Laura Raskin, a former RECORD editor, writes about architecture. She recently moved with her family from Brooklyn, New York, to the Green Mountains of Vermont.
The organization will open the doors to its renovated facility this fall, marking the end of a long, troubled saga. Image courtesy of Platt Byard Dovell White Architects Click on the slide show button to view more images of New-York Historical Society Renovation. Related Links: NY Historical Society Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture Completed in 1908 by York and Sawyer, the New-York Historical Society’s classical, Roman Eclectic style building, on Central Park West, has long been known as a “bunker”—its elegant yet severe granite façade fails to extend a warm welcome to visitors and passersby.
An office building in the Bronx Zoo seems as natural to the site as the surrounding parkland and accommodates multiple programs with minimal resources. Staring out the window is part of the job description.
When Brooklyn-based design and fabrication shop Situ Studio was installing reOrder at the Brooklyn Museum in late February, it looked as though their team was fashioning enormous Victorian skirts for the classical columns in the McKim, Mead & White'designed Great Hall.
' [Cannon Design Staff] are now living in a world where they can talk with each other and share ideas, and it makes our projects stronger and our team stronger.' ' Thomas Bergmann, Cannon Design Architect Thomas Bergmann, managing principal of the Cannon Design St. Louis office, had walked past the Power House many times. The 1928 Revival-style building was a derelict landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, just off the interstate — a sign of different and more prosperous times. The building began its life as a courthouse. Then the city turned it into a coal-fired
'We thought, it would be great if a corporation tried to reach out to the public. Roca wants to erase this detachment that companies have from society.' ' Borja Ferrater, Office of Architecture in Barcelona The Barcelona-based Roca, one of the world’s top producers of bath furnishings and tile, wanted to increase its visibility. So the company approached Carlos Ferrater’s Office of Architecture in Barcelona (OAB) in 2008 to transform a small 1960s office building it occupied into a brand showroom. Although the timing was precarious — right when the financial crisis hit — design architect Borja Ferrater developed a
'We had to . . . figure out ways to make the merchandise look like art. Now many people walk into the lobby and think the store is the first gallery.' ' Jeff Sheppard, Roth + Sheppard Architects Established more than 26 years ago, Roth + Sheppard Architects have a bunch of retail projects in their portfolio — “just cool spaces that seemed to work,” says Jeff Sheppard, coprincipal of the Denver-based firm. His design of the gift shop at Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum wasn’t based on a gut sensibility, though. Instead, he and his team took a scientific
'Now, the early guys got it. Schindler, Neutra, Wright,' says Barton Myers, sitting on a ledge of the terrace outside of his most recent steel and glass house in Montecito, California, completed in 2009.
When Serie Architects was selected in March 2010 along with Grimshaw's London office and Berlin-based Pysall Ruge Architekten to transform a group of disused steel factory buildings in Hangzhou, into a new mixed-use complex, the firm faced a big challenge.
Image courtesy Houses at Sagaponac Click on the slide show button to see the new designs proposed for the Houses at Sagaponac development. Houses at Sagaponac was a project for a robust economy. In 2001, the late Harry Brown Jr. recruited Richard Meier to help lure architects, many of them famous, to design 32 modern, high-end residences for a 72-acre plot of land in Sagaponac, a village in the town of Southampton, on Long Island. Brown was hoping to beat back the number of traditional, shingle-style mansions cropping up in the area. Related Links: The Sagaponac Effect: Modernist Subdivisions Multiply
Rendering by CO Architects Click on the slide show button to see more images of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. An intact, teeth-baring 33-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex named Thomas is among the 20 dinosaur skeletons and 300 fossils that are moving into an upgraded space inside the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, located in Exposition Park. Designed by Los Angeles-based CO Architects, in collaboration with Brooklyn-based exhibition designer Evidence Design, the exhibition hall, at 14,000 square feet, is twice the size of the museum’s old dinosaur gallery. Never-before-displayed stars of the exhibition include a Triceratops and