The romance of architecture is in its creative potential—a marriage of art and pragmatism. Of course, many architects suffer disillusion, especially in the early years of their career, where all they may be doing is door schedules into the small hours of the night. But for architects mastering their own projects—or bringing ideas into a collaborative process—where does the spark of creativity come from? How is it harnessed into the development of great design? In this special section, RECORD explores the science and psychology of creativity, as well as the approaches architects use to keep that spark alive.
It was 60 years ago, at the start of his career, but the architect and educator John P. Eberhard remembers the very moment the idea came to him for what would be his seminal creation: the modular church.
In 1958, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at the University of California, Berkeley, embarked on an ambitious endeavor to closely study 40 of the most creative architects living in the U.S. or working in the country at the time.
Rumor has it that the quaint town inspired the architecture in Disney’s animated film Beauty and the Beast. But in a recent renovation of the city’s Musée Unterlinden, Herzog & de Meuron made a conscious effort to avoid the preciousness of a Disney film.
When it was founded in 1935, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) occupied one, then two floors of the War Memorial Veterans Building in the Hayes Valley neighborhood before moving into its purposebuilt, Mario Botta–designed home in nearby SoMa in 1995.
The completion of Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s (RPBW) Valletta City Gate comes 30 years after the architect was first invited to remodel the main entrance to Malta’s walled capital.