Wretched excess. Sustainability and the rise of LEED. Architecture as spectacle. Architecture for Humanity. Buildings as collectibles and architects as brands. . . Making sense of the past decade means confronting forces and trends pointing in radically different directions. Should we remember the first 10 years of the 21st century — the naughts — for advances in digital technologies that allow building designs to be rapidly analyzed and improved or for those that allow super-tall buildings to rise in the middle of deserts? After a period of wealth creation on a scale never before seen, what do we have to
Paul Nakazawa teaches professional practice at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and works as a business strategist and coach for architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design firms.
Ole Scheeren After 15 years at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture—eight years as a partner—Ole Scheeren has split from Rem Koolhaas and set up his own firm. The new practice, called Büro Ole Scheeren, is based in Beijing (where Scheeren has lived for the past six years) and Hong Kong (where he has been a visiting professor at Hong Kong University since January 2010). He brings with him as a partner Eric Chang, an American architect who had worked at OMA in Beijing. At OMA, the German-born Scheeren spearheaded the design and construction of the China Central Television Station (CCTV)
Having designed a pavilion for a three-day event and a memorial required to stand for at least 200 years, Kevin Carmody and Andrew Groarke have wrestled with that most slippery of human constraints: time.
Turn the clock back to 1999 and you find Zaha Hadid and her partner Patrik Schumacher working on a critical set of projects, four of which (including MAXXI) eventually got built and two that never moved off the page or computer screen.
Health-care facilities typically use isolation as a strategy for dealing with infection control, creating buildings that work as sets of departments closed off from one another.
Fast-disappearing, Shanghai’s nong tang (lane houses) combine European construction with Chinese notions of tightly packed residential life. From the street, these early-20th-century buildings present gabled facades — respectable and a bit staid. But once you walk through the door to the lane running between the houses, you encounter a messy world of clothes hanging out to dry, shutters flung open, people gossiping, and kids running around. Private space bleeds into the public realm, with some folks cooking in the shared lane and others bathing their children there. Neri & Hu Design and Research Office (NHDRO) tried to capture the spirit
Using a process of renovation through subtraction, the New York—based firm Lynch / Eisinger / Design (L/E/D) created a multitenant commercial building in part by taking away pieces of an old industrial complex.