Tracy Metz

Articles

ARTICLES

The Edge

The Edge

The Next Wave: A smart building raises the bar for technology, innovation, and sustainability.
Tracy Metz
August 1, 2016
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Amsterdam’s Zuidas financial district is distinguished by the work of an impressive roster of architects, such as Toyo Ito, Rafael Viñoly, and Pei Cobb Freed, all of whose designs fit into a traditionally corporate atmosphere.


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Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis

Double dutch masterwork: A design team digs down to artfully connect a historic museum to a building across the way.
Tracy Metz
February 15, 2015
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A design team digs down to artfully connect a historic museum to a building across the way. In the hands of Dutch architect Hans van Heeswijk, the Mauritshuis, a 17th-century mansion in The Hague that later became the Netherlands' first museum, has undergone an impressive expansion.


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Building As Ornament: Iconography In Contemporary Architecture

Tracy Metz
October 16, 2014
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By Michiel van Raaij. nai010 Publishers, May 2014, 240 pages, $25. For more than a century, ornament in architecture was anathema in the Calvinist Netherlands—and elsewhere too. In his book Building as Ornament: Iconography in Contemporary Architecture, Michiel van Raaij, who is the editor in chief of the online architecture platform Architectenweb, interviews 10 well-known architects and architectural historians to reveal how this attitude has changed since the 1990s. The moralism of modernism, though, has not yet completely disappeared: “A successful ornament,” writes van Raaij, “represents a virtue and explains the function, status, structure and context of the building.” An
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Invisible-Kitchen

Invisible Kitchen

i29 Interior Architects uses decorative wall panels and an optical trick to create a vanishing kitchen inside a Paris apartment.
Tracy Metz
September 16, 2014
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In one particularly humorous episode, the old television program Candid Camera tried to sell a house that had no toilets. (It was remarkable how many potential buyers didn't notice the defect.)


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Villa Kogelhof

Putting Down Roots: A Dutch design team infuses a sweeping, minimalist aesthetic into a home with an ambitious sustainable program.
Tracy Metz
April 16, 2014
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In a gravity-defying act of daredevil modernism, a villa in the Dutch province of Zeeland seemingly floats above the surroundings it was named after—the former 60-acre Kogelhof farm.


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Tyrolean Festival Hall

Peak Performance: A concert hall carves its own niche in the Austrian Alps while bowing to the neighboring midcentury playhouse and the breathtaking landscape beyond.
Tracy Metz
October 16, 2013
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In the picturesque Austrian village of Erl, just east of the German border, where the rugged Alps seem to descend from the heavens to meet the undulating valley below, a striking, angular structure, the Tyrolean Festspielhaus, or Festival Hall, pierces the landscape that inspired it.


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Loft MM

Beyond Boundaries: The Belgian firm C.T. Architects' solution for a client who uses a wheelchair shows a keen sense of spatial relationships and materials with universal appeal.
Tracy Metz
September 16, 2013
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It can be done: a wheelchair-friendly environment that in no way resembles the typical one. 


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