Architects and Artisans

Stephen Rigby got into vineyards and winemaking through a twist of fate. Armed with a degree in marine engineering, he took a part-time job in the late ‘70s at Mississippi State’s Agriculture School, engaged at the time in revitalizing the state’s wine industry, wiped out during Prohibition. “I’m one of those guys that just fell [...]

When Eric Gartner and Coty Sidnam, partners in the New York firm of SPG Architects, met their new client in Costa Rica back in 2005, he’d already started to put up a steel structure on his steeply sloped site at the tip of the Osa Peninsula, overlooking the Pacific and Panama in the distance. “There [...]

A builder, a venture capitalist and a real estate developer have joined forces in Beverly, Mass. to create a traditional, shingle-style residence qualified for LEED-Platinum status. Its mission is to educate consumers and builders about the benefits of green construction. And it’s going to debut during the first three episodes of “This New House” on [...]

Frank Lloyd Wright never forgot the impact of the Froebel blocks his mother bought for him at an early age. “The smooth shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which never afterward leaves the fingers: so form became feeling,” he once wrote. He later noted that when he finally went to work [...]

Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL) is an architecture firm known for setting directions rather than making statements. The firm rarely fails to help us think about where we are, and more important, where we’re heading. Its loosely choreographed and intuitive attitude toward our environment made a major splash on June 24 when its winning [...]

Seventeen years ago, Cedric Smith turned a love for advertising into a career as an artist. He’d been working as a barber’s apprentice in Atlanta. “To me, cutting hair was like sculpting,” the forty-year-old painter said. When Mississippi artist William Tolliver came into the shop for a trim, he invited Cedric to visit his studio [...]

In a slim little volume that’s eminently readable, visionary architects Amale Andraos and Dan Wood have documented how their firm, WORKac, recruited a team of 150 collaborators, built an elevated urban farm at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) P.S.1 courtyard in Queens, New York, and put on a party for thousands. Above the Pavement [...]

Like Frederick Law Olmsted, Alex Garvin has been working with parks his entire life. With dual degrees – one in architecture and another in city planning – he’s taught at Yale University for the past 43 years. He helped usher in the transformation of Atlanta’s Beltline from train tracks to urban greenspace. He managed the [...]

The story of Ivan Chermayeff and SO-IL is a tale told by a crisis. In 2008, six weeks before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Jing Liu, a native of China, and her Dutch partner Florian Idenburg set up their architecture practice in New York. They’d worked together in Japan with 2010 Pritzker Prize laureates SANAA. Each [...]

Steve Guarnaccia isn’t naming any names, but his “Three Little Pigs” bear a certain resemblance to some familiar faces. The chair of the illustration program at Parsons The New School for Design, former art director for The New York Times op-ed page and illustrator for Rolling Stone and New York, he’s just published a tongue-in-cheek [...]