A modernist icon that married architecture and pedagogy remains influential today. When the Crow Island Elementary School in Winnetka, Illinois opened in 1940, it launched a revolution in the architecture of schools. Designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, and the Chicago firm then known as Perkins, Wheeler & Will, the welcoming, low-slung, one-story brick building, with a slender, beacon-like clock tower, was hugely influential in the postwar rush to construct new schools for the incoming tide of baby boomers. The earlier 20th-century model of stately, historicist multistory school buildings, that spoke more to the aspirations of town fathers than to
A series of structures that once comprised a lumberyard is transformed into an innovative school for grades 7 to 12 in a northwest Chicago neighborhood.
With this issue of RECORD, we celebrate the 15th edition of Design Vanguard, our annual selection of 10 of the most promising architecture firms emerging on the global stage.
“It’s not ripping my flesh off,” says Denise Scott Brown of the loss. Photo Venturi Scott Brown and Associates Denise Scott Brown in Las Vegas in 1968. There’s a long shadow hanging over the AIA Gold Medal for 2015. Yesterday, the institute announced that Moshe Safdie is next year’s winner—a surprise for those who were expecting Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to get the prize. This was the first year Venturi and Scott Brown were jointly eligible because of a change in the rules to allow two architects to win the award together. That change was made in the
As sure as the Harvard–Yale football game (or just The Game to its passionate alumni) is played every November, so does RECORD bring you our annual Top 10 architecture school lists.
Architect Judith Edelman, 91, died on October 4, in New York City where she left a profound mark, both on the built environment and as a role model for younger women architects.
Sacré Bleu!: High over the treetops in the Bois de Boulogne, Frank Gehry’s contemporary art museum for a French luxury magnate is an astonishing work of architectural couture.
Celebrating design leadership in a culture of collaboration. Recently we've seen, in print and online, a reprise of old debates about starchitects. The critic Witold Rybczynski complained that big-name architects don't design their best work in cities that are foreign to them, because they don't understand the context. He proposed turning to local architects, whom he called “locatects.” Not long afterward, the architect and Yale professor Peggy Deamer wrote to The New York Times, arguing that several high-profile architects, through news coverage of various controversies, were giving architecture a bad name.
This past spring, the sculptor Richard Serra was honored with the President's Medal from the venerable Architectural League of New York, which cited his evolution as an artist from the “concerns of matter and materiality to more spatial preoccupations.”