Architects and Artisans

It was 1996 and artist Will Cotton was painting bunnies from Trix cereal and Nestlé’s Quik, among other characters from the pantheon of popular culture, when a new concept from his childhood crept into his consciousness: Candyland. “Everything was made of sweets,” he says of his favorite board game.  “It’s all pleasure and indulgence all [...]

Recently, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design (UCLA A.UD), one of the most prestigious programs in the nation, approached David Lai, principal and creative director at Hello Design, with the goal of communicating the school’s program and mission through a new digital presence.  Led by renowned architect Hitoshi Abe, the school believes in the power of [...]

The cut’s been made from 52 design firms down to 11, as Chicago’s Navy Pier looks toward its 2016 centennial with an eye toward its second reinvention in 20 years. Among the teams making the first cut are Zaha Hadid, Xavier Vendrell, SHoP, Studio Gang, !melk, James Corner Field Operations, Jacques Ferrier Architectures, Gustafson Guthrie [...]

On Saturday, October 29, the Savannah College of Design (SCAD) will open the doors to its new Museum of Art, a celebration of the 19th and 21st centuries in the oldest existing antebellum railroad depot in the nation. The lead architect, Christian Sottile of Sottile and Sottile Architects, who ‘s also a SCAD alumnus and professor, recently [...]

By JoAnn Locktov In 1987, as fashion designer Karen Thompson was restoring her home, she taught herself the ancient craft of mosaics. It became her career, as she replaced fabric and buttons with ceramic and glass. Working with a vast range of materials Thompson has developed a specialty in custom mosaic installations for both interiors [...]

Michael Connors is an author who’s transformed his favorite topic into three dimensions. He’s written three books on Caribbean decorative arts during the past decade. Along the way, he began collecting the post-World War I Art Moderne furniture that permeates the islands.  Now he’s partnered with Ohio-based manufacturer Scott Thomas to launch a line of furniture [...]

What’s an architect to do when asked to make a headquarters building out of a mass of metal scraps scattered out over a ten-acre bone yard for one of the nation’s largest steel, crane and fabrication companies? For Carrboro, N.C.-based Weinstein Friedlein Architects, an inventory of precisely what Buckner Companies had on hand was the [...]

It’s an agrarian tale with an historic twist. On one of George Washington’s five farms in Northern Virginia, scaled down today from 2,000 acres to 128, Woodlawn Plantation and Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture are partnering to provide fresh, local-grown produce to the Washington D.C. market. The experimental farming project began this year [...]

By JoAnn Locktov Jack in the Beanstalk could do worse than to depend on Marie Gibbons’s “Natural Desire to Climb” series of tile to reach his lofty treasure.  Inspired by an exhibit titled Ladders, for which the series was intended, the 5” square sgraffito tiles offer a toehold into the imaginative realm of Gibbons’ memory [...]

For Wired magazine executive editor Thomas Goetz, it was an opportunity to transform mountains of data into meaningful art. With Adobe, he curated InForm: Turning Data into Meaning on AMDM, an online exhibit of the works of ten graphic artists that shows how significant digital information is in people’s lives – of how our social [...]