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Meet the man who'very wisely'acquired the 'Architect.com' Web site, which helps drive substantial business to his residential design practice. Thomas Bollay, AIA Santa Barbara, Calif.—In today’s brutal business climate for architects, even a small edge that can help a firm stand out and secure new business becomes extremely valuable. With a prescient purchase 16 years ago, architect Thomas Bollay, AIA, acquired for a few dollars a big marketing advantage that could be worth tens—or, in his view, even hundreds of thousands of dollars: the architect.com domain name. As those with even a rudimentary understanding of the workings of search engines
BR: How has your training as an architect informed your career in policy? SD: What I appreciated so much about my training is the interdisciplinary way that architects approach problems. The process of being trained in design ideally is about being able to integrate, to bring together different kinds of constituencies. One of the reasons I became so fascinated with affordable housing, and more broadly community development, is because they connect to so many other things. When a family chooses a home, they're choosing much more than that. They're choosing access to jobs; they're choosing public safety. Our work at
Shaun Donovan, the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and a Harvard-trained architect, recently attended the ground-breaking ceremony for Via Verde, a mixed-income apartment community in the South Bronx that he says exemplifies the Obama administration’s “fundamentally different” approach to housing—a move away from the Corbusian, tabula rasa model to one that supports local visions of site design.
Watch as Bruce Fowle, senior principal of FXFowle Architects, takes us on a tour of three iconic NYC buildings and places: Daniel Burnham’s Flatiron Building, Rockefeller Center (for which Raymond Hood led the design team), and 4 Times Square, designed by Fowle himself. Fowle calls the Flatiron an “inherently green” building and notes that the “character of high-rises dramatically changed” after its construction. In his tour of Rockefeller Center, Fowle says the urban space in the center of Manhattan is the world’s “most elegant, most sustainable, most urbanistically correct complex.” And speaking about his very own 4 Times Square (aka
Carl Galioto, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s partner-in-charge of the firm’s New York Technical Group, and Paul Seletsky, SOM’s director of digital design, are two of the architecture profession’s leading experts on BIM: building information modeling (also commonly referred to as virtual design and construction). The pair discuss how BIM facilitated a major redesign of the Freedom Tower; assess the technology’s strategic impact on the profession; address common misperceptions; explain BIM’s potential benefits for smaller practices; point out how BIM can lead to increased compensation for architects; and lay out the potential ramifications of BIM—both positive and negative—on the architect’s overall
BR: What about the software itself? Where is it falling short now from where you expect it to be in a few years? CG: I have one word for where I believe all the software falls short: interoperability. One can always find the software that can deal with curvilinear forms best, or that deals with interference checking best, or daylighting. The issue right now is that there isn’t one software that can do all of these things.
Had Peter Cook’s career ended in the early 1970s, this founding member of the über-influential Archigram group would still be considered one of the most important architects of our time. As RECORD has written, “As the Beatles of architecture, Archigram broke down the dreary conformity of the 1950s, sweeping aside sclerotic convention with their antics.” Image courtesy Kunsthaus Graz; photography by Nicolas Lackner. Kunsthaus Graz in Graz, Austria, designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier. This slideshow includes images of some of Peter Cook’s Archigram proposals; Kunsthaus Graz; and the London Olympic Stadium. When asked to describe the inspiration for
Bryant Rousseau: You’ve said that from the age of eight you wanted to be an architect. What sparked this early attraction to the profession? Sir Peter Cook: I was a tiny child in the Second World War, and my dad, who had been an army officer in the First World War, had a home job as the quartering commandment for the middle bit of England, and I used to go with him from the age of three or four in the car to look at buildings he was requisitioning. He was looking at buildings, and I was looking at buildings
