Architectural Record

After more than four decades, a congregation in New York finally gets a synagogue taliored to its needs.

The remote, rural town of Frommern, in Germany’s Black Forest, is hardly the place one expects to encounter finely crafted works of architecture.

Gutenberg’s introduction of movable type six centuries ago was a true revolution. The development forever altered the way information was received and disseminated, democratizing knowledge. Printing’s recent move beyond two dimensions could be similarly transformative.

When New York firm Hariri & Hariri unveiled a design for a futuristic residence they called the Digital House in 1998, it caused a stir.

The completion of Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s (RPBW) Valletta City Gate comes 30 years after the architect was first invited to remodel the main entrance to Malta’s walled capital.

When it was founded in 1935, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) occupied one, then two floors of the War Memorial Veterans Building in the Hayes Valley neighborhood before moving into its purposebuilt, Mario Botta–designed home in nearby SoMa in 1995.

Rumor has it that the quaint town inspired the architecture in Disney’s animated film Beauty and the Beast. But in a recent renovation of the city’s Musée Unterlinden, Herzog & de Meuron made a conscious effort to avoid the preciousness of a Disney film.

Eclectic and eccentric, with influences that range from Islamic to Celtic to Japanese, the Veteran’s Room at the Park Avenue Armory was reopened to the public in March as an intimate space for lectures and recitals.

Charles and Ray Eames may have been the most famous Midcentury Modern design pair in the Americas, but they were not the only professional couple who contributed to its development.

Reflecting on the impact of the architect’s visionary work and larger-than-life persona.

Set against a dramatic backdrop of distant mountains and boundless sky, a tiny chapel in Austria’s southernmost state of Carinthia magnifies the intensity and natural beauty of its location.

Some new additions to a balanced architectural library.

It is impossible to do justice in the space available to the critical writing of the distinguished Canadian architect/theorist George Baird.

In A Genealogy of Modern Architecture, the prolific historian, critic, and theorist Kenneth Frampton presents a documentation of a course he used to teach, which involved comparative critical analyses of 14 pairs of more or less canonical modern buildings completed between 1924 and 2007.

Urban theorist Jane Jacobs was born 100 years ago, but her ideas are as vital as ever.

When Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was published 50 years ago, Vincent Scully announced in the introduction that it was “probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture” of 1923.

The answer to the April issue's Guess the Architect is LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE, who designed the Tugendhat Villa in Brno, Czech Republic, in 1930. The partially steel-frame and plastered-masonry house is perched on a slope where the entrance is on the top floor, facing the street. The living and dining areas, on the lower level, look out to a garden through an 80-foot-long band of alternately retractable glass windows. The house, extensively renovated in 2012, is part of the Brno City Museum.

We at RECORD were deep into preparing this month’s issue when the startling, sad news broke of Zaha Hadid’s death at age 65.

“It is much better to be good than to be original,” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously advised his protégé Philip Johnson.

Jason McLennan says green building is not about putting on a sweater when you’re cold. It is about creating better buildings. For two decades, his mission has been helping the design and construction industry do just that.

When the United States’ London embassy moves across town from Mayfair to Nine Elms in 2017, it will leave behind a monumental home: the Eero Saarinen–designed Chancery Building.

When he was named director of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena asked curators to focus on projects that “improve the quality of the built environment and life and consequently people’s quality of life.”

Lighting is core to Rockwell Group’s DNA, with the interplay of illumination and shadow central to the firm’s interiors, architecture, and stage sets.

New products from Ply Gem, Shildan, DensElement, Georgia-Pacific, PROSOCO, SAF, and VaproShield.

New products from Sonneman, Wästberg, Lunera Lighting, Dyson, Zumtobel, and Flos Architectural.

New products from CertainTeed, Milliken, Plyboo, Baux, and Eureka.