Articles by Christopher Hawthorne

Founded in 1925, the Claremont Colleges occupy a connected series of leafy, low-rise campuses about 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

A sprawling show in London tries to capture the manic pace and self-conscious ways of Rem’s firm. Photography © Lyndon Douglas Organized by the Belgian design collective Rotor, the exhibition includes stools made from the same blue foam that OMA uses for its study-models. In the late summer of 2010, the Belgian Pavilion was the talk of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Curated by Rotor, a young Brussels-based design collective, the pavilion was a beautifully sincere, irony-free study of the ways that architecture ages and is worn down by daily use. In the midst of the Biennale, which is often obsessed

One thing that often surprises first-time visitors to downtown Los Angeles is the proximity of its gleaming clutch of skyscrapers and cultural facilities to the homeless encampments in the area known as Skid Row.

Standing out in a gritty locale One thing that often surprises first-time visitors to downtown Los Angeles is the proximity of its gleaming clutch of skyscrapers and cultural facilities to the homeless encampments in the area known as Skid Row. From the front doors of Frank Gehry’s exuberant Walt Disney Concert Hall, it takes about 15 minutes to walk—or 2 or 3 minutes to drive—the mile or so downhill to a landscape full of quiet but marked desperation, a place where social-services agencies, single-room occupancy hotels, and liquor stores serve a stubbornly large homeless population. (From the steps of City

It was just about five years ago that I sat down with my colleague Alanna Stang to begin work on a survey of ecoconscious residential design, ultimately published as The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). The book’s thesis was straightforward: The green-design and high-design wings of the architecture profession, which had looked at one another for so long across a chasm of mutual disdain, were beginning to find common ground. Photo © Earl Carter Half of Australian houses sit within 8 miles of a beach. The Glenburn House reverses the house/water relationship, looking like