Magazine

Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan province in Southwest China. It is the most important economic, cultural and communication hub in the western region with more than seven million inhabitants in the inner city and more than six million in the suburbs. Since the early 21st century, with the...

Bookstores may be a dying breed, but they are integral to universities, where they provide more than just textbooks to students. But when a national chain runs the bookstore there is the risk of inserting a standard big-box into the context of the school and town. Thankfully for the...

Oak and Laurel Halls serve the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Leers Weinzapfel Associates carefully inserted the contextual yet contemporary buildings into the school's Storrs campus. Although separated from each other...

Theatre Aspen opened its new facilities last June, just in time for a summer of concerts in the city's beautiful Rio Grande Park. The new structure consists of a demountable black box theatre that is removed after the summer season and a permanent pavilion that houses the lobby,...

If one state embodies the merits of modern, single-family residential architecture it is California, the land of Eichlers, the Case Study Houses, and now Dwell magazine. The influence of the latter and the broader "tyranny of consumerism" can be found in the "fresh voice and...

As architects Osamu Nishida and Erika Nakagawa designed this residence in Kanagawa Prefecture, they conceived of the architectural plan as a map. The pair strewed elements of the residence across the lot, and by doing so created a unique home structured similarly to a village. The...

This urban infill project in Fayetteville is a house and studio for a painter who is also a professor at the University of Arkansas. The house is situated on the south to take advantage of the sun, and the studio is on the north for that side's ever-important indirect light; a carport...

Phoenix is a sprawling desert city that encompasses and is surrounded by a number of mountains. One within the city limits is South Mountain, home to the largest municipal park in the United States. About one mile north of its namesake mountain is the South Mountain Community Library, serving...

For years Portugal has captured the attention of the international architecture scene, but has also proven to be a breeding ground for architects beyond the great masters such as Fernando Távora, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura. The famous Porto School has given way to a...

A quick glance at the aptly named Snowhaus would lead one to think the building is covered in snow. In reality the white exterior is a bit more conventional, but it is also less dependent on the weather; even in Alaska the snow melts in the summer. The mixed-use project in Anchorage is...

Auburn University's Rural Studio is one of the most respected undergraduate design-build programs, started by D.K. Ruth and Samuel Mockbee in 1993. Under current director Andrew Freear, the Rural Studio focuses on community-oriented projects in "West Alabama's Black Belt...

Bleu Blanc, a wedding hall in the city of Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture, was designed by Suppose Design Office. With architecture as its base, Suppose Design has continued to offer new ways of thinking, designing, and forming relationships...

Brooklyn's phenomenal popularity this century has resulted in a lot of new apartment buildings mixing with the borough's distinctive residential fabric. But much of the new is questionable in terms of scale and design. This six-story building with three duplex apartments, designed by...

China has an unbelievable 14,500 kilometers of coastline, not including the islands. From the north to the south, three different seas follow each other: The Yellow Sea with the Gulf of Bohai, the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Only the island of Hainan east of Vietnam is known in the...

Circuit of The Americas (COTA) is a new auto racing facility in Austin, Texas, that hosts events like the Formula 1 U.S. Grand Prix™. Architecture for motor sports runs the risk of being lost in the cars, crowds, and advertising, but Miró Rivera Architects' designs...

The winding Cumberland River cuts the city of Nashville, Tennessee, roughly in half, a situation that necessitates a number of bridges to traverse the waterway. A density of bridges occurs near downtown, including the Shelby Street Bridge, whose distinctive truss structure originally carried...

Located on the 185,000-square-meter site of a former ranch in Taikicho, Hokkaido, Même Meadows is a unique research facility for studying design responses to the region’s harsh climate. The environmental technology research institute based at the Meadows focuses on the collaborative...

Ohio is home to enough starchitect-designed buildings—by the likes of Coop Himmelb(l)au, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and SANAA—to make the state a must on any archi-tourist's radar. But cultural icons alone, like Farshid Moussavi's MOCA Cleveland, do not a city make....

The town of Bethlehem in eastern Pennsylvania was home to the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, which churned out steel for buildings, ships, and weapons for close to 150 years. The company went bankrupt in 2001 after decades of decline, selling its six plants two years later. This move led to...

Studio 804 is the final design studio for graduate students at the University of Kansas (KU) School of Architecture, Design and Planning in Lawrence, Kansas. While the design-build studio is typically focused on sustainable housing for disadvantaged communities, their latest undertaking is a...

Schwarze und weiße Rechtecke ergießen sich in einem regelmäßigen Muster über das Haus. Es erinnert an ein Schachbrett, hat aber auch etwas von den weiß verschneiten Bergen, die Innsbruck umringen.

The E.J. Ourso College of Business's new Business Education Complex is comprised of four volumes: a circular commons, a semi-circular auditorium, and two rectangular classroom wings. Facades of wood, glass, and bronze look upon a landscaped courtyard at the project's center. Ikon.5...

With its complex of halls and meeting spaces, the Kanazawa Umimirai Library, designed by Coelecanth K&H, serves as the core of a new community in the castle district of Kanazawa. Twenty-five pillars support the 45-meter-square, 12-meter-high space, lending it a sense of presence fitting to a...

In contrast to the "existing Beverly Hills clichés," as architect Dan Brunn calls them, Yojisan's quiet facade of cedar, Cor-ten steel, and glass greets passersby along North Beverly Drive, just steps away from Wilshire Boulevard. Inside, the home for Yoji Tajima's haute...

In the German city of Mannheim an exhibition shows 100 contemporary architectural projects from China. The show was curated by Fang Zhenning for the Chinese cultural year in Germany, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Earlier the...

Faced with a client that wanted to expand their existing house in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood, and limitations placed on formal expression through the block's historic designation, architects SFOSL built up the house vertically and covered it in a material typically used...

The form and construction of the Harvest Pavilion at Common Ground High School in New Haven, Connecticut, may be simple, but the result is a very appealing building whose character changes during the day and when open or closed. This responds to the pavilion's various uses: It serves to...

In what is common in many parts of the United States, Santa Monica, California's industrial buildings have been transformed into office spaces for replacement business, in this case for entertainment and tech companies. Many of these old industrial spaces near Los Angeles feature large...

Buildings for wineries have become one of the most unexpected typologies for high-profile architecture, resulting in designs by Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, Herzog & de Meuron, Steven Holl, and other household names. Yet flashy forms are not appropriate for all vitners. Studio B...

By digging into the terraced building site, architect Keisuke Maeda of UID created a living area that is protected from the elements yet strongly connected to the land. His “House on the Surface of the Earth” is not a pre-conceived structure simply set on the ground, but rather a...

For some time now Belgian architecture has been forging ahead as one of the most interesting in Europe. Following in the wake of more consolidated studios like Robrecht en Daem (2G N.55), Xaveer De Geyter or Stéphane Beel is a new generation of top-notch architects such as De Vylder...

A 19th-century barn in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhooed was originally used as a dairy distribution center and later as an artist's studio and gallery. It was recently transformed by Vinci | Hamp Architects into a house for a family of five. Forced with literally rebuilding the...

Massachusetts' Cape Cod is famous for, among other things, the namesake style of residential architecture that started hundreds of years ago but has persevered in suburban landscapes across the country. The traditional form and construction was a response to the cape's harsh natural...

While every four years the Summer Olympics brings attention to the host city and the architecture built to serve the games and the athletes, the impact of the Olympics is geographically much larger. Taking into account the trials that determine which athletes are sent to compete is one such...

Architecture may result in buildings, but it is as much process as stable forms. This fact is evident in this house in Upstate New York designed by New York City's Grzywinski + Pons; what looks to be a design strongly determined by its skin is actually a result of factors beyond the...

Gradually, housing developers are beginning to respond to demographic change. The complex called “generations : housing on the mühlgrund”, which Hermann Czech, Adolf Krischanitz and Werner Neuwirth have recently completed, does something more. It is an attempt, using various...