Interviews

RSS

Filmmaker Sam Wainwright Douglas speaks to RECORD about "Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio."

Fumihiko Maki During his many decades practicing architecture, Fumihiko Maki has accrued an impressive collection of awards, including the Pritzker Prize (1993) and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale (1999). Now, the American Institute of Architects has announced that this year’s Gold Medal will honor the esteemed architect, known for such projects as the Sam Fox School of Design and MIT Media Lab.  A graduate of both Tokyo University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Maki was one of the first Japanese architects to study and work in the United States after World War II. Following his graduation from Harvard in 1954, Maki

Ole Scheeren After 15 years at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture—eight years as a partner—Ole Scheeren has split from Rem Koolhaas and set up his own firm. The new practice, called Büro Ole Scheeren, is based in Beijing (where Scheeren has lived for the past six years) and Hong Kong (where he has been a visiting professor at Hong Kong University since January 2010). He brings with him as a partner Eric Chang, an American architect who had worked at OMA in Beijing. At OMA, the German-born Scheeren spearheaded the design and construction of the China Central Television Station (CCTV)

Meet the man who'very wisely'acquired the 'Architect.com' Web site, which helps drive substantial business to his residential design practice. Thomas Bollay, AIA Santa Barbara, Calif.—In today’s brutal business climate for architects, even a small edge that can help a firm stand out and secure new business becomes extremely valuable. With a prescient purchase 16 years ago, architect Thomas Bollay, AIA, acquired for a few dollars a big marketing advantage that could be worth tens—or, in his view, even hundreds of thousands of dollars: the architect.com domain name.  As those with even a rudimentary understanding of the workings of search engines

RECORD speaks with the principal of SOMA, the architecture firm behind the controversial Park51 Muslim community center proposed for Lower Manhattan. Amid the controversy surrounding Park51, the Muslim community center and worship space in Lower Manhattan labeled the “Ground Zero Mosque” by its opponents, the young New York-based firm SOMA Architects last week quietly unveiled designs for the new 15-story building. “I think the location of the center has been overexposed and overrated,” says Michel Abboud, principal at SOMA. Abboud recently sat down in the firm's new Midtown office to answer questions about Park51, its design, SOMA's history, and the

Photo © Patrick McMullan Co. Playwright June Finfer Some years back the Chicago-based playwright and filmmaker June Finfer discovered stories about architecture to be packed with drama, and increasingly focused on this topic in her work. Her play, The Glass House, a quasi-fictional account of the story behind Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, has been staged at various venues, including the terrace of the Farnsworth House. Most recently, the Resonance Ensemble company performed a short, sold-out run in New York City. Finfer hopes the play will be presented at other theaters across the U.S.; in the meantime, she’s

Photo © Vincent Starr Alain de Botton “Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design,” writes pop philosopher Alain de Botton in his heartfelt case for good building, 2006’s The Architecture of Happiness. Having grown up amid Switzerland’s clean modernism and luxuries such as underfloor heating, the now London-based author observes that in the United Kingdom, most people associate modern building with hastily constructed postwar tower blocks. By contrast, the crumbling country cottage—loaded with both history and suspect plumbing—enjoys a powerful grip on the British psyche, a condition that, he argues, has led

Photo courtesy Eva Franch i Gilabert Eva Franch i Gilabert Following a four-month international search, the Storefront for Art and Architecture has named Eva Franch i Gilabert its new director. The announcement came on May 10, after the organization’s board vetted more than 70 contenders, according to Storefront’s Web site, acknowledging the “overwhelm[ing] breadth and depth of candidates who applied from around the world.” A Catalan architect, researcher, and teacher, Franch i Gilabert, 31, is founder of the solo practice OOAA (office of architectural affairs). During the past two years, she directed the Masters Thesis studio at Rice University, where

The designer, thinker, and IDEO founder takes on an entirely new role as director of the Cooper-Hewitt. Photo Courtesy of IDEO / Nicolas Zurcher Bill Moggridge If you’re reading this on a laptop, take a second to admire Bill Moggridge’s work. His design for the GRiD Compass—a 1979 personal computer that enclosed a keyboard and screen in a clamshell-like, fold-open case for the first time—set the mold for the contemporary machine in front of you. U.K.-born Moggridge, 66, founded his first design firm in 1969, and over the next two decades the practice created innovative forms for many high-tech products.