The outgoing dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) discusses the thinking behind his experimental legacy. In September, Mark Wigley, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), announced that he would step down from his position at the end of the academic year, in June 2014. Wigley, who has a B.Arch. (1979) and a Ph.D. (1987) from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, assumed the deanship in 2004. Since coming to the United States in the late 1980s, Wigley has produced a series of provocative books and exhibitions on

The dean of Syracuse University’s School of Architecture talks to RECORD on the occasion of his first midterm review. Photo © J. Seo Michael A. Speaks Earlier this year, Michael A. Speaks took over as dean of Syracuse University’s School of Architecture. As dean of the College of Design at the University of Kentucky, Speaks focused his school's energy into a series of multi-stakeholder community revitalization projects, not unlike the legacy left by his Syracuse predecessor, Mark Robbins, whose tenure was defined by numerous efforts to revive the Rust Belt city. On the occasion of Speaks's first midterm review, he spoke

A Maggie's Centre, designed by Snøhetta, opened in Aberdeen, Scotland, on September 23. Architecture can’t cure cancer, but good design has the power to heal. That’s the philosophy behind Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres, a network of drop-in facilities in Great Britain. The centers—17 and growing—are named for writer and landscape architect Maggie Keswick Jencks, who died of breast cancer in 1995. Married to the influential American architecture critic and landscape architect Charles Jencks, Maggie spent the last two years of her life conceiving a warm, inviting place where cancer patients could spend time learning how to cope with their disease

Photo courtesy Architecture Forum Aedes An exhibition this summer at Berlin's Aedes showcased the research and planning scenarios that grew out of MyIdealCity.com. The start of the school year marks Winka Dubbeldam’s first fall semester as chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. But the principal of New York firm Archi-tectonics has hardly been on summer vacation. She has been traveling the globe to discuss MyIdealCity.com, a crowd-sourced, bottom-up urban planning project for downtown Bogotá, Colombia, that she and her office helped develop. (“I love working there. I might be a closet Latin

Meier (standing) at Westbeth, a nonprofit affordable housing complex for artists in New York's West Village, in 1970. Also shown in photo: Barbara Littenberg; Gerry Gurland (in front of Meier); and Tod Williams (behind Gurland). This October Richard Meier celebrates the 50th anniversary of establishing his own office in New York City. Over the years, Meier has witnessed significant changes in architectural practice—including his own. It has become more global in a world where he and other "design"-oriented architects are now able to attract a gamut of large-scale commissions. Richard Meier & Partners currently has major projects going up in

This summer may be the busiest of Andy Klemmer’s life. Two buildings for which his firm, the New York-based Paratus Group, serves as project director—the Pérez Miami Art Museum, by Herzog & de Meuron, and an addition to the Kimbell Museum, in Fort Worth, by Renzo Piano—are racing toward fall openings, turning the New Yorker into a Florida-Texas commuter. Photo courtesy Paratus Group Andy Klemmer He founded the company in 1997, the year Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, for which he served as owner’s rep, debuted. Subsequent projects have included SANAA’s Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art as well

Record talks with the eminent architecture historian and architect who organized the comprehensive new Le Corbusier exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928–31 (Photo 2012) You might say it’s about time. Finally a retrospective of the pioneering master of modern architecture has been mounted by the Architecture and Design Department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes (on view until September 23), presents a vast range of the work of the influential architect who was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland in 1887,

Installation image of Lost City Arts at the Collective.1 Design Fair. New York architect Steven Learner needed advice. While fairs like Design Miami/, which cater to collectors of 20th century and contemporary work, have popped up around the world, New York City lacked a similar event, and seeing a hole in the market, Learner decided to start his own. To bridge the knowledge gap between being an architect and being a design market impresario, he called on a group of some 13 dealers, collectors, curators, and other advisors, including fellow architect Alexander Gorlin, to help conceive a new fair. This

Photo courtesy Frieze Art Fair Alemani has organized a series of installations, talks, and other programming for the Frieze Art Fair in New York, held in a snaking tent designed by SO—IL, May 10-13. Cecilia Alemani’s favorite work of public art is Maurizio Cattelan’s massive statue of a hand that stands in front of the stock exchange in her native Milan, with every digit severed but an insouciant middle finger. While Alemani enjoys the provocation, she mostly admires the way it confounds expectations about what public art should be. Photo © Tom Medwell Cecilia Alemani As the director and curator