Features

RSS

For newly minted architects eager to see the world’s great buildings, international travel is a rite of passage. For Koji Tsutsui, it’s a way of life. Born and bred in Japan, educated in England, and having built his defining work to date in Uganda, the 39-year-old architect divides his time between offices in Tokyo and San Francisco.

Doepel Strijkers Architects is revving up to conquer the world, starting with the first-ever sustainable, socially minded, zero-waste tequila factory.

In the house that Iñaqui Carnicero has built for himself in Madrid’s rolling northern suburbs, the architect declares allegiance to a classic Modernist discipline, following a Madrid tradition that leads back to one of his influential teachers, Alberto Campo Baeza, and to Alejandro de la Sota and other pioneers of a renewed Spanish Modernism in the 1950s.

A cluster of windblown branches sprouts from a tree stump in front of a museum in Ascó, Spain. The tree is sufficiently battered that I wonder why architects Olga Felip and Josep Camps kept it. “Our landscape doesn’t have a lot of character.

In a country where globalization’s impact can be seen almost everywhere, Shanghai-based Atelier Deshaus wants to keep traditions alive.

Johanna Hurme and Sasa Radulovic had just finished filing the legal paperwork when they decided to name their minutes-old architecture firm after its new corporate identification number.

Three new books by thoughtful architect-urbanists, usefully read together, explore the current state of urban design. Each author investigates historic and current trends in the evolution of specific American locations, and posits approaches for responding to local character and shaping future growth. Click the image above for details about each book mentioned in this review. Lars Lerup left his native Sweden to come to America in 1966, and has lived in Houston for over 20 years, serving as dean at the Rice School of Architecture from 1993 to 2009.  In One Million Acres and No Zoning, he notes the implications

Edited by Ricky Burdett and Devan Sudjic. London: Phaidon Press, 2011, 432 pages, $69. Seldom does a book make me actively angry, but Living in the Endless City did.  When it arrived with the heft and size of a concrete block, I thought it was an architectural sample. Actually, it is  a collection of essays by 38 contributors from conferences on world cities held by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank‘s Alfred Herrhausen Society. The book focuses on Mumbai, Sao Paolo and Istanbul. As such, it is a companion piece to an earlier effort published by the same sponsors called The

By James S. Russell, Island Press, 312 pages, 2011, $35 James Russell argues in this well-researched and persuasive book that cities will need to become agile: to adapt to the climate changes already in progress and to reduce the potential for a global environmental catastrophe as the world races towards a population of more than 10 billion.  Transitioning to energy-efficient buildings is one form of agility open to all cities. Adopting planning measures that preserve more of the natural environment, supported by diverse forms of transportation and not just highways, is another strategy within the control of state and local