On April 14 Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (AAHC), announced the selection of Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup to design the museum’s freestanding building on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C. The winning team, comprising The Freelon Group, Adjaye Associates, Davis Brody Bond, and SmithGroup, was part of shortlist of six teams announced on January 29. The finalists’ proposals for the museum design were unveiled at the Smithsonian Institution Building, also known in Washington as the Castle, on March 27. Images courtesy Smithsonian / Imaging Atelier A team comprising The Freelon Group, Adjaye Associates,

Shortly after becoming chancellor of Syracuse University in 2005, Nancy Cantor introduced her Scholarship in Action initiative, which aims to meld academic study with community redevelopment efforts. As part of that wide-ranging effort, the Syracuse University School of Architecture, led by dean Mark Robbins, spawned a local design-build workshop, as well as a Gluckman Mayner–designed renovation of an old furniture warehouse in downtown Syracuse that now contains classrooms, a cafe, and an art gallery. Images courtesy Syracuse University R-House (top); Live Work Home (middle); Ted (above) The most recent undertaking in this series of efforts is the competition "From the

For the reopening of the BMW Museum in Munich this past June, the upscale auto manufacturer’s designers dusted off GINA Light Visionary Model, a concept they had begun toying with in 1999. Although the last iteration of the idea was completed in 2001, the vision is no less futuristic today. GINA’s signature element is its namesake skin, a polyurethane-covered Lycra that replaces sheet metal by stretching over the aluminum frame. “The fascinating thing is that it produces a formal vocabulary of folding, which is something we don’t know in cars,” BMW’s director of group design Christopher Bangle says of the

Correction appended March 13, 2009 When the materials library Material Connexion officially opened its new Manhattan headquarters in January, the 12,000-square-foot space doubled the display capacity of its old office. Visitors to the new space will find more eco-friendly offerings: The company adds 600 new materials to its library each year, and in 2008, about 250 of those new materials had sustainable attributes—a 50 percent increase over 2007. “We are actively looking for these materials, because we know they’re important to our clients,” says library and materials research vice president Andrew Dent. Photo courtesy Material Connexion Material Connexion, which recently

For design students in New York, Christmas comes in April. That’s when SpecSimple.com, a New York–based company that operates an online directory of design products and services, distributes free swatches, material samples, brochures, finish cards, and other goodies to local schools. Now in its tenth year, the Save a Sample! Box-A-Thon is gearing up for what it hopes will be a record amount of donations and deliveries. Trucks and drivers provided by local furniture dealers will fan across the metropolitan area from April 7 to 9 to collect the spoils from architecture and design firms and to deliver them to

J. Max Bond Jr. J. Max Bond, Jr., FAIA., one of the nation’s most influential African-American architects, succumbed to cancer on February 18. He was 73. The partner at New York–based Davis Brody Bond Aedas was widely regarded as a mentor, a voice of social responsibility in practice, and a magnetic presence. “In a sense we all got robbed, including Max, because he was young,” says firm partner Steven M. Davis, FAIA. “There was a lot left to do and a lot we wanted to do together—that we would have done together.” At the time of his death, Bond was

Although longtime New Yorkers will bemoan the transformation of once-scrappy neighborhoods like Williamsburg or the East Village, gentrification does have its holdouts. PS 122, a former public school building located on the corner of First Avenue and 11th Street, is one such fortress of bohemian activity. As if ripped from the book of Jonathan Larson’s Rent, a group of artist squatters took over the Beaux Arts–inspired, five-story structure in 1978 after local officials, cowing to the city’s perilous financial crisis, closed the primary school. Photo ' David Shankbone/courtesy Wikipedia The NYC Department of Design + Construction has tapped Deborah Berke