First, imagine you’ve got one of the more uninviting back yards in all of suburban D.C. A place where plants don’t want to grow well. A place that needed some definition, and an identity. A place to relax with friends, which might be turned into a stage for concert space. Further, suppose you decided...
Here we have the unlikely story of success and failure, based upon the tenets of Feng Shui. “My wife is a genius with color and my mother is a Feng Shui master,” said Los Angeles-based builder Clint Arthur. “So I was aware that all parts of the Feng Shui baqua have a color associated with […]
Are the new X1600 workpants from Swedish manufacturer Blaklader a stunning work of art? Hardly. But are they an evolutionary work of functionality that finds its art in utilitarian genius? Absolutely. Most of that genius is the result of 50 years of focus groups and customer suggestions, carefully incorporated...
There’s a certain symmetry to the idea: For 20 years, Nike has been taking back its worn-out sneakers, ripping them apart, and recycling them for new kinds of outdoor uses. Through a program called Nike Grind, the company estimates it’s found new life for upwards of 25 million pairs of athletic shoes....
Faced with a demanding 15-month schedule for the 82,000 square-foot City Centre library in downtown Surrey, B.C. – and little time for lengthy public discussions – Bing Thom Architects used the only logical 21st-century tool to solicit public input: Social media. “We were very keen to get out to the community...
He started in watercolors when he was five years old, inspired by his mother, a fashion designer and devoted painter who’d live to see her own show at the Guggenheim on her 100th birthday. In 1976, he’d join with two partners in to establish Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, designing some of the world’s...
In Mason City, Iowa, a town blessed with more Prairie School residences than any other in Iowa, a group of preservationists have restored Frank Lloyd Wright’s last hotel to the architect’s original 1910 vision. The Historic Park Inn Hotel was commissioned to Wright by a pair of lawyers who sought...
While the stock market plunged and rose and plunged again over the past week or so, Robert Brada of Blue Sky Homes was busy breaking all known construction records. At the base of Zuma Creek in Bonsall Canyon on two acres in the city of Malibu, his crew of three erected the steel frames of a 3,900-square-foot...
By Frank Harmon, FAIA At a coffee shop recently, I bumped into a friend who asked: “Did you recognize me waving at you from my car last week?” I had to admit I didn’t recognize her or her car. But thinking about it later, I remembered a remark by the social critic Lewis Mumford, who suggested that...
To understand how Suman Sorg came to become an artist who paints nearly every day, while simultaneously designing award-winning stuctures, would mean mulling over the indirect influence of her diplomat father, the architects Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier – and radio personality Don Imus. She was born...
