Architects and Artisans

Just a few weeks before publication by W. W. Norton of a major retrospective on the work of modernist Harry Weese, the Regents of the University of Colorado School of Medicine are seeking to demolish his 1972 Given Institute in Aspen. Educated at MIT and Cranbrook, Weese is well-known as the architect of Arena Stage [...]

When asked to renovate an entire 1920s residence and transform it into a voluminous library for a well-read client, Mark McInturff eschewed the notion of working with the home’s decorative roots. Instead, he chose to work with a universal system of steel, glass and cherry wood, and apply a standard set of interventions throughout the [...]

One block from Daley Plaza at Chicago’s City Hall a new high-rise has taken shape, a glass-clad sliver that pierces the skyline 50 stories up. It’s been designed by a team headed up by John Lahey, a principal at the 85-member firm of Solomon Cordwell Buenz in Chicago. He faced a series of special challenges. [...]

In Mount Airy, Maryland, a couple living in a modular home on eight country acres for the past 20 years decided some time back to plant an allee of 53 pin oaks at the center of their property. Then they built a barn for their 1949 Farmall tractor, and tore down their original modular home, [...]

They call it “A Summer House.” In rural Virginia, not too far from Fredericksburg, architect Mark McInturff and his associates recently added a freestanding structure with dual purposes to the main residence they’d already completed “It’s designed to be a pool house and a guest house,” Mark said of the petite and graceful 1,500 square [...]

Most architects, author Paul Andersen says, don’t like to be associated with patterns. There’s superficiality connected to them, as though they’re simply applied to the surface of a building and don’t affect its function at all. They don’t have much to do with context – and after all, architecture is supposed to respond to its [...]

After an inspiring trip to Fallingwater in 2007, George Smart came home to the Research Triangle Park (RTP) area of North Carolina and immediately began work on a model for his new home. The executive director of Triangle Modernist Houses stayed up all night piecing together slabs of Styrofoam until he arrived at the design [...]

Nicholas Stern was tempted to follow in the proverbial footsteps of his father, one of the nation’s preeminent architects. He studied the profession at Columbia, graduated, and enrolled in the master’s program at Yale long before Robert A. M. Stern was named dean there. But he dropped out. “Freudian issues” were the root cause, he [...]

A small transparent structure that doubles as a pristine outdoor sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh has won a national AIA Small Project Award. That’s in addition to local, state and regional AIA awards the “Art as Shelter” project has already racked up. Designed by Mike Cindric of Design Dimension and [...]

In Bessancourt, a town in Ile de France just 28 km northwest of Paris, Karawitz Architecture has abstracted the traditional form of a farmhouse and given it new life as a passive solar home. Its exterior membrane is clad in bamboo. Inside, it’s all bare wood. “It was important for us that there were raw [...]