Architects and Artisans

It started out as an Earth Day competition for the AIA’s Committee on the Environment (COTE) fourteen years ago. Now it’s evolved into the AIA/COTE (Committee on the Environment) Green Projects competition. Every year, as many as 100 architecture firms will submit projects to be judged on both design and sustainability. “That’s what sets it [...]

Since the 1930s, Preservation North Carolina (PNC) has been striving to protect North Carolina’s architectural history, one building at a time. Remarkably, of the total 702 preservation covenants held by statewide organizations in the U.S., 407 are held by PNC. “We have one of the highest rosters of protected buildings in the country,” said Elizabeth [...]

At the bottom of Science Hill on the Yale campus in New Haven, on the quad between Prospect Street and Whitney Avenue, across from Eero Saarinen’s 1958 hockey rink, lies one of the AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects for 2010. Kroon Hall, home of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, was designed and [...]

On the site of the former Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Sen. Robert F. Kennedy gave his final victory speech – and was gunned down only minutes later – a school and park bearing his name now honor the pragmatic idealism that was uniquely his. The Ambassador and its Cocoanut Grove nightclub fell into [...]

Architect Campion Platt found inspiration for his Mariner Collection of rugs, woven in silk and wool by master rug maker Roubini, from his travel and work in the Turks and Caicos Islands. While designing and developing a community at Ambergris Cay, a 1,100-acre private island there, he began to draw. “For each design, I developed [...]

Sometimes, the smartest thing a writer can do is get out of the way. That’s what Saxon Henry did with her new book, “Four Florida Moderns,” and the tactic’s paid off handsomely. Though she interviewed architects Alberto Alfonso, Rene Gonzalez, Chad Oppenheim and Guy Peterson, she chose not to inject her own narrative into the [...]

Every year at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, Skram Furniture out of Hillsborough, N.C. unveils its new, modern, approachable products to the market. This year is no different, said Skram founder Jacob Marks (that’s Skram spelled backwards) – except for the debut of heavyweight saddle leather in a number of new items. [...]

The theme of the AIA Conference in Miami on June 10-12 may be “Design for the New Decade,” but Allan Shulman’s new book, “Miami Modern Metropolis,” takes a thorough look in the opposite direction. Still, it’s timely. It’s an exploration of the myriad and often contradictory forces that shaped Miami’s postwar construction, and looks at [...]

Ambitious? Yes. Rigorous? Check. Visionary? Absolutely. But then, wouldn’t anything bearing the Buckminster Fuller name have to be all three? The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is a three-year-old competition designed to shed light on system-based approaches to solving the major crises facing humanity. “It’s about putting forth an approach to solve complex problems,” said Elizabeth Thompson, [...]

Artist Brian Plaster has taken a 1952 Sears home in Carrboro, N.C. and turned it into a gallery clad in found objects. It was a wreck when he found it fifteen years ago. Abandoned cars littered the back yard. Massive pine trees, their trunks three to four feet in diameter, leaned against exterior walls. “It’s [...]