Articles by Cathleen McGuigan

Crossover Artist?

Frank Gehry weighs in on his friendships with artists, how he designs for art—and why he resists certain labels.

Cathleen McGuigan

August 16, 2014

No Comments

A new art museum by Frank Gehry, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, will open this October.

Modernism in the Rearview Mirror

This Venice Biennale just looks back, without an eye to the future.

Cathleen McGuigan

July 16, 2014

No Comments

This Venice Biennale just looks back, without an eye to the future. Venice is a city that resists the contemporary. New architecture tends to be discreetly inserted behind the facades of historic structures, as in recent interventions designed by Tadao Ando or Annabelle Selldorf. So the contrast between the historic city and the contemporary architecture that typically fills the Venice Architecture Biennale is particularly acute. Photo © Michael Arnaud Related Links Critique: Rem’s Rules Venice Dispatch: Highlights from the National Pavilions Venice Dispatch: Golden Lions for Phyllis Lambert and Korean Pavilion Venice Dispatch: U.S. Architecture as American Export—The Story Expertly

Cathleen McGuigan

June 16, 2014

No Comments

How many ways can architects engage with the communities and wider world around them? Here are some randomly selected news stories from the last month: • Rising temperatures and climate change are already here, contributing to the current extremes of droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and floods that are devastating regions of our country. • A botched execution by lethal injection in Oklahoma caused obvious suffering to the inmate, who then died of a heart attack. • French economist Thomas Piketty's runaway bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century—which posits that global economic inequality will widen with disastrous results, unless governments intervene

Cathleen McGuigan

May 16, 2014

No Comments

New architecture's impact on the urban realm, from Los Angeles to Glasgow to Rio In the pages of RECORD, we like to explore a work of architecture not only for the strength of its design but for the impact on its surroundings. In this issue, we look at several new cultural projects that are having a profound effect on urban sites. Steven Holl's controversial addition to the Glasgow School of Art, opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh's early 20th-century masterpiece, brings a sense of lightness—with its luminous translucent glass skin—to that gritty Scottish city, where it rains more than half the year.

Cathleen McGuigan

April 16, 2014

No Comments

RECORD Houses Connect to Their Surroundings—or Create Their Own Environment T.S. Eliot may have thought April was the cruelest month, but here at Architectural Record, we look on the bright side because it's time for our annual RECORD Houses awards. Now in its sixth decade, the Houses issue is always full of surprises, with our selection of the best new projects by architects who experiment with form and materials on a domestic scale, often in spectacular settings. Photo © Michael Arnaud Renzo Piano never designs houses (not counting the Diogene, a tiny—8 foot by 10 foot—prototype of a sustainable cabin

Supersize It« Back to Super-size Design

Technology, demand, and daring are driving the push for big buildings.

Cathleen McGuigan

March 16, 2014

No Comments

Twenty years ago, Rem Koolhaas published a fat doorstop of a book, S, M, L, XL, which included his manifesto on Bigness: “Bigness is ultimate architecture,” he wrote. “Only Bigness instigates the regime of complexity that mobilizes the full intelligence of architecture and its related fields.”

Asking Mr. Big

Foster+Partners has designed megaprojects around the globe, from airports to skyscrapers. How are super-size buildings, such as Apple's future headquarters, shaped for the people who will use them?

Cathleen McGuigan

March 16, 2014

No Comments

As founder and chairman of Foster+Partners, Norman Foster has created projects at every scale but may be best known for such innovative tall buildings as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters in Hong Kong (1986), the Swiss Re tower in London, a.k.a. “the Gherkin” (2004), and the Hearst Tower in New York (2006).

Cathleen McGuigan

February 15, 2014

No Comments

MoMA rushes to raze Midtown Manhattan gem. Photo © MichaelMoran/OTTO The Folk Art Museum building's stair contained niches for objects in the collection and led visitors through the narrow structure. Next month, RECORD will present projects by architects who give new life to old buildings through thoughtful renovation or adaptive reuse. Unfortunately, that kind of creative thinking wasn't brought to bear to save the acclaimed former home of the American Folk Art Museum from demolition. Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and opened in late 2001, this little gem in Midtown Manhattan—six stories high and only 40 feet wide,

Cathleen McGuigan

January 16, 2014

No Comments

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

Cathleen McGuigan

Laura Raskin

January 8, 2014

No Comments

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced today that in its next phase of expansion, it will tear down the 2001 American Folk Art Museum building designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.

Credits: 1 AIA LU/HSW; 1 AIBD P-CE; 0.1 ICC CEU; 0.1 IACET CEU

Join us for this insightful webinar, where we'll delve into the principles of biophilic design and acoustical strategies.

Credits: 1 AIA LU/HSW; 1 AIBD P-CE; 0.1 ICC CEU; 0.1 IACET CEU

This webinar will explore the growing use of mass timber in K-12 schools and its transformative benefits across four key areas: health, well-being, durability, and sustainability.