The biodiversity museum, which sits along Panama City’s Amador Causeway, is visible from great distances across the bay. After years of agonizing delays, an opening date is finally drawing near for Frank Gehry’s iconic Biomuseo in Panama City—a project that has been in the works for over a decade. Gehry’s first built work in Latin America, the vividly hued concrete and steel biodiversity museum sits dramatically along the Amador Causeway, former site of a U.S. Army base at the Pacific entry to the Canal. Focusing on Panama’s rich and

I was startled to read in the New York Times about the plan to remove Picasso’s large curtain, Le Tricorne (1919), from the landmarked Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York. The reason, according to current owner RFR Holding, is the imminent failure of the travertine-clad wall against which the 19-foot-high curtain, originally painted as a backdrop for a Diaghilev ballet, is mounted. I was aghast—and surprised, as I am very familiar with this wall.

With the budget-blowing games underway, we take a look at Sochi’s architectural bling. View of the Coastal Cluster of Olympic venues in Sochi Russia has changed immeasurably since it last hosted the Olympic Games in the summer of 1980. Or has it? The transformation of Sochi—a subtropical playground on the Black Sea once frequented by Joseph Stalin—into a gargantuan palace of winter sports is just the sort of absurd feat that might have made the Soviets proud. The Coastal Cluster, a close-knit circle of shiny, undulating arenas and rinks master-planned by Populous, is architectural bling blown up to an Olympian

The Museum of Modern Art’s contemporary art space, MoMA/P.S.1, announced today that the winner of this year’s Young Architects Program commission will rise with the help of a kind of architectural huitlacoche. The winning proposal, designed by New York firm The Living (helmed by David Benjamin, a director at Columbia University's Living Architecture Lab), calls for a cluster of towers built inside the courtyard at MoMA/P.S.1, a former public school in Queens, New York. The structure, titled Hy-Fi, will be made from components that combine corn stalks with mycelium, a root material in fungus that grows into mushrooms. Both ingredients

Guangzhou-based O-office Architects is in the process of converting 18 former factory buildings on a 20-acre site into artists’ studios, hotels, a conference center, and more. In China’s booming Pearl River Delta, the former Honghua Printing and Dyeing Factory—long vacant and overgrown—has recently been rebranded as iD TOWN art district. Guangzhou-based O-office Architects is in the process of converting its 18 buildings on a 20-acre site into artists’ studios, hotels, a conference center, and more. On January 11, the exhibition Organism opened iD TOWN to the public and inaugurated its gallery space in the first renovated building in what is

“The public is invited into the process very late,” said Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic, referring to the decision by the Museum of Modern Art and its architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, to tear down the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, which stands in the way of MoMA’s recently announced expansion. And Ouroussoff was right: Eight hundred people turned out for what was, in effect, a town hall meeting on the demolition of the Tod Williams Billie Tsien building, which heated up a Manhattan auditorium on a very cold night. But then, after nearly two hours of