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Photo © Gina Sabatella Jerde's Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles. Jon Jerde often said “the communal experience is a designable event,” and he proved it over and over during a 50-year-career. The architect, who died this week at 75, created ersatz downtowns, really elaborate malls with vast garages. His most famous project was Universal CityWalk, a hilltop shopping-and-entertainment center in Los Angeles, completed in 1993. Herbert Muschamp, the longtime architecture critic of The New York Times, admired CityWalk’s showbiz vitality. Jerde, he famously wrote, was more likely to be nominated for an Oscar than a Pritzker. Photo © Gina Sabatella Jon A.

Andrés Jaque designs a water purifying pavilion for MoMA PS1. COSMO, the winner of MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program, by Andrés Jaque, will naturally purify water 3,000 gallons every four days this summer. Can plumbing be sexy? Architect Andrés Jaque, a 2014 Design Vanguard winner, proposes that it can indeed with COSMO, a gargantuan water-purifying pavilion. On February 5, the Museum of Modern Art’s contemporary-art space MoMA PS1 announced Jaque’s design as winner of its annual Young Architects Program and as the centerpiece of its outdoor music series in the courtyard of the Long Island City building. The other finalists

The first version of B&B's Landscape chaise lounge, designed by Jeffrey Bernett, was released in 2001. Rumors are swirling that Knoll—makers of such classics as Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair, Marcel Breuer's Wassily Chair, and Eero Saarinen's Tulip and Womb Chairs—is ready to buy contemporary Italian furniture line B&B Italia, known for stylishly elegant pieces by the likes of Antonio Citterio, Patricia Urquiola, and Mario Bellini. For its part, B&B Italia issued a denial of the rumors late Friday evening, following a story about the potential sale to Knoll on Italian website Pambianco.com, a go-to news source among Italy's

A cultural foundation brings designers to Dhaka and announces a new institute for architecture, landscapes, and settlements. A view of the old city of Dhaka near the Buriganga River. Political unrest and sporadic violence on highways and roads in Bangladesh provided the backdrop to a three-day architectural conference in the country’s capital, Dhaka, in mid-January. Organized by the Bengal Foundation, a private trust dedicated to promoting the arts in Bangladesh, the event brought together speakers such as Fumihiko Maki, William J.R. Curtis, and Ken Yeang to examine how notions of “place” and “presence” shape the built environment. Other participants included

Love them or hate them, design competitions elicit strong emotions from architects and design professionals. But very little hard data exists to guide the people who enter them or those who organize them. “Some designers complain about competition organizers who write vague briefs, don’t respect intellectual property, and make everyone work for free,” says Van Alen Institute (VAI) competitions director Jerome Chou, adding, “But designers also tell us competitions offer opportunities to take on interesting challenges, to experiment, and to work in new sectors.” Over the course of its 120-year history, VAI has organized hundreds of competitions and, as Chou

Photo courtesy IBI Group Gruzen Samton Jordan Gruzen in 2010.  On Tuesday, January 27, 2015, Jordan L. Gruzen, FAIA, died in New York City after a brief bout with bladder cancer. He was 80 years old. Gruzen, along with his long-time colleague and partner Peter Samton, designed schools, universities, housing complexes, and civic and religious buildings that staunchly upheld the principles of modernist architecture with a well-tailored, straightforward use of materials. Their firm, named IBI Group-Gruzen Samton following a merger in 2009, has imparted its stamp on New York and the surrounding metropolitan area over more than four decades.

Brouhaha over development near Grand Central Terminal could be an object lesson for other cities. Image courtesy KPF Looking north from 42nd Street up Vanderbilt Avenue, One Vanderbilt is on the left and Grand Central is on the right. Grand Central Terminal, now polished and celebrated, has suffered many indignities since its 1913 opening on 42nd Street and Park Avenue. The two most notorious: having the monolithic 59-story Pan Am (now MetLife) Building wedged between it and the distinctive 1929 New York Central (now Helmsley) Building just one block north, in the early 1960s; and Donald Trump’s late ‘70s transformation