Architects and Artisans

After decades of urban and suburban infrastructure designed by traffic engineers who’ve delivered tangled and ever-slowing meaning to the word oxymoron, Audi is turning to the architecture community for new solutions. Earlier this week in Munich, the German automobile manufacturer unveiled initial ideas from six international architecture firms in a competition designed to analyze the future of [...]

Antwerp-based Royal Botania has earned an reputation for creating some of the most refined, diverse outdoor collections in the world, with a wide selection of different materials, and a blend of precision and functionality. The company will be at ICFF this week, and A+A recently interviewed founders Kris Van Puyvelde and Frank Boschman via email: [...]

Deborah Osburn has her finger on the pulse of tile design. Through her blog, Tile Envy, she’s learned what’s hot and what’s not – and she’s assembled an online design boutique dedicated only to the tile designs she knows are in demand. It’s called Clé – and it’s a source for affordable, fashionable and quality [...]

The city that’s given us cutting-edge museums by Phillip Johnson, Tadao Ando and Louis Kahn is now 25 years into a major revitalization of its downtown urban core. Armed with a generous budget and a visionary master plan financed by the local, civic-minded Bass family, David M. Schwartz Architects (DMSAS) has been steadily working to [...]

Leon Jakimac is intent on creating Bohemian perfection. It’s what he calls the brand essence of Lasvit, the company he founded after graduating from Loyola in 1999 and earning his MBA from Northwestern’s Kellog School of Management in Hong Kong.  His  firm designs and manufactures contemporary light fittings, glass art installations and award-winning lighting collections. The Bohemian [...]

Manhattan-based Urban Green Council, the NY chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, takes sustainability for existing buildings seriously. With more than a million structures in New York, 26,000 of them at 50,000 square feet or more, the group has initiated an Oscar-like award competition called the Ebies, as in Existing Buildings. And in a remarkably [...]

Back in the early 1980s, attorney Robert Herrmann, fresh out of Columbia Law School and Yale’s Department of History, began to represent Robert A. M. Stern in construction law. The encounter not only changed his career path, but engendered a lifelong appreciation for good design. In the early 1990s, he developed a curriculum for a [...]

Rebecca Norton and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe work in symmetry as a team known as Awkward x 2, painting together to produce images that belong to neither. They paint at exactly the same time, sometimes for as long as 10 hours at a stretch, like two musicians side by side. They use an affine grid – a favorite [...]

A well-designed building, believes Architzer co-founder and HWKN partner Marc Kushner, is an incredibly effective communications tool, uniquely equipped to bring value to a brand. “It’s a big billboard in the marketplace,” the 2004 graduate of the Harvard Design School says.  “It speaks to users – for those who pass it, it enters into their [...]

David Bergman looks at green architecture through the dual lenses of architecture and economics. He majored in both at Yale, then tackled Princeton’s A-school.   He’s been tracking the price of oil and the use of sustainable design ever since. “When I graduated in 1981, there wasn’t much in environmental design,” he says.  “Oil was cheap.  [...]