The North American recipients of the Holcim Awards (left to right): David Benjamin, Caitlin Taylor, Amy Mielke, Kai-Uwe Bergmann, and Matthijs Bouw.  On September 18 the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction announced the winners for the North American segment of its international awards program at a ceremony held at Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto. Over the course of the evening, which was enlivened by an unseasonable cold snap that pervaded the largely open-air venue (a community environmental center that won a Holcim award in 2008), 13 projects were recognized and a total of $330,000 in prize money was awarded.

Rural Studio's legendary program celebrates 20 years of design-build in west Alabama. Photo © Timothy Hursley Fireworks marked the culmination of the annual pig roast and valediction ceremony, held at the Bodark Amphitheatre behind Newbern’s Main Street. The Greensboro Boys & Girls Club was one of a dozen projects presented over the course of the weekend. Clad in a brightly hued corrugated metal, it refers to the vernacular rural barn. On a recent blazing, blue-sky afternoon, a crowd of 300 assembled in Newbern, Alabama, at the former local savings bank, a 1903 brick edifice that Auburn University's Rural Studio is

Renzo Piano never wanted to build a house. With a portfolio of museums, towers, and other award-winning buildings across the world, his mind was elsewhere. 

Richard Meier's new model museum is located at Mana Contemporary, a cultural center and fine arts storage and handling facility that occupies a hulking former manufacturing complex in Jersey City, New Jersey. On the evening of March 5, Richard Meier celebrated the opening of his new model museum in Jersey City, New Jersey. Guests from Manhattan arrived by coach buses, which whisked them below the Hudson River and across the state’s gritty edges to Mana Contemporary, a cultural center and fine arts storage and handling facility that occupies a hulking former manufacturing complex. The collection, which was relocated to its

Panama's instant icon has taken shape—and inches toward the finish line. The biodiversity museum, which sits along Panama City’s Amador Causeway, is visible from great distances across the bay. After years of agonizing delays, an opening date is finally drawing near for Frank Gehry’s iconic Biomuseo in Panama City—a project that has been in the works for over a decade. Gehry’s first built work in Latin America, the vividly hued concrete and steel biodiversity museum sits dramatically along the Amador Causeway, former site of a U.S. Army base at the Pacific entry to the Canal. Focusing on Panama’s rich and

Exploiting the bounty of local building products as well as a regional tradition of craft, Monterrey, Mexico'based S-AR is amassing a rugged, though subtly refined, body of work that reflects the city around them.

Designer shelters for the birds and the bees elevate our view of food production. Nogg, by Matthew Hayward and Nadia Turan A Modernist roost for a chicken? A bespoke cow barn on an English country estate? A luxury high-rise for a colony of bees? Some people might say that these structures are unnecessarily extravagant, given the simple programmatic needs of the occupants. But, as architect Stephen Taylor says of the barn he designed at Shatwell Farm in Somerset, England, that responds to the dignified, centuries-old architecture around it: “Every building is always part of something bigger.” While it was a

Colombia Transformed: Architecture=Politics features work by six designers including Felipe Mesa, Planb Arquitectos. His Orquidorama pavilion in Medellín’s Botanic Garden is shown here. Last Thursday, July 11, the exhibition Colombia Transformed: Architecture=Politics opened at AIA New York’s Center for Architecture. The show examines 11 recent works by six of the Latin American country’s leading architects: Daniel Bonilla, Giancarlo Mazzanti, Felipe Mesa, Juan Manuel Pelaez, Felipe Uribe, and Orlando Garcia. The featured projects—from libraries and community centers, to sports arenas, to schools—reflect the wave of innovative design that has been driving social transformation across the country (most notably in Bogotá and