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May 2008 The two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination clearly illustrate that America is changing. Look around the American workplace or the adjacent seat on mass transit. Demographics and personal observation prove that the monolithic culture many of us knew as children has shifted to a polyphonic blend of peoples and cultures. Architecture remains woefully behind the power curve, however. Photo © André Souroujon Theodore Landsmark, the president of Boston Architectural College, recently reiterated a fact that some of us had regrettably become familiar with, because it has not appreciably changed: Only 1.5 percent of America’s architects are African-American

April 2008 April 2008 counts as a transformative moment. In less than a year, oil, which had hovered around $60 per barrel in 2007, has broken the $100 ceiling and is still climbing. Global warming continues to wreak immense consequences on the planet. After more than 50 years of Record Houses, the time has come to consider how the individual house can help mitigate, if not solve, the problems it unwittingly helped to create. Photo © André Souroujon Building on our determination last year to provide environmental assessments of the projects in Architectural Record, we now address Record Houses. The

March 2008 At a time in which hard news has been taken over by reality shows and the E! mentality, why should you care how your architectural journalists conduct themselves? If, however, you’ve been assaulted by public relations cleverly masquerading as real content, or found that a user-rating Web site had been cleverly sabotaged by competitors, or gotten hooked by a blogger who turned out to be a nutburger, you might assume a more critical view of the state of the media. In the wide-open millennium, who can you trust? Photo © André Souroujon Architectural Record does not say, “Trust

February 2008 The Slowdown Is Upon Us! Recession Looms! If you happen to practice architecture within the housing market, those terms might literally apply to you. The subprime-lending crisis subjected residential investment to the harsh glare of prime time, leaving the entire housing industry stranded like a deer in the headlights. Pick up today’s paper, and it might seem that all design professionals will face bleak times in 2008. What’s an American architect to do? Photo © André Souroujon Before you consider standing in the bread line, consider the following facts: For all our fascination with China and Dubai, the

January 2008 Working in Manhattan, I love the idea that we accept the clear and simple geometry of a building. We accept that logic. But complexity comes from texture, from vibration to change, to breath. Sometimes buildings even make sounds. —Renzo Piano Photo © André Souroujon Speaking at his offices at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop near Genoa in an interview with Architectural Record in 2001, the architect described his hopes for a building still in design—the New York Times Tower. The completion near Times Square of a new, 52-story tower—home of the country’s premiere news daily at Eighth Avenue

December 2007 Buildings play a role in an overarching problem facing all humankind. “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future.” Rajendra Pachauri, the economist/scientist heading the Nobel Prize–winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, speaking of his committee’s summary findings issued by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on November 17, underscored the seriousness of our common challenge in The New York Times. The economy, health, even war pale by comparison to the stresses of rising pressure to our planet’s ecosystem. Photo © André Souroujon

Attribution keeps Architectural Record on its toes. Claims of responsibility and neglect remain fraught with conflict for our editors and the firms that we write about—the primary reason for unhappy e-mails to this publication.

October 2007 The phrase “skin deep” applies to many architectural award programs in this country. One program, however, stands resolutely outside these compromises. For 30 years, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture has looked at architecture in a more holistic way. Since the program’s founding in 1977, process, rather than building-as-object, has dominated the awards program. Limited in scope to a three-year cycle, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture examines submissions from a worldwide network of nominators (including the editor in chief of Architectural Record), narrows the field to a manageable number, then sends out professionals to visit the projects,

September 2007 The early 21st century may be remembered as the time America began to crumble. While the assertion may lapse into hyperbole, the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge at Minneapolis on August 1 focused our attention on the perilous condition of our structural underpinnings, and we found them weak. While the experts continue to evaluate exactly what went wrong in Minneapolis/St. Paul, this disaster follows in the wake of other spectacular failures in other cities. Photo © André Souroujon Remember Boston in July 2006? We are only now fully sorting through the forensic evidence surrounding the malfunction

August 2007 In the 18th century, Dr. Johnson asserted the critic’s role to skewer “delusive combinations, and distinguish that which may be praised from that which can only be excused.” Excuse me! In the linked-in, blog-bursting 21st century, aren’t we all critics? Thankfully, the distinctions of language, between “gourmet” and “gourmand,” hold fast, and some writing still warrants savoring, not merely devouring. Photo © André Souroujon Since the mid-1980s, Martin Filler has contributed a medley of long critical essays on architects and architecture to The New York Review of Books. A new book by that publisher released on July 17