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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.

Construction starts for nonresidential renovation projects will increase 8% in 2013 to $42 billion. Every region of the U.S., except the Northeast, will experience gains this year, with the South expected to show the healthiest growth. Source: McGraw-Hill Dodge Analytics Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].

Photo © Julio Cortez/AP Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In the wake of the December massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, school districts around the country are grappling with “how to marry 20th-century environments with 21st-century technology and make our schools safe,” said architect Irene Nigaglioni, chair of the Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI), at its School Security Summit in Washington, D.C., on February 7. Echoing many speakers at the meeting, Nigaglioni, a partner at the Dallas-based PBK Architects and the mother of a second grader, said she was deeply affected by the

Image courtesy Adjaye Associates Sugar Hill Housing in Harlem will provide 124 units of affordable housing. It will finish construction in December. An urban farm on the rooftop of a David Adjaye–designed affordable-housing project in Harlem will provide fresh produce and income for the building sometime after construction has been completed in December. An $80 million development in the historic New York City neighborhood, Sugar Hill Housing will offer 124 units of rental housing for low-income adults and families. Adjaye’s stepped-profile design, with a rose-embossed, textured precast-concrete facade, makes it the latest example in a trend to replace bland institutional

This article originally appeared in the Chinese edition of Architectural Record. A pair of museums designed by Steven Holl Architects will anchor a new cultural district in the Eco-City area of Tianjin. Holl envisions the two museums—one dedicated to ecology and the other to city planning—as complementary buildings, both in terms of their missions and their architectural forms. A collaboration between the governments of China and Singapore, Tianjin Eco-City is being built on a site in the Binhai New Area that had been a polluted salt pan 25 miles from the center of Tianjin. The 11.5-square-mile-project, which aims to be

This article originally appeared in the Chinese edition of Architectural Record. Yuelai Eco-City, one of 17 transit-oriented developments (TODs) that Peter Calthorpe has designed for the northern Chongqing area, is scheduled to break ground on its 2,500-acre site this summer and will eventually accommodate 100,000 to 250,000 residents. Record-breaking pollution levels in Beijing this winter are one visible symptom of the bind China has gotten itself into with its rapid urbanization and infatuation with the automobile.  As China accelerates its urban development to accommodate an estimated 300 million people moving from the countryside to cities by 2020, it is turning

Oslo- and New York City-based firm Snøhetta recently completed the James B. Hunt Jr. Library on North Carolina State University's Raleigh campus. The long rectangular volume provides 221,000 square feet of space for up to 1,700 students in traditional and informal study rooms, technology labs, and lounges. An envelope of fritted glass crossed by a zig-zag of aluminum sun shades lets in daylight and permits views to a nearby lake. An automated book delivery system (see slide 4) reduces the space needed for stacks and can accommodate a 2 million volume collection. In addition to library functions, the facility also

Photo courtesy Princeton University Sigrid Adriaenssens, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, shows C. Susan Grimmond, King's College London, one of the exhibits in the "Resilient City" display. Are cities collections of problems that need to be solved or sites of innovation that offer opportunities? Are they best managed by top-down planning and policies or bottom-up entrepreneurialism? These themes and many more were the focus of the inaugural Princeton-Fung Global Forum, “The Future of the City,” held January 30–February 1 in Shanghai. The papers presented during the event were as diverse as its 48 speakers, a collection

Photo courtesy Braden Toan Danforth Toan and his wife Jane Toan. Danforth W. Toan died on January 16 at the age of 94. He was an architect and founding partner of Warner Burns Toan & Lunde Architects & Planners in New York, now known as WBTL Architects. Many of Dan’s significant buildings in New York and around the world were college libraries and educational facilities, including Columbia University’s Hammer Health Sciences Center and New York University’s Warren Weaver Hall. His buildings transformed other campuses, including Brown University, where he designed the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library and the Science Tower,