Articles by Clifford A. Pearson

Herzog & de Meuron’s design for the M+ museum in Hong Kong. An exhibition examining plans for M+, the new visual arts museum scheduled to open in Hong Kong in late 2017, is on display through February 9 at ArtisTree, a multipurpose venue on Hong Kong Island. Curated by Aric Chen, who is the new museum’s curator of design and architecture and an international correspondent for Architectural Record, Building M+: The Museum and Architecture Collection looks at designs for the institution’s building and some of the items that will fill its design and architecture galleries. Last year, an international jury

The fifth edition of the show takes on urban questions against the backdrop of China’s rapidly changing cities. At the entrance to the Value Factory site in Shenzhen, Noreen Heng Liu of Node Architecture designed a restaurant standing on columns above an existing concrete structure.

Cerebral and fluent in the language of ideas, William O'Brien, Jr. has moved skillfully within academia and the art scene while slowly establishing a practice that will allow him to build too.

For the new campus of a business school in Vienna, six international architects design a series of innovative buildings. Photo © Iwan Baan Angled at 35 degrees, Zaha Hadid’s 300,000-square-foot library and Learning Center asserts itself on the central square. The campus sits between the rectangular buildings of the Messe Exhibition Center and Prater park The challenge was daunting: plan, design, and build an entirely new campus for the Vienna University of Economics and Business in just five years. With 25,000 students, the school had outgrown its 30-year-old home in the city’s Ninth District and decided to move to a

Odile Decq and Thom Mayne Watching the presentations at this year’s Monterey Design Conference in northern California, attendees got a multiple-image portrait of architecture in the early 21st century. Elegant buildings with refined details alternated with exuberant installations that relied on digital know-how and student labor. Snapshots from Arkansas, Minnesota, and California appeared between reports from France, Japan, and Brazil. And a tribal elder told stories of working with Louis Kahn, as newer members of the profession listened raptly. More than 600 people gathered at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove at the end of September for the event,

Architects Hitoshi Abe and Peter Ebner help 3M rethink the way its employees work, taking the company and its headquarters on a journey from the past to the future. More than just Post-it notes and Scotch tape, 3M produces a vast array of items—electronic stethoscopes, solar mirror films, abrasives—and likes to think of itself as an innovative company. But until recently, its headquarters in St. Paul was stuck in the 1970s, its offices a throwback to an era when you programmed a computer with punch cards and used a slide carousel for presentations. This time warp separating appearance and reality

By Vishaan Chakrabarti. Metropolis Books, 2013, 252 pages, $30. Bright Lights, Big Cities Architect, planner, and one-time developer Vishaan Chakrabarti asks us to imagine a United States in which government invests in high-speed trains linking high-density cities and does not subsidize suburban sprawl. He admits this sounds a bit naive in an era of political paralysis and at a time when the middle class and wealthy—no matter their political affiliation—enjoy perks like the mortgage-interest deduction that help perpetuate the status quo. But he builds his argument with straightforward prose and lots of easy-to-read charts and graphs. Hyper-dense cities are more

In 2011, the Kunsthaus Bregenz mounted an exhibition of the art and architecture of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

By Brian Lutz. Pointed Leaf Press, November 2012, 224 pages, $85. This is a book on the model of Marilyn and John Neuhart’s The Story of Eames Furniture (Gestalten, 2010). It shares with that two-volume set an agenda—an emphasis on process and manufacturing—and a large size (14.2 by 11.8 inches) that does neither the reader nor the illustrations great service. Eero Saarinen: Furniture for Everyman, by Brian Lutz. Pointed Leaf Press, November 2012, 224 pages, $85. First, the agenda. Lutz, a former Knoll associate, argues in his introduction that Saarinen’s furniture has never attracted the same scholarly interest as his