Clifford A. Pearson

SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City

March 16, 2013

Edited by Paul Hardin Kapp and Paul J. Armstrong. University of Illinois Press, 2012, 224 pages, $60. SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City, edited by Paul Hardin Kapp and Paul J. Armstrong. University of Illinois Press, 2012, 224 pages, $60. Focusing mostly on Rust Belt cities in the United States, this book examines urban-revitalization strategies in places such as Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, and Peoria, Illinois. In a lively foreword, urbanist Richard Florida argues that these cities should be wary of megaprojects like “heavily subsidized convention centers and downtown sports stadiums” and should look instead to smaller-scale, grass-roots efforts

Urgent Architecture: 40 Sustainable Housing Solutions for a Changing World

By Bridgette Meinhold

Clifford A. Pearson

March 16, 2013

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The author, who covers architecture for Inhabitat.com, examines the need for new kinds of housing in the wake of disasters, poverty, and climate change, and shows projects from around the globe.

Baroque Court Apartments

Heart of glass: Located in the historic core of the Slovenian capital, a residential project transforms a set of buildings from the inside.

Clifford A. Pearson

February 15, 2013

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Like a good poker player, the Baroque Court Apartments in Slovenia's capital city show a public face that reveals almost nothing of what's going on inside.

Holl Stays Busy in China

Clifford A. Pearson

February 14, 2013

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This article originally appeared in the Chinese edition of Architectural Record. A pair of museums designed by Steven Holl Architects will anchor a new cultural district in the Eco-City area of Tianjin. Holl envisions the two museums—one dedicated to ecology and the other to city planning—as complementary buildings, both in terms of their missions and their architectural forms. A collaboration between the governments of China and Singapore, Tianjin Eco-City is being built on a site in the Binhai New Area that had been a polluted salt pan 25 miles from the center of Tianjin. The 11.5-square-mile-project, which aims to be

Sandy High School

A Walk in the Woods: By breaking a large program into a set of components, a Portland firm creates a high school that hugs the land and minimizes its carbon footprint.

Clifford A. Pearson

January 16, 2013

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In a town of just 8,000 people, a 310,000-square-foot building is a big deal, especially if it's the new high school.

Rail Complex to Anchor New Business District in Bengbu

Clifford A. Pearson

December 27, 2012

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A new high-speed train complex in Bengbu is nearing completion. Designed by Shanghai-based Verse Design, the two six-story buildings bracket an existing train station, which opened in 2011, and define the north and south sides of the new plaza.

Vo Trong Nghia Architects

Applying Japanese training to the vibrant but chaotic conditions of Vietnam, a firm makes the most of two cultures.

Clifford A. Pearson

December 16, 2012

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It is about 450 miles from Quang Binh province in the middle of Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), the noisy, frenetic commercial capital in the south.

CCTV Headquarters

Too Big To Fail?: Long awaited and much debated, the enormous headquarters for CCTV finally opens, already a symbol of the new Beijing. But what does it actually say about architecture and China today?

Clifford A. Pearson

November 15, 2012

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Promising to “kill the skyscraper,” Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues at Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) grabbed international attention in 2002 when they won the competition to design a huge headquarters in Beijing for China Central Television (CCTV).

John Johansen, Nonconforming Modernist, Dies at 96

Clifford A. Pearson

November 1, 2012

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Johansen's Mummer's Theater in Oklahoma City. Renamed Stage Center, the now unoccupied building is under threat of demoltion. For more than 50 years, John Johansen challenged the norms of architecture—designing buildings that looked like no others and teaching students to do the same. The last of the "Harvard Five," architects who studied under Walter Gropius in the 1940s and then settled in New Canaan, Connecticut, Johansen was probably the most experimental of the group. While the other four in the unofficial club—Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Eliot Noyes, and Landis Gores—built more than he did, Johansen played the vital role of

Vaughan City Hall

Clifford A. Pearson

October 16, 2012

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One of the fastest-growing places in North America, Vaughan, 14 miles north of Toronto, has morphed from a rural township of 16,000 people in 1960 to a sprawling suburb of 288,000 today.