Founded in England in 1980, Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, known for sleek buildings like London's first Eurostar terminal, opened a New York office in 2001.

As the New York City Planning Commission debates Madison Square Garden's future above Penn Station, a Municipal Art Society competition calls for designs to re-envision both. Photo © Flickr user freddan212 A view from 8th Avenue of Manhattan's Madison Square Garden. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Santiago Calatrava, SHoP Architects, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—four busy firms—will have to find time during the next six weeks to brainstorm. The Municipal Art Society (MAS) has given them until May 29 to develop ideas for moving Madison Square Garden from its present site, directly above New York’s Pennsylvania Station. Transferring the Garden would

The exhibition "Informal Studio: Marlboro South" at Johannesburg's Goethe-Institut (through May 9) includes four five-minute films. In the heady days after the end of apartheid, the South African government promised to build millions of new houses. These houses would make “informal settlements”—communities of squatters living in deplorable conditions they are unable to change given their lack of legal ownership— a memory. But the national government has delivered two million fewer houses than promised; meanwhile the population of Gauteng, the province that includes Johannesburg, has increased 30 percent in the last 10 years. Informal settlements have not been eliminated—they’ve grown. Thorsten

Photo © Sharon Farmer/NMAAHC President Obama addressed the crowd at the February 2012 groundbreaking ceremony for the David Adjaye-designed Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. When president Barack Obama held a state dinner for British Prime Minister David Cameron last year, the luminaries at the head table included Warren Buffett, George Clooney, and David Adjaye. Not long after, the British press began referring to Adjaye as the president’s favorite architect. At the time, there was no talk of an Obama presidential library—the election was still months away, and the president had reportedly told friends

The annual Cape Town conference advocates for levity in design, if not permanence. Photo courtesy Design Indaba Paula Scher and Michael Beirut at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, South Africa. South Africa's Cape Town is a city of architectural extremes, from the futuristic, 30,000-square-foot houses of the super-rich in Clifton to the corrugated metal shacks of Langa township. And it is a city of physical barriers. Prominently advertised in the Cape Times are hammer-proof, roll-down shutters that are “extremely difficult to break without the use of power tools.” Photo courtesy Design Indaba Design Indaba attendees at the Cape

Photo courtesy The Architectural League of New York "The City That Never Was" panelists included (from left to right): Javier Arpa; Robin Nagle; Iñaki Abalos; William Braham; and Christopher Marcinkoski. Have architects been spending too much time designing buildings? That was the paradoxical question at the heart of a symposium sponsored by the Architectural League of New York on the boom years of the early 21st century. The February 22 conference, called “The City that Never Was: Urbanization After The Bubble,” was about the buildings that resulted from the mismatch “between the flows of capital and the needs of the

A new exhibition at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute examines concrete construction, Soviet style. Installation view of Cold War Cool Digital on view at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn through March 20. Most people don’t think of Nikita Khrushchev, the former Soviet premier, as having changed architectural history. But those people haven’t been to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for the fascinating new show, Cold War Cool Digital. The exhibition, which runs through March 20th (in a building undamaged by last week’s destructive fire), traces the relationship between Soviet imperialism and the panelized building systems that were a hallmark of the Iron

Last fall, the artist Tatzu Nishi created a fully furnished living room around the statue at the center of New York's Columbus Circle.

January 2013 Daniel Libeskind adds to his Jewish Museum Berlin. Something about Berlin brings out the best in Daniel Libeskind. It is here that he had his greatest triumph with the opening, in 2001, of the Jewish Museum Berlin, a building with cuts and slashes that make brutality palpable. On the audio tour, Libeskind says that some people will be nauseated by the museum's angles. But that's OK. If his way of talking about the symbolism of his buildings can seem overwrought (he is happy to offer almost any meaning until he finds one that sticks), in Berlin the architecture