Magazine

Kanagawa-based architecture team Ryumei Fujiki and Yukiko Sato/F.A.D.S designed this home for an art appreciator and amateur artist who wanted a “house like an art museum.” Planned with careful consideration for air circulation as well as for the harsh, snowy climate of the Japan Sea...

On 16 November 2014 the renovated and expanded Harvard Art Museums opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after six years of planning. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, in collaboration with Boston's Payette, the project consolidates three of Harvard University's museums –...

Resembling a simple glass-box office building from a distance, up close the 50-story FKI Tower reveals a simple yet ingenious wall section that incorporates solar panels angled to absorb more of the sun's rays than a strictly vertical surface. Further, a number of atriums and a rooftop...

For the last two years the Buildings of the Week on the U.S. platforms of World-Architects looked at one building in each state over the course of fifty weeks. For 2015 we are going a different route and looking at buildings overseas designed by architects based in the United States...

This combined studio, gallery, and home by Fukuoka-based Masao Yahagi Architects features a wood-frame construction style appropriate to the building’s location in a historic district near the sea, and an open gallery space unbroken by columns. The site presented a number of design...

Just as this house is for two personalities – an architect and a chef – the exterior exhibits two main gestures: Sculpted panels made from fiberglass wrap the cube-like volume, while charred cedar pieces with horizontal windows break through at an angle. The combination is a...

For a site in the Resonant Sand Bay in the Gobi Desert near the city of Baotou in Inner Mongolia PLaT architects from Beijing designed a hotel that reflects, in plan, the shape of a lotus flower. However, the inspiration of the design developed from the idea of creating a construction on top of...

Designed for an engineer and an artist, the Topo House is an apt name, given the way it peels up gently from the Wisconsin landscape, melding itself with the site's topography. Johnsen Schmaling Architects' low-slung design can also be seen as a response to the state's cold...

Located in Nakanoshima, Osaka’s business district, Mitsui Garden Hotel Osaka Premier was designed around the concept of stimulating all five senses of its cultured clientele. Kanagawa Prefecture-based landscape design firm STGK (Studio Gen Kumagai) created the hotel’s gardens with an...

Every four years thousands of Boy Scouts, leaders and staff converge for the 10-day National Scout Jamboree. Held in various locations since its 1937 beginning, the Jamboree has a permanent base at the Summit Bechtel Family National Scout Reserve in Mount Hope, West Virginia. Connecting...

Wood in architecture is undergoing a 21st-century resurgence of sorts, finding applications from the thinnest of veneers to structural frames for mid-rise buildings. Most architectural applications utilize milled wood, which exhibits the grain and character of wood but does not convey the...

Since 1991 Georgetown University has offered first-year and transfer students an "overnight experience" away from its Washington, D.C. campus with it ESCAPE program. Last year the school dedicated the program's new venue, the Calcagnini Contemplative Center, named for alumnus...

Guilford is a town in southern Vermont that is home to only about 2,100 people. It is also the location of Guilford Sound, an energy-efficient recording studio for those who want to get away to what the proprietors call "your own private recording haven." Designed by Ted...

Parking garages are one of the lowliest of building types, often built as gray, open-air concrete boxes without any architectural consideration. But a number of garages, such as Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami, reveal the potential hidden in parking structures. Axis...

Healthcare architecture brings to mind large buildings and complexes with fairly generic exteriors and interiors to match. This is not the case with Legacy's small emergency rooms in suburban Dallas, Texas, designed by 5G Studio Collaborative. In the second and most recent ER, in Allen, a...

Tennessee is home to two music meccas: Memphis and Nashville. While the latter is the home of country music (and even the Country Music Hall of Fame), Memphis is synonymous with blues, soul and gospel. As Jason Jackson of brg3s architects testifies, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters,...

PRODUCTORA is a budding architecture studio with its headquarters in Mexico City, founded by architects from different countries: Abel Perles from Argentina, Wonne Ickx from Belgium, and Carlos Bedoya and Víctor Jaime from Mexico. Shortly after its beginnings in 2006, the studio came...

Not many architects can boast of having a cultural anthropologist on its team when designing a building, but when it came time for Liollio Architecture to tackle the design of a library for the residents of St. Helena Island in South Carolina, they brought one on board to help understand the...

Rhode Island may be the smallest state in the U.S., but its architecture has warranted studies by historians Henry-Russell Hitchcock in Rhode Island Architecture and Vincent Scully in The Shingle Style with the Stick Style. The latter is mentioned by architects Estes/Twombly...

The workshop of O-office Architects in Guangzhou was built on top of an old silo building that was part of a brewery. Its views go south across the river towards downtown and north towards a generic new high-rise housing estate. The architects reused the industrial space with basic but radical...

"Urban unfill" is the term that Spillman Farmer Architects uses to describe its "non-building" for Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. The Arts Plaza transforms an old auto-repair facility into a raw, open-air space for the school's art students. Architectural...

Single-family homes in the United States tend to be one- or two-story buildings that sprawl across the land. Another tactic is taken in the aptly named Tower House designed for a steep and narrow Portland lot by architect Benjamin Waechter. Building up four floors allows for economical...

What looks like a low-slung industrial box rising from the plains of Oklahoma, with oil derricks projecting from its roof, is in fact a library inspired by the natural and economic characteristics of the place. Designed by LWPB Architecture with Richard+Bauer, the building is an unabashed...

This addition to a 100-year-old bungalow in Bay Village, Ohio (a small town west of Cleveland), is particularly striking for the way it melds architecture and landscape through the plants covering its wall and folded roof. Further, a sunken terrace helps to bring sunlight into the...

This home for a family of four designed by Naoi Architecture & Design Office sits in a farming-district-turned-suburban-subdivision in Shiga Prefecture. In order to enable a lifestyle in harmony with nature for the outdoors-loving residents, the architects kept the surrounding landscape...

The impact of architecture is often felt beyond the walls of a particular building. In the case of this residence hall serving the students of Williston State College in North Dakota, the building frees up much needed space in the community to alleviate a housing shortage. The...

Mid-20th-century modern architecture is old enough that the question of demolition versus preservation comes to fore. In many cases the choice of preserving modern architecture involves renovations and additions, so particular buildings continue their usefulness over becoming museum pieces....

In an effort to recede from the suburban context of Syracuse, New York, Jon Lott of PARA-Project opted to wrap the three-story writing studio in a material more commonly used for roofs and canopies: silicon-impregnated fiberglass fabric. The orthogonal exterior belies the curved ceiling of...

Many former industrial buildings in Chinese cities have been converted into hubs for the creative industries. There is political support for the shift of production from inner city neighbourhoods to newly established industrial zones on the fringes of the metropolises. Of course, environmental...

Shou Sugi Ban is an old Japanese technique for charring wood to make it insect resistant and weatherproof it on the outside of buildings. The technique, which creates a wildfire-resistant shell, is one way that this retreat on a cattle ranch between...

In the United States battlefields from the American Revolution and Civil War are considered sacred ground, preserved as open space and used as sites for education and interpretation. The American Revolution's Battle of Monmouth took place on a hot day in June 1778 in central New Jersey....

For years, Switzerland has held a privileged position in the panorama of international architecture. The country (one of the richest in the world) boasts an excellent network of architecture schools, a modern architectural culture with a long tradition, a powerful publishing industry and...

Even as college tuitions rise faster than overall inflation, universities are booming. The University of New Hampshire is projecting a 30% increase in the undergraduate and graduate populations in the next two decades. In anticipation, UNH is building more, including a new building for the...

The harsh sun of America's Desert Southwest leads architects to varying design responses, from the vernacular use of mass that absorbs the sun's heat and radiates it during the cool nights to elements that filter the sunlight. Eric Strain of assemblageSTUDIO has combined these two...

Aksarben Village is a mix of apartments, shopping, restaurants, entertainment, recreation and offices that bills itself as "Omaha's all-weather destination" about five miles west of downtown. The office spaces are particularly important for giving the new development some...

Site often determines a building's form, be it orientation, size, views, or materiality, among numerous characteristics. This cabin on the edge of Flathead Lake in western Montana finds inspiration in its site accordingly, also going so far as to echo the slope of the land in the green...