Articles by Laura Raskin

Easton+Combs

December 16, 2012

A husband-and-wife team has gone back to basics, studying the material and structural innovations of centuries past to create new systems for building. Lonn Combs and Rona Easton, married in life as well as in practice, have spent the last year living and working in Rome. Combs won a Rome Prize in Architecture in 2011 and, with Easton, has been studying Italian architect and engineer Pier Luigi Nervi’s groundbreaking innovations with concrete. In a way, their time in Rome has been a mirror of their practice in recent years. Just as they are taking the time now to “slow down

The Architecture of Architecture Schools

Laura Raskin Asad Syrkett

November 19, 2012

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As Marc Treib writes in an essay in Joan Ockman's Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, architecture-school buildings haven't changed much from their early-20th century design roots:

Brous Scherer House

James Gauer, with Bildsten + Sherwin Design Studio, creates a small house with an early modernist feel in Santa Barbara, where Spanish Colonial still reigns.

Laura Raskin

November 15, 2012

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Situated on a skinny lot at the edge of downtown Santa Barbara, California, architect James Gauer’s 1,500-square-foot Brous-Scherer house is an anomaly in a town known for its code-enforced adherence to the Spanish Colonial style.

Laura Raskin

November 6, 2012

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Muji design director Kenya Hara launches a line of starchitect-designed dog houses. Architecture fans and dog lovers unite! Sou Fujimoto - Boston Terrier On November 20, Kazuyo Sejima, Shigeru Ban, Sou Fujimoto, Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma, and six other renowned architects will launch the results of a project kept under wraps for months: a line of breed-specific dog houses commissioned by Muji design director Kenya Hara, who has also designed an abode (for the Toy Poodle). Some of the environments—"house" is a loose term here—will be sold through an accompanying website. Others are meant to inspire DIY copies: download a

Wissioming2

Robert Gurney’s Wissioming2 is a suburban refuge outside bustling Washington, D.C., with Mondrian-inspired windows and cubic volumes nestled in the Maryland woods.

Laura Raskin

October 16, 2012

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While Washingtonians haven’t exactly led the pack in their desire for modern residences, Robert Gurney, a D.C.-based architect, says that has dramatically changed since he began his practice in 1990.

Uptown

Street Smart: How to Create a City Within a City

Laura Raskin

October 16, 2012

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Cleveland's three largest employers'Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospitals'sit just shy of East Cleveland, the most bombed-out part of town, where foreclosures and population decline have taken the highest toll.

Laura Raskin

October 16, 2012

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Photo © Jason Meyer/Feinknopf The nine-mile, $200 million bus rapid-transit line launched in October 2008, transporting passengers adjacent to and along Euclid Avenue, a grand corridor once known as Millionaires’ Row, which went into a spiral of deterioration and neglect after the Great Depression. Decades in the imagining, the transit line is now credited with helping to attract $5.8 billion in investments for new construction and rehabilitation on Euclid. Hybrid rapid-transit vehicles stop at 40 stations and connect two growing areas, University Circle and downtown Cleveland.

Laura Raskin

October 16, 2012

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Photo courtesy LMN Architects Slated for completion in July 2013, LMN Architects' Medical Mart and the Cleveland Convention Center underground are rising in tandem with the revival by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN) of Daniel Burnham's 1903 downtown Mall (above). Together, the projects aim to bring the public back to the city center and reconnect a greener, unified Mall with the lakefront. The five-level Medical Mart (below), with a pixelated window pattern, is a permanent showroom for medical manufacturers. GGN's long-term plan for the Mall includes 'outdoor rooms' to accommodate flexible programming and lighting to showcase beautiful historic buildings. Photo courtesy

Laura Raskin

October 16, 2012

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Photo © Jason Meyer/Feinknopf The newest addition to a group of local, worker-owned cooperatives, this four-acre greenhouse on a 10-acre site in the Central neighborhood will be complete by mid-November; the first crop of leafy greens and herbs will be harvested in January. The greenhouse will supply 3 million heads of lettuce and 300,000 pounds of herbs per year, to be sold to the area's largest employers (Case Western Reserve University, University Hospitals, and the Cleveland Clinic) and retail groceries. Initially, the greenhouse will employ 20 to 25 people from the surrounding neighborhoods, where the median income is less than

Laura Raskin

October 16, 2012

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Photo © Brad Feinknopf Cannon Design's 375,000-square-foot cancer center opened in spring 2011, combining all of University Hospitals' cancer departments under one roof (the health-care system is an affiliate of Case Western Reserve University). Located on the edge of the Case Medical Center campus next to a linear park and connected to the existing hospital, the center is another head-turning structure in University Circle. The architects stacked 10 floors of services between swerving glass curtain walls that bring daylight and distant views of Lake Erie to patient and treatment rooms.

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This course explores the fundamentals of fire-rated glass and framing, including historical background, fire-rated glazing classifications, and key fire-rated glazing code changes.