Design-oriented nonprofits and foundations choose their best contributions to the built environment last year. The Design Trust for Public Space erected the Boogie Down Booth as part of its Under the Elevated project. The temporary installation transformed an underused space beneath subway tracks in the South Bronx into a seated bus stop with solar-powered lighting and directional speakers playing local artists’ music. The end of one year and the start of a new one belong to the makers of lists—of most fascinating people, brightest ideas, and biggest red-carpet disasters. At RECORD, we decided to combine clickbait and goodwill, asking a

The U.S. pavilion (1930) was designed by William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich.  The Venice Architecture Biennale is a polyglot affair. Some countries use their pavilions as conventional galleries, displaying photographs of finished buildings. Others create architecture-based installations. A smaller number take an intellectual approach, posing and then answering questions derived from architectural theory or practice. And a very few—and these may be the ones taking the greatest risks—pose questions to which the answers are allowed to emerge, through real-time investigation, over the course of the Biennale’s six-month run. Related links Exhibition Review: Time Space Existence Venice Dispatch:

The organizers of the U.S. pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale plan to reckon with the legacy of modernism by putting it into practice. Image © Naho Kubota / courtesy Leong Leong Ever the champion of far-reaching concepts, this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale director Rem Koolhaas has taken the unusual step of not only determining a theme for the main exhibitions but also asking each of the 65 independently organized national pavilions to follow his lead. Under the umbrella title Fundamentals, the architect has planned a three-part show that will include a section presenting a taxonomy of basic building

Image courtesy Storefront for Art and Architecture The curators of the United States's Pavilion at the 2014 Architecture Biennale in Venice call their project OfficeUS. The curators of the United States Pavilion at the 2014 Architecture Biennale in Venice have very ambitious plans: to transform an exhibition space into an architectural office. Announced last week, the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs selected the team of Ashley Schafer, Ana Miljački, and Eva Franch i Gilabert and their proposal to reinterpret the last 100 years of American building outside our borders in a project called OfficeUS. "We want to

At the Storefront anniversary party: Honoree Steven Holl, director Eva Franch, event co-chair Linda Pollak, and board president Charles Renfro. New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture celebrated its 30th anniversary with a benefit and silent auction on Friday night. Vito Acconci, who designed Storefront's exhibition space and its jigsaw puzzle façade, was a no show, but director Eva Franch i Gilabert presided over the event in one of her appropriately architectural dresses. An event honoree (along with Yona Friedman and Mary Miss), Steven Holl exchanged some quick banter with Franch before he spoke to the crowd, remembering the Storefront's

Photo courtesy The Architectural League of New York "The City That Never Was" panelists included (from left to right): Javier Arpa; Robin Nagle; Iñaki Abalos; William Braham; and Christopher Marcinkoski. Have architects been spending too much time designing buildings? That was the paradoxical question at the heart of a symposium sponsored by the Architectural League of New York on the boom years of the early 21st century. The February 22 conference, called “The City that Never Was: Urbanization After The Bubble,” was about the buildings that resulted from the mismatch “between the flows of capital and the needs of the

Photo courtesy Eva Franch i Gilabert Eva Franch i Gilabert Following a four-month international search, the Storefront for Art and Architecture has named Eva Franch i Gilabert its new director. The announcement came on May 10, after the organization’s board vetted more than 70 contenders, according to Storefront’s Web site, acknowledging the “overwhelm[ing] breadth and depth of candidates who applied from around the world.” A Catalan architect, researcher, and teacher, Franch i Gilabert, 31, is founder of the solo practice OOAA (office of architectural affairs). During the past two years, she directed the Masters Thesis studio at Rice University, where