A cantilever stores water for drought-inflicted site.

Beach House breaks up monotony and creates private beach.

Rows of Victorian-era workers’ cottages line the streets in Richmond Hill, a residential neighborhood of Melbourne, Australia. While these humble dwellings do not appear intimidating, the surrounding historic district’s covenants make some architects cringe. Jon Clements, of Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, is among them. When given the opportunity to work there in 2001, afforded by his brother’s acquisition of a house, he faced a quandary of expressing originality within preservation’s restrictive prerogatives. Courtesy Jackson Clements Burrows Architects The house in question was a single-story weatherboard cottage in a significant state of decay. Clements’s brother hoped to build a new structure

Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, created a buzz in museum circles earlier this year when he expressed an interest in acquiring canonical, Midcentury Modernist houses for his institution's collection.

Renzo Piano is not bashful about his plan to raze century-old, masonry-clad factories and tenements in West Harlem and replace them with big, crisp buildings of steel and glass—a new campus for Columbia University that resembles Metropolis more than it does the existing neighborhood. “Cities are bound to change,” he says, “You have to accept it.” Images courtesy Renzo Piano Building Workshop / Skidmore Owings & Merrill Created by Renzo Piano and SOM, Columbia University’s new 17-acre campus will replace low-rise warehouses and tenements with glass-walled towers. Pressed for space at its original campus in Morningside Heights, 10 blocks south,

The looming acquisition of a software vendor that supports interoperability of competing electronic design and construction products by a leading vendor of design software is both raising concerns and welcomed. On May 31, Autodesk announced it had signed an agreement to acquire NavisWorks, which produces a universal file reader for 3D coordination, collaboration and construction sequencing, for $25 million. “The news concerns me greatly,” says Mark V. Holland, chief engineer for Omaha-based steel fabricator Paxton & Vierling Steel. “Will the application keep its original direction of being a universal reader in the building information modeling world?” Jay Bhatt, senior vice