How do you guarantee a view when you are in a valley in Switzerland? Thom Mayne of Morphosis decided to build as high as the mountains.

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.

By Rem Koolhaas with a supplement by Jorge Otero-Pailos, edited by Jordan Carver. GSAPP Transcripts, September 2014, 104 pages, $18 The idea that Rem Koolhaas and his firm, OMA, staunchly advocate preservation might come as a surprise. His large-scale buildings, such as CCTV in Beijing; or the Seattle Central Library attest to a "starchitect" at work, one who pushes for the new and unique, not the old and historic. Koolhaas, not surprisingly, abhors this hackneyed epithet. And now, two of his past lectures-assembled with a concluding essay by Jorge Otero-Pailos, associate professor of historic preservation at Columbia University-make a strong

Most young architects start off with small projects (kitchen, baths) or art installations before getting meatier commissions. Aranda\Lasch’s methods for scaling up are a little different.