Architects and Artisans

Anyone who’s ever wanted to try out a piece of furniture in a room before stepping into a store, or even decorate an entire house prior to making a purchase, is now in luck. Design Within Reach (DWR) and mydeco.com are now collaborating to allow customers and studios to see how the store’s products work [...]

If Monday’s post on A+A looked at et al. Consortium’s inspired efforts to find new uses for discarded Christmas trees, and Tuesday’s pondered artist Ludvic’s reconfiguring of scrapped steel into sculptural works of surreal whimsy, today looking at one Minnesota design-build firm striving sentively to restore  homes built from the 1890s to the 1940s. It too, works [...]

Egyptian-born artist Ludvic, a Canadian citizen who’s made his home in the U.S. for the past 25 years, is a sculptor whose art embraces what he finds in the environment. His work makes use of the detritus of civilization, the leftover flotsam and jetsam from modern society’s movement forward, as its raw material. “I don’t [...]

Born of the apocalyptic snowstorms of the past winter in New York, fLume is a found object and a truncated symbol of holidays past. “When the snow melted, one of our partners discovered dozens and dozens of discarded Christmas trees revealed on the sidewalks,” said Manu Garza of et al. Collaborative.  “They were something once [...]

On Saturday, June 18, 2011 Architects + Artisans will host a behind-the-scenes tour of Thomas Jefferson’s architectural masterpiece and Palladian retreat, Poplar Forest. Travis McDonald, director of architectural restoration at the estate, will offer a guided, room-by-room commentary of the octagonal-shaped main building, as well as its design and construction and that of the surrounding structures.  [...]

John Makepeace, master woodworker, and Robert Golden, documentary filmmaker, live within six miles of each other in Dorset in Southwest England. But until Makepeace read an opinion piece on the relationship between the meaning of choice in shopping and the resulting erosion of the tax base, written by Golden for a local newspaper, the two had never met.  A series of [...]

Joe Ginsberg is talking by phone from his 2,500 square-foot studio in the Garment District in Midtown Manhattan.  The self-described painter, sculptor and materials specialist is cataloging the sheer breadth of the items surrounding him.  There are, he says, bronzes, brasses, fabrics, canvases, metal screenings, hand-blown glasses, cast steel and aluminum, as well as an [...]

It’s an innovative initiative created in response to a languishing design and construction market. In 2010, Meld USA, the North Carolina based manufacturer of eco-friendly concrete products, spun off a new company called Concretehaus.  For about a year now, the company has been soliciting designs for ready-to-use concrete products from young designers, primarily in Europe, [...]

The 18 projects in the 2011 AIA Housing Awards were selected for their ability to delight as well as solve problems and elevate the design profession. “We were looking for the theatrical and a certain sense joyfulness, of ‘Oh man – it would be so nice to be there!’” said Katherine Austin, AIA, jury chair [...]

By his own admission, architect Jim Cutler is a big-time storyteller. One of his favorite tales is how he came to study with Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania. “I was a pretty poor kid on a scholarship, living on food stamps, and I took his graduate course for the worst possible reason – [...]