Why isn't sustainability a hot issue on the campaign trail? Illustration by Brian Stauffer Those fast-payback, high-efficiency lights you just specified? Job-killing. The daylighted, naturally ventilated workplace you've created that delights your client and decreases sick days? A drag on the economy. When it comes to sustainability, the political debate of 2012 relies on misinformation—if those issues are addressed at all. In many places the term "global warming" can't be uttered in polite company. The building industry has recognized the urgency of embedding sustainability deeply in product development, design, standards setting, and construction. A broad range of public and private
The centerpiece of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas, is a vast room that rises in a graceful arc of laminated-wood roof beams and swells outward with canted walls of glass as it vaults a pond.
A cluster of windblown branches sprouts from a tree stump in front of a museum in Ascó, Spain. The tree is sufficiently battered that I wonder why architects Olga Felip and Josep Camps kept it. “Our landscape doesn’t have a lot of character.
J'rn Utzon, designer of the Sydney Opera House, died November 28 at age 90. Jørn Utzon died November 28 at age 90, after a long illness. He never saw his masterpiece, the Sydney Opera House, completed. Though it is among the 20th-century’s most widely admired and audacious works, it is the architect’s great failure. It jump-started a promising career and stunted what should have been a glorious maturity. Utzon married a great intuitive aesthetic to an almost heroic faith in the ability of technology to realize human aspiration. The son of a naval architect, Utzon was born in Copenhagen in
Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina pushed a 30-foot-high surge of water through East Biloxi, Mississippi, tall weeds grow along streets once lined with houses. Biloxi’s casinos have been reconstructed, larger than their former selves.
The Gulf Coast Community Design Studio provides a model for rebuilding after Katrina. “We’re not looking to make a sweetened vernacular,” Perkes explains. “If anything, we’re looking for something energetic or a bit more robust.” A striking butterfly roof allows the house for Le and Nghia Tran (opposite) to fit gracefully under mature trees and directs runoff to a cistern to water the garden. Working with students from Penn State University, as well as University of Texas, Austin professor Serge Palleroni and Bryan Bell of the Charlotte-based social-outreach organization Design Corps, the studio designed a fretwork of wooden braces to
Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina pushed a 30-foot-high surge of water through East Biloxi, Mississippi, tall weeds grow along streets once lined with houses.
When splashed across newspapers, television screens and Web sites worldwide on December 18, the nine proposals for the World Trade Center site may have looked like a brave new skyscraper world—to paraphrase the headline of December 19th’s New York Daily News—or an exhibition of architectural ego as Lisa Rochon put it in the Toronto Globe and Mail.