Articles by Laura Raskin

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Photo by Dean Kaufman/Courtesy MOCA Cleveland Farshid Moussavi's first building in the U.S., the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA), opened to the public this week. (Click the image above to view a slide show.) On the corner of Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road, MOCA adds another crown jewel to the neighborhood known as University Circle when it opens this month (see RECORD's feature on development in Cleveland) It is also a powerful urban accent in relationship to its neighbor, Stanley Saitowitz's mixed-use Uptown project. The four-story, 34,000-square-foot hexagon is clad in mirrored, black stainless-steel panels. A glass atrium contains

Photo © Mr. T in DC Fifteen years ago, wig shops dominated East Fourth Street; the wigs in the windows were color-coded to correspond to the drugs for sale inside. In 2000, local developer MRN Ltd. used historic tax credits and abatements to begin to buy out 250 owners and create 224 apartments, for which there’s now a 400-person waiting list. More than a dozen restaurants, a House of Blues, and a bowling alley keep the lantern-strewn strip buzzing. Downtown needs retail and more residents, but East Fourth Street helped jump-start the revitalization.

Photo © Jason Meyer/Feinknopf Cleveland-based Dimit Architects' 27 townhouses in Little Italy, near University Circle, hit the market in early 2009'not the most auspicious time for real estate. Perhaps because of their flexible floor plans, industrial aesthetic (the property was a former brownfield), and proximity to the city's largest employers, all of them sold in two and a half years. The three-story houses, clad in cement board and phenolic panels, contain 1,600- to 3,400-square-foot loftlike units with roof terraces. The architects are working on another townhouse project for the same developer in Cleveland's Rocky River suburb.