Articles by Joann Gonchar, FAIA

After more than four decades, a congregation in New York finally gets a synagogue taliored to its needs.

Jason McLennan says green building is not about putting on a sweater when you’re cold. It is about creating better buildings. For two decades, his mission has been helping the design and construction industry do just that.

By manipulating materials and the land, designers merge a rustic house and its distinctive site.

The ambitious environmental agenda of a new elementary school by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) on Staten Island, New York, is obvious from the first encounter: almost 1,600 photovoltaic (PV) panels cloak the 68,000-sqare-foot, two-story structure, covering the south facade, extending over its roof, and cantilevering out to float above a playing field.

Gensler’s new 545-foot-tall Tower at PNC Plaza is hardly the tallest skyscraper in downtown Pittsburgh.

The City College of New York (CCNY) is a bit like an academic Acropolis. Situated in Upper Manhattan on one of the island’s highest points, its collection of early 20th-century neo-Gothic buildings, by George B. Post—and more recent additions by architects that include Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Rafael Viñoly—sit high above the surrounding neighborhood of townhouses and low-scale apartment buildings.

Aficionados of the musical West Side Story will know the New York neighborhood Lincoln Square, once called San Juan Hill, as the backdrop for the clashes between the Jets and the Sharks. But in real life, this is the part of Manhattan’s West Side that was bulldozed in the 1960s to make way for the performing-arts complex Lincoln Center.