Clifford A. Pearson

Admiral Live-Work

April 19, 2011

Zimmerray Studios Photo © Lara Swimmer With the recent arrival of their second child, architect Robert Zimmer and his wife, photographer Lara Swimmer, have grown accustomed to planning for the not-quite-knowable. While thinking about their own 4,250-square-foot live/work building in the North Admiral district of Seattle, they got to practice these skills — imagining not just how it would evolve as the kids grew up, but how it might accommodate new zoning in a changing neighborhood. Although the area right now is zoned for multifamily use on two sides and commercial on another, it is becoming more densely developed. So

Giant Interactive Group

Morphosis engages landform with architecture to create a new kind of workplace for Chinese capitalism.

Clifford A. Pearson

January 16, 2011

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Corporate office buildings used to offer architects the chance to tap into fat construction budgets and make serious design statements.

What Was... 2000-2010

Clifford A. Pearson

January 16, 2011

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Wretched excess. Sustainability and the rise of LEED. Architecture as spectacle. Architecture for Humanity. Buildings as collectibles and architects as brands. . . Making sense of the past decade means confronting forces and trends pointing in radically different directions. Should we remember the first 10 years of the 21st century — the naughts — for advances in digital technologies that allow building designs to be rapidly analyzed and improved or for those that allow super-tall buildings to rise in the middle of deserts? After a period of wealth creation on a scale never before seen, what do we have to

What Next: Paul Nakazawa

Clifford A. Pearson

January 16, 2011

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Paul Nakazawa teaches professional practice at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and works as a business strategist and coach for architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design firms.

Newsmaker: Ole Scheeren

Clifford A. Pearson

January 16, 2011

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Ole Scheeren After 15 years at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture—eight years as a partner—Ole Scheeren has split from Rem Koolhaas and set up his own firm. The new practice, called Büro Ole Scheeren, is based in Beijing (where Scheeren has lived for the past six years) and Hong Kong (where he has been a visiting professor at Hong Kong University since January 2010). He brings with him as a partner Eric Chang, an American architect who had worked at OMA in Beijing. At OMA, the German-born Scheeren spearheaded the design and construction of the China Central Television Station (CCTV)

Carmody Groarke

From the ephemeral to the permanent, a London based firm is exploring the means and meaning of architecture in projects both public and private.

Clifford A. Pearson

December 16, 2010

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Having designed a pavilion for a three-day event and a memorial required to stand for at least 200 years, Kevin Carmody and Andrew Groarke have wrestled with that most slippery of human constraints: time.

A Cluster of Hadid Projects Share a Particular Strain of Design DNA

Clifford A. Pearson

October 16, 2010

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Turn the clock back to 1999 and you find Zaha Hadid and her partner Patrik Schumacher working on a critical set of projects, four of which (including MAXXI) eventually got built and two that never moved off the page or computer screen.

MAXXI/National Museum of XXI Century Arts

MAXXI: Zaha Hadid Taps into Rome's past while creating its most contemporary building in decades.

Clifford A. Pearson

October 16, 2010

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In Rome, history flows through every urban artery, providing a strong pulse to obscure outposts and tourist destinations alike.

Penn State Hershey Cancer Institute

A building's design expresses and supports its client's mission of blending research and treatment.

Clifford A. Pearson

October 16, 2010

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Health-care facilities typically use isolation as a strategy for dealing with infection control, creating buildings that work as sets of departments closed off from one another.

The Waterhouse at South Bund

Clifford A. Pearson

September 16, 2010

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Fast-disappearing, Shanghai’s nong tang (lane houses) combine European construction with Chinese notions of tightly packed residential life. From the street, these early-20th-century buildings present gabled facades — respectable and a bit staid. But once you walk through the door to the lane running between the houses, you encounter a messy world of clothes hanging out to dry, shutters flung open, people gossiping, and kids running around. Private space bleeds into the public realm, with some folks cooking in the shared lane and others bathing their children there. Neri & Hu Design and Research Office (NHDRO) tried to capture the spirit