Mike McDonald is a builder who thinks like a movie producer. In Oakland, his Margarido House is built into a steep slope so the five-bedroom, 4,700 square foot home overlooks the Bay Bridge and San Francisco. “I treat building projects like a producer creates films,” he said. “I have to get everybody...
The fourteen-acre site in upstate New York seemed to have everything in the way of landscaping: expansive lawns, stone walls, unmowed fields, deep forests and the Catskill Mountains beyond. Everything, that is, except a courtyard. So that’s what architect Cary Tamarkin envisioned for a friend’s...
The architects call it a “folly” – Victorian for a small structure beckoning visitors to rest and revel in nature. But near the 1898 Edenton, N.C. Cotton Mill, recently converted to condominiums, this whimsy of a pavilion is really a trickster defying definitions – not because it lacks meaning,...
Alys Beach is built for the long term. It’s made of hurricane-proof, sustainable materials that last, like concrete, steel and plaster. It marries a vision from Bermuda with the typology of Antigua and Guatamala. Its walls and rooftops are white, not just to resemble their counterparts in Bermuda,...
At heart, Belzberg Architects’ 20th Street Offices in Santa Monica are a tubular celebration of the Pacific breezes. They started out that way five years ago when conceived as headquarters for the firm, and remained so when adapted for construction and LEED Gold status a few years back. A tubular shape,...
The elliptical staircase on a courtyard of the Dodge residence in downtown Raleigh is the product of a personal, hands-on collaboration between an architect, his client and handpicked skilled artisans. It’s also a monument to the gentle art of persuasion. Its genesis lay with a client who first...
Nick Deaver’s assignment was to slip a new home into a pie-shaped lot in one of Austin’s older neighborhoods, and learn from – but not mimic – its neighbors from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s “It needed to be a home that would fit Texas,” the architect said. “This is a very elegant, mature...
On the peninsula where Gen. Douglas McArthur once turned the tide of the Korean War 60 years ago, a new and modern city is rising rapidly. At Incheon, seventeen miles southwest of Seoul, Phase I of New Songdo City opened in August 2009. It’s now home to more than 10,000 people, with about...
In this, the most difficult lending and building environment since the Great Depression, Rob Goodwin in Perkins + Will’s New York office understands the power of a positive attitude. He should: he’s got one tower in the Middle East under way, and two more on the drawing boards. “Architects are optimistic,”...
For thirty years, Centerbrook Architects and Planners has been working slowly but steadily to build a carefully thought-out town on a hillside on the north shore of Long Island, thirty-five miles east of Manhattan. It is a village for science. They started out working on Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory...
