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Where to go and what to see in Beijing: Personal suggestions for architects from people shaping the city and members of our staff. Clifford Pearson Deputy Editor, Architectural Record Photo courtesy Architectural Record Clifford Pearson, Deputy Editor, Architectural Record and Editor-In-Charge of Architectural Record’s China Edition While in Beijing, Clifford Pearson, deputy editor at Architectural Record and editor-in-charge of our tri-annual China publication, suggests strolling through Beihai Park. On clear days, the park offers wonderful views of the Forbidden City and an opportunity to watch Beijing’s older generations practicing their calligraphy—using brushes dipped in water—directly on the pavement. It illustrates

The cherry blossoms were at their peak on a Thursday in late March when I went for a stroll in Ueno Park in Tokyo. A nimbus of white glowing pink with dramatic dark branches etched through it floated above the crowds strolling, photographing, and picnicking on blue tarps spread beneath the trees. What could be more Japanese than such civic reverence for this short-lived phenomenon in all its tender aesthetic frailty? Of course, everyone’s behavior was exemplary, not a scrap of litter and no one disrespecting the pedestrian flow. Photo © Christian Richters (top); Jimmy Cohrssen (above) Herzog & de

Checking out the goodies Okay. Enough of this self-righteous rant. What about the architecture? There is some marvelous work. Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada is striking at the scale of the cityscape, jutting appealingly just above its roofline context. The diamond-gridded structural wall, with its mix of bubbled and flush glass panels, is a lovely thing, and the interior is luminous and dramatic. Circulation is suave, carpet is white, clerks are impeccable in gray. At Tod’s down the row, Ito claims inspiration from the angularity of the branches of the trees out front and creates a facade of big, irregular

This Firm Award winner's long-range plan led to a successful research-based culture James Timberlake, FAIA, has often described his firm, KieranTimberlake Associates (KTA), as a tortoise. “We’ve not done things fast,” he says. And although it is almost 25 years old, until the past six or seven years, the firm did its work “in relative obscurity.” Timberlake’s partner, Stephen Kieran, FAIA, agrees. “One of the things about being located in Philadelphia is that you can work there for a long time and never get noticed.” But, he says, it was during those early years they developed the culture that made

A few random field notes on Renzo Piano’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). I assumed RECORD would already have an article on the Broad in the works, but I’m told that no, because Piano is designing so many museums and has also just won the AIA Gold Medal, the magazine is going to hold off for a while. Photo © 2008 Museum Associates/LACMA Renzo Piano’s new Broad building at LACMA features a sawtooth roof of skylights (top) that bounce northern light into the top-floor galleries (above). I suppose the goal

City of dreams While in Los Angeles, I had a chance to revisit a very different museum, the Getty Villa—not the Richard Meier–designed white monastery on a hilltop, but the original Getty that was built in 1979 to hold the oilman’s art collection, and which then was greatly enlarged in 2006 by Boston architects Machado and Silvetti. Photo © Richard Ross (top); Bradley Johnson/Machado and Silvetti (above). At the Getty in Malibu, Machado and Silvetti built an amphitheater next to the villa (top) and treated the site as an archaeological dig where visitors descend through time (above). It’s often said

The noun want used to mean need. Want was life or death stuff, as in “the baby wants feeding.” Now, want has flipped 180 degrees to imply an arbitrary and even whimsical desire, unfettered by need, significance, or logic. At the same time, and perhaps even because our wanting has become so willful, human beings have grown insatiable. The more we get, it seems, the more we want, as though desire itself is the thing we cannot forgo. As though, even cocooned by layers of brimming superfluity, we must want or perish. Welcome to Blubberland. Photo © Alex S. Maclean

Now, however, Gaia, the Greek earth goddess, is offering us a chance. Gaia has brought us to the brink of crisis. Climate change, and all of its moving parts—from litter to light bulbs to deforestation—is more than a crisis of survival. It’s a crisis of significance, where we must grasp the essential connectedness of everything and reinvest in our source of meaning, or die. Photos © Alex S. Maclean Cul-de-sac housing under construction in Houston, 1999 (aerial photo, top). Leveling hills for a new housing development, Castro Valley, California, 1997 (aerial photo, above). In the past 40 years—since the baby