Julia Morgan's impressive legacy of architectural achievements from her 45-year practice in San Francisco has won her the AIA Gold Medal for 2014. Photo © Richard Barnes Studies in Paris would lead Julia Morgan to the playful Bear House at Wyntoon in California (1933). Julia Morgan The well-publicized announcement that Julia Morgan (1872–1957) is the recipient of the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal for 2014—the first woman to receive the honor—naturally raises questions about why it took so long. She died 57 years ago. (We also might wonder about the logic of posthumous Gold Medals—but more about that later.)

The Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the Pritzker Architecture Prize, has announced Shigeru Ban as the recipient of the award for 2014.

New York's Museum of Modern Art offers a fresh look at the influential architect's ideas for skyscrapers and city planning. Photo: © Ezra Stoller/Esto The exhibition is devoted to the city planning and skyscrapers of Frank Lloyd Wright, shown above in 1945. Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, conceived in 1934–35, was the emblematic manifesto of decentralized urban planning. Its first public viewing in New York's urbanistic heart, Rockefeller Center, was heralded by Architectural Record in its April 1935 issue, and commended by Lewis Mumford in The New Yorker the same month. Wright explained that his city would accommodate “little farms,

The large, enclosing, rectangular frames in a new set move to generate a spatial dynamic on stage. Act Two: The Linden Trees, from Massenet’s Werther, Metropolitan Opera. Most of those thronging to the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Massenet’s Werther this winter have gone to hear tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s mellifluous singing as the protagonist and the plush sounds of mezzo-soprano Sophie Koch as Charlotte. But some operagoers might also have appreciated the choreographic performance and efficiency of the set, which mechanically slides and shifts in different directions within the shallow space of the three-dimensional stage. In recent years the Met

A famous school gets back on track blending modern and traditional design elements.