Architects and Artisans

Micah Condon manages a gallery of 162 painters from across the nation via a website in Denver. An artist himself, he started Dailypainters in 2006, inviting in a few others who were painting every day and selling their work online. Within a month, 400 artists had signed up at no charge. He made the transition [...]

While China, Korea and India rush headlong to build entire new cities cut essentially from whole cloth, New York’s architects are striving to create sensitive infill for a 19th-century grid. And two new residential designs by Kohn Pedersen Fox in Manhattan – one on Jackson Square and the other on the Upper East Side – [...]

This post, originally published on March 16, is running again today in anticipation of the Tuesday, March 30 deadline to enter Dwell’s “Houses We Love”  competition honoring the magazine’s 10th anniversary. With a circulation of 350,000 for its print edition, and monthly online page views tallying 3.3 million, Dwell magazine could be considered the journalistic [...]

She holds a master’s degree in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania, is former associate curator of the department of architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently associate dean of external relations for the IE University School of Architecture in Madrid, Spain. But Martha Thorne is best known for her other [...]

A fifteen-year run as an actor in New York came to an abrupt end in 2000 when Michael Curry awoke in the middle of the night with an epiphany about a mosaic and a dining room table. He’d been working at night in “Cabaret” on Broadway, his days free, and was creatively antsy. He’d recently [...]

Marcello Becchi remembers his days as a child when he’d walk into a toy store with his parents and see things that they couldn’t. “It was a fantasy,” the Italian-born vice president of business development for the international firm Trend Group says. “I was a fan of Legos – not as blocks, but as a [...]

Jim Childress of Centerbrook Architects and Planners in Connecticut may have found the ideal client. She’s a world class violinist, and she loves to build. “She was my first client when I made partner,” he said. “And she’s been my longest-running client ever since.” In 1995, he began the complete renovation of her house, retaining [...]

Chris Kempel of Rockefeller Partners Architects dropped in to see his new clients a few years back, to see how they lived before starting on designs for their new home. “They were renting a rustic canyon home which felt like a ski lodge,” he said. “There was a stone hearth at the center of the [...]

It’s said that one of the bookplates in architect Richard Morris Hunt’s library read: “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis Est” or “Art is Long, Life is Brief.” Perhaps the conservatory at Biltmore Estate near Asheville, N.C. is a case in point. Developed in collaboration with Frederick Law Olmsted for George Vanderbilt, the glass, brick and stucco [...]

Out at the end of Long Island where the land fishtails into the North and South Forks, a tiny dollop of of sand appears to have slipped between the two tines and split them. Shelter Island is twelve square miles of beach accessible only by an eight-minute ferry ride. Twenty-five hundred people live there in [...]