We may think we know all there is about the most famous display of architecture to be mounted in the the U.S., the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark show, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, curated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932. But there’s always more to dig up about this ultra-influential event and the fertile period from which it emanated, as we find in Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson.
You might say that East Harlem in Manhattan is well-known for the wrong reasons, such as high rates of crime and joblessness. But the neighborhood, traditionally called El Barrio for its largely Latino population, has shown significant signs of change—and not just gentrification as landlords renovate apartments to lure young professionals able to pay higher rents.
Frank Lloyd wright did not take criticism lightly. He was furious at the stinging denunciation of his revolutionary Larkin Building in Buffalo that was published in Architectural Record in April 1908. Its author, Russell Sturgis, an eminent architect and historian who had written for RECORD since its inception in 1891, called Wright’s office building for a mail-order soap company “ungainly” and “awkward.” Wright retaliated in an unpublished reply that it was “pathetic” to see a well-respected critic “picking over bit by bit his architectural ragbag for architectural finery wherewith to clothe the nakedness of the young giant.”
A house by architect Ben van Berkel rarely could be described as a glass box. Instead the principal of the Amsterdam-based UNStudio avoids the rectilinear modernist approach for a more organic direction.
In an interview accompanying the 2016 rankings, RECORD asked James P. Cramer, editor in chief of the publication DesignIntelligence (DI) and the chairman of the Design Futures Council, to address these and other changes he sees confronting architectural education today.
Stanley Tigerman has died at age 88. RECORD remembers the "Mr. Chicago," revisiting a 2015 interview with the architect about his hometown and its place in architectural culture.
Everyone knows that Chicago is the birthplace of the skyscraper. And it is true—depending on how you define the building type. As Carol Willis points out in Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago, if you go by the technological innovations of the elevator and the metal frame, then Chicago was first, but if height matters most, it was New York.