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Photo © Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images (left) / Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images North America President Obama in Michigan (left) / Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Florida. When it comes to public infrastructure, Americans face a stark policy choice this November. More than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Barack Obama has made investing in infrastructure central to his presidency. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, says little about issues like transportation and housing. When he does, it is to suggest cuts to programs and agencies that provide them. The current administration encourages cities and states to spend federal money on projects

Lella and Massimo Vignelli, Peter Marino, New York AIA president Joseph Aliotta, and many others gathered last night at the SoHo showroom of Poltrona Frau in New York to celebrate the start of Archtober—a month long design festival organized by the New York AIA—and the Architecture & Design Film Festival. Architectural Record was a sponsor of the event. View a slide show below. Roberto Guerra and Kathy Brew, directors of "Design Is One: Lella and Massimo Vignelli," with Massimo Vignelli and Architecture and Architecture & Design Film Festival founder Kyle Bergman at the Poltrona Frau showroom in New York for

From a former wasteland to a genuine cultural hub, Lyon's Confluence area accounts for one of Europe's boldest city-center urban developments. Odile Decq's Pavilion 8 office building will house a "floating" restaurant and offices in Lyon's former wharf district. When Jean-Paul Viossat, director of the Rhône Saone Développement, first opened his office in the Lyon Confluence district in 2004, the industrial zone was full of derelict buildings and empty streets. “We lived together with local prostitutes and drug addicts,” he recalls. "They were the only living souls in the area." What a difference a decade can make. Today, the district,

Herzog & de Meuron’s Parrish Art Museum shown under construction.   Here's a message not all architects will want to hear.Less is more. Even less money.Exhibit A is the Parrish Art Museum, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and scheduled to open on November 10. The museum, which is visible to anyone driving along the Montauk Highway on the South Fork of Long Island, New York, is a single low-slung rectangle, about 100 feet wide and more than 600 feet long, under a standing-seam metal roof.It's not a small building, but it is a simple one. The design replaced an

Roman Mars raised over $170,000 on Kickstarter for the third season of his "tiny" radio show about design, 99% Invisible. © Raymond Ahner Roman Mars, host of 99% Invisible. As host of the weekly radio show and podcast 99% Invisible, Roman Mars takes a democratic interest in the stories behind all kinds of design. With typically “tiny” 4- to 10-minute segments (a project of KALW in San Francisco), Mars has explored the past and future of the Purple Hotel outside of Chicago, designed by John Macsai, the sound of the World Trade Center towers “breathing,” and depression induced by airport

Experts and residents rally in an ambitious plan to save a struggling city. Photo © Dave Jordano Detroit Works recommends expanding existing neighborhood initiatives, like the Spirit of Hope garden in Midtown. In Detroit, the statistics are jarring: The city has 26 jobs for every 100 people, 47 percent of residents are functionally illiterate, and, with 344 homicides in 2011, its violent-crime rate eclipses that of any other major U.S. city. Twenty-three percent of the housing stock is vacant, and though municipal tax rates in Detroit are 2.5 times the national average, services are spread thinly across the city’s expansive

Two architecturally ambitious developments have stalled following accusations of municipal malfeasance. Photo via Wikipedia Following a corruption investigation, bidding has stalled on a $1-billion project to redevelop the Miami Beach Convention Center site. Architects, no matter how successful, are dependent on clients; even the indomitable Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas can see their best efforts dashed when clients get in trouble. That’s the situation in Florida, where the two starchitects were in the running to design a billion-dollar development on the site of the Miami Beach Convention Center. Now the project has been set back by charges of municipal corruption,

The recession decimated the architecture profession, with firms closing or laying off large numbers of employees, architects left jobless for months or years, and many leaving the profession entirely. But a survey recently conducted by McGraw-Hill Construction (Record’s parent company) came to the counterintuitive conclusion that some U.S. firms expect a shortage of qualified designers to meet their workloads by 2014. The survey of 1,007 U.S. designers found that nearly one-quarter of respondents anticipated a shortage of architects resulting from a combination of designers exiting the profession, baby boomers retiring, a lack of skills among architects looking for work, and

The AIA releases its 2012 firm survey. Courtesy Cooper Carry/TVS Architects The Marriott Marquis Convention Hotel, designed by Cooper Carry and TVS Architects, is under construction in downtown Washington, D.C. The Great Recession has hardly been good to architects. But the extent to which it fundamentally changed the industry was not always clear. Now comes a sweeping 40-page report released this month from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the industry’s leading trade group, that specifically details the recession’s damage and what firms did to cope. And those survival strategies may portend new ways of doing business. The bad news