Architects and Artisans

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 the structure, [...]

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 [...]

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 glass [...]

He may have started out decades ago as a journalist in Manhattan, but Daniel Mack is now a sought-after furniture designer and architectural collaborator whose work is on display in museums like the Whitney, Cooper Hewitt and Boston’s Museum of Fine Art.
“I was in New York in the early ‘70s,” he said. “I was [...]

When the owners of a vintage Charles Moore residence in New Hampshire needed a dining room table, they turned to veteran woodworker Dan Mosham and Dorset Custom Furniture in Dorset, Vermont.
Then they came back for the chairs.
He’s been making furniture for more than thirty years now. He got started in 1974, after he’d built [...]

Curtis Olson started making art on a full-time basis less than a decade ago. Before that, he’d been practicing architecture in California and Wyoming for twenty years.
“One Friday about eight years ago, I was driving to my grandmother’s memorial service in Missoula, Montana and thinking of the unfulfilled dreams she’d had in her life,” he [...]

Winemaker Stephen Rigby says he doesn’t have a lot to do with the vineyards at Raffaldini during the growing season, other than discuss their progress with vineyard manager Andy Shores.
But as the fruit on the vines begins to show color in mid-July, he gets busy, bringing some of it back to the lab. “I’ll be [...]

A builder, a venture capitalist and a real estate developer have joined forces in Beverly, Mass. to create a traditional, shingle-style residence qualified for LEED-Platinum status.
Its mission is to educate consumers and builders about the benefits of green construction.
And it’s going to debut during the first three episodes of “This New House” on the DIY [...]

Frank Lloyd Wright never forgot the impact of the Froebel blocks his mother bought for him at an early age.
“The smooth shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which never afterward leaves the fingers: so form became feeling,” he once wrote. He later noted that when he finally went to work for [...]

Seventeen years ago, Cedric Smith turned a love for advertising into a career as an artist.
He’d been working as a barber’s apprentice in Atlanta. “To me, cutting hair was like sculpting,” the forty-year-old painter said. When Mississippi artist William Tolliver came into the shop for a trim, he invited Cedric to visit his studio and [...]