The good people of Iceland are refusing to allow economic crisis or volcanic activity to stand in the way of their cultural progress. On May 4, 2011, Reykjavík’s new Concert Hall and Conference Centre, designed by Henning Larsen Architects, with acoustics by Artec Consultants and a facade by Olafur...
A seemingly inseparable pair, Charles and Henry Greene were born in Cincinnati a little more than a year apart in 1868 and 1870, attended manual training school together at Washington University in St. Louis, then headed off to MIT for their two-year degrees in architecture. When their parents moved...
If, as Scott Fitzgerald suggested, the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing, then Chicken Point Cabin by Olson Kundig Architects is a house hinged on a pivoting window as wide as a wall. “I like the way the house opens up the outside,” says Tom Kundig, design principal at the […]
When Eric Gartner and Coty Sidnam, partners in the New York firm of SPG Architects, met their new client in Costa Rica back in 2005, he’d already started to put up a steel structure on his steeply sloped site at the tip of the Osa Peninsula, overlooking the Pacific and Panama in the distance. “There...
Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL) is an architecture firm known for setting directions rather than making statements. The firm rarely fails to help us think about where we are, but more important, where we’re heading. Its loosely choreographed and intuitive attitude toward our environment...
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 says. When Mississippi artist William Tolliver came into the shop for a trim,...
In a slim little volume that’s eminently readable, visionary architects Amale Andraos and Dan Wood have documented how their firm, WORKac, recruited a team of 150 collaborators, built an elevated urban farm at the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S.1 courtyard in Queens, New York, and put on a party...
Like Frederick Law Olmsted, Alex Garvin has been working with parks his entire life. With dual degrees – one in architecture and another in city planning – he’s taught at Yale University for the past 43 years. He helped usher in the transformation of Atlanta’s Beltline from train tracks to urban...
The story of Ivan Chermayeff and SO-IL is a tale told by a crisis. In 2008, six weeks before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Jing Liu, a native of China, and her Dutch partner Florian Idenburg set up their architecture practice in New York. They’d worked together in Japan with 2010 Pritzker Prize...
Steve Guarnaccia isn’t naming any names, but his “Three Little Pigs” bear a certain resemblance to some familiar faces. The chair of the illustration program at Parsons The New School for Design, former art director for The New York Times op-ed page and illustrator for Rolling Stone and New York,...
