Architects and Artisans

Frustrated with the state of sustainable, affordable housing in Seattle, designer Johnny Hartsfield quit his job, holed up in his basement, took out a home equity loan and didn’t come up for air until he’d developed a solution. It took two years. “I wanted to design homes with better values, with better health and with [...]

Michael Carlson of Carlson Studio Architects faced one of the most sensitive of challenges in Sarasota, when the Wellness Community of Southwest Florida asked his firm to design a center for patients affected by a diagnosis of cancer. “It’s not a medical facility,” he said. “It’s a place where people go to learn – a [...]

Bob Bennett and his partners at U.S. Green Energy Corporation in Fredericksburg, Va. are squeezing the costs and rigidity out of photovoltaic solar arrays. They’re doing it with lightweight fiberglass and tempered glass photovoltaic sheets they sell and install by the square foot – with a look that’s remarkably slate-like. “We shape our product to [...]

By day it’ll be a good neighbor, with form, line and warm brown tones striving for harmony alongside its early 20th century counterparts next door, around the corner and down the block. By night it’ll be a transparent lantern inviting all that pass on foot or wheels to bask in its glow and celebrate the [...]

Lisa Jackson is an interior designer who sees herself as an editor. She doesn’t like precious – she doesn’t understand it. She’s not an antique dealer, though she loves and sells the occasional piece. She simply believes, like Hemingway, that what she leaves out is just as important as what she leaves in. And she’s [...]

In northwest Washington D.C., a couple in their sixties loved their five-story home so much that they didn’t want to leave it as they looked toward retirement. Instead, they wanted to install an elevator. And a kitchen. And to age in place instead of moving away. Their team of architects, headed by Mark McInturff, concluded [...]

At 72 stories high and 840 feet tall, John Lahey’s new Legacy at Millennium Park in Chicago is an elegant, glass-clad and noticeable addition to the Chicago skyline. “I don’t think Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB) has done an all-glass building since the firm did Harbor Point and Edgewater in the early 1970s,” John said. “This [...]

John LaFarge was a late 19th century painter who studied at Newport, Rhode Island under William Morris Hunt, brother of Beaux-Arts master architect Richard Morris Hunt. LaFarge would go on to illustrate books by Tennyson and Browning, and paint his first mural for Trinity Church in Boston. But it’s his later work in opalescent stained [...]

“It’s quite a challenge,” said Zaha Hadid’s associate in charge, Joris Pauwels, of the firm’s competition proposal for the new Dance and Music Centre in The Hague. The firm’s entry won out over 15 others in the first phase of the competition. Now it must overcome two more in the second phase. The structure is [...]

Atop a bluff in suburban Maryland, the Sustainable House by McInturff Architects overlooks the C & O Canal.  Beyond that runs the Potomac River. The home’s 4,000 square feet are broken up into separate spaces to lessen the impact of its volume.  The main living space, elevated to the second level, contains living, dining and kitchen [...]