Fred A. Bernstein

A sobering look at how designing a building to meet Passive House standards affects its overall energy use.

Architecturally ambitous, it's also a model of international cooperation

A temple to honor at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs damages perhaps the greatest modernist campus in the world. And it's by the campus's original architect, SOM

A very expensive experiment in creating an energy-efficient dwelling overlooks the impact of embodied energy

One after another, architects who grew up in New York in the sixties recall how the fair inspired them

Too many glass buildings, and the city becomes just another banal office park

A "national shrine" now hovers over the World Trade Center site

The gentle architecture of Phase Three

Can Frank Gehry's firm outlive its founder? Norman Foster's? Zaha Hadid's?

Technologies that are changing how architects practice

Ando, Meier, Scott Brown, Decq, and others talk about their inspirations

Give Calatrava a chance!

An old city gets an unwelcome new neighbor

The great critic, curator and connector

A review of the architect's 2004 Castelvecchio installation

The architect was awarded a Pulitzer Prize last month for her investigative work

David Adjaye and Moshe Safdie remember the Indian architect, who died at the age of 84

SOM's student-centered building on Fifth Avenue

Diller Scofidio + Renfro takes a crack at elevating Chinese workers

A look back at Michael Graves's career

A Korean firm is part of Record's Design Vanguard

A tribute to "the Emperor" of Japanese Architects

The memorial design by landscape architects Dan Affleck and Ben Waldo offers a contemplative space in nature

In a post-occupancy visit, Atelier Oslo and Lundhagem’s public library, which stayed open during Covid, is clearly a popular amenity

A new beachside building on Long Island embraces environmental stewardship

Architect Joshua Ramus discusses the recently-completed exterior of the theater in Lower Manhattan that opens in 2023

Reiser+Umemoto's Taipei Music Center is a brawny complex of cubic and crystalline forms

In redesigning San Diego’s Mingei Museum, LUCE et Studio engages artists to further the institution’s mission

A wood temple on a sacred site opens and closes like a book

The man behind the mega-dorm at the University of California, Santa Barbara, responds to criticism that it will create an unhealthy environment for students in rooms without windows

Baroque influences shape this sinuous contemporary church in Southern Italy by Mario Cucinella Architects

Still labeled Dubai 2020, the World Expo will open on October 1, complete with a centerpiece dome by Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill

Projects from around the country reflect an array of inventive affordable approaches

What if New York City treated Barry Diller's $120 million fantasy park as an experiment, but not a monument?

Completed in 1962 and abandoned in 2001, Eero Saarinen’s bird-like building at JFK Airport in New York now serves as a spectacular lobby for the new hotel

Since it opened in 1995, Bruder has been able to bring the building into the 21^st century without compromising his architectural vision, of which flexibility was a key part

The founder of The Architect’s Newspaper died at age 72 on Saturday, April 11, 2020, in New York, after a long battle with lymphoma

The British-born designer of Boston City Hall died Friday, March 27, 2020, at age 84, after contracting COVID-19

The architect and urban designer died at the age of 88 at his home in East Hampton, New York

The 1,653-foot-high building will be part of a new Manhattan skyline that not everyone is happy about

The architect talks to Record about the firm’s first, and biggest project, still incomplete, for Dissona

Richard Gluckman reimagines a Con Edison substation for Peter M. Brant’s latest art venue in New York

Working on Fallingwater brought out the best in Robert Silman, the structural engineer who died this week at 83

The architect and furniture designer, who reinvented the modern office, passed away at the age of 101 last week

To lead the profession, firms must nimbly respond to and embrace technological changes

Smiljan Radic's beacon-like regional theater in Chile is a concrete structure wrapped as lightly as a tent

Two buildings open on a new campus in upper Manhattan, with a promise to enhance the community

Architect Hugh Hardy died last week at 84

In 2014, after accepting the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron drove from Chicago to Plano, Illinois, to visit -- and criticize -- Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Farnsworth House 

The longtime home of the Swiss National Museum, or Landesmuseum, in Zurich, is a stolid 19th-century pile

John Belle, who died this week at 84, helped restore several of New York City’s most important buildings, including Grand Central Terminal and the soaring Enid Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden

Three of the most eloquent voices at the Venice Architecture Biennale addressed different aspects of the same question: Can architecture improve lives in Africa? 

If you’re prominent and reach the age of 80, The New York Times may have a writer (possibly this one) prepare your obituary for later use

Two teachers have been bringing out the inner architects in Moscow children since the Soviet era

In Manhattan, a sleek rectilinear garage and sculptural salt shed brighten the city

Thierry Jeannot's Green Transmutation Chandelier (2010) made from reclaimed materials, green dye, aluminum, and light bulbs. Don’t envy Lowery Stokes Sims, the curator of the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, her many recent trips to Latin America. As the force behind New Territories, the museum’s survey of recent design in 14 countries (through April 6), Sims maintained a punishing schedule of studio visits; her itineraries and notes are viewable on iPads in the museum’s ingenious “Curator Lab.” Sims discovered many more worthwhile items, most of them by young designers, than the museum had room for. Her other challenge

A dark and mysterious pavilion—the first new arrival in two decades—shakes up the Venice Biennale

By running their fingers across new “super-high-definition smart tables," visitors make shapes that are then displayed as hats, lamps, tables, vases, chairs, or buildings

Open since May 1, this tightly packed world's fair of architectural hits and misses runs through October 31. UK Pavilion by Tristan Simmonds in collaboration with BDP and Stage One. The first world exposition, held in London in 1851, occupied Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace. But during the last century, expos (also called world's fairs) evolved into collections of national pavilions that competed for attention with novel and grandiose building designs. The Shanghai Expo in 2010 kicked off the “Asian century” with a show of architectural pyrotechnics that reportedly attracted 73 million visitors

At an old distillery complex, Rem Koolhaas's Prada Foundation mixes one part creative preservation with one part bold new architecture

Joy's 1,000-square-foot station is part of the redevelopment of the southwest corner of the Princeton University campus

Jon Jerde often said “the communal experience is a designable event,” and he proved it over and over during a 50-year-career. The architect, who died this week at 75, created ersatz downtowns, really elaborate malls with vast garages. His most famous project was Universal CityWalk, a hilltop shopping-and-entertainment center in Los Angeles, completed in 1993. Herbert Muschamp, the longtime architecture critic of The New York Times, admired CityWalk’s showbiz vitality. Jerde, he famously wrote, was more likely to be nominated for an Oscar than a Pritzker

The billionaire chats with RECORD about his Thomas Heatherwick-designed island, disagreeing with Frank Gehry, and why he hates Jean Nouvel's 100 Eleventh Avenue

Joshua Prince-Ramus discusses the challenges and opportunities of working abroad

Paul Andreu's mammoth 'Egg' shelters three theaters under one domed roof

Allied Works's Brad Cloepfil bravely tackles the redo for New York City's Museum of Arts and Design

Weeks before its grand opening, Safdie gives a behind-the-scenes tour of Alice Walton’s museum of American art

In the Bronx, new parks are opening and old parks are being revitalized at a pace not seen since Robert Moses’s heyday. 

At New York's Museum of Modern Art, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream proposes five solutions to the disconnect between the housing Americans need and the housing America offers

An aesthetic that mined the past gets a historical consideration of its own at a New York City symposium

A pavilion designed by Woods with Christoph A. Kumpusch is under construction in Chengdu, China. “I was never in love with drawing,” Woods says “I drew because I wanted to express ideas.”

Funding shortfalls could hinder ambitious waterfront schemes planned for several U.S. cities

Despite declining attendance and revenue, many cities are expanding convention centers or building new ones

Websites are a vital marketing tool. Unless you’re a superstar design firm, steer clear of archi-speak and tricky graphics. Users want a site that is clean and simple.

The New York architects recently won the bid to design a condo-hotel building on the Brooklyn waterfront. Image courtesy Rogers Marvel Rogers Marvel has designed a 550,000-square-foot building that steps back from the Michael Van Valkenburgh-designed Brooklyn Bridge Park. Twenty years ago, when Jonathan Marvel and Rob Rogers founded Rogers Marvel Architects, they decided to forego the route taken by many young Manhattan firms—designing residential and commercial interiors—preferring, Marvel says, “to cut our teeth on New York City’s’ bricks and mortar.” 

Early this afternoon, during a preview of his firm’s new building for the Perez Art Museum Miami, Jacques Herzog sat in a window seat in a second floor gallery and discussed what the building lacked. “It doesn’t really have a form,” he said, looking out at Biscayne Bay past rows of thin concrete columns supporting a trellis overhead. “It’s more about its permeability. There is so much form in Miami. We wanted to do something that shows the potential in this city to let in sun and vegetation.”

Two architecturally ambitious developments have stalled following accusations of municipal malfeasance. Photo via Wikipedia Following a corruption investigation, bidding has stalled on a $1-billion project to redevelop the Miami Beach Convention Center site. Architects, no matter how successful, are dependent on clients; even the indomitable Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas can see their best efforts dashed when clients get in trouble. That’s the situation in Florida, where the two starchitects were in the running to design a billion-dollar development on the site of the Miami Beach Convention Center

Why is a Washington, D.C., rail revamp moving forward while another in New York can’t seem to pull away from the platform? Image courtesy Amtrak A rendering for an improved West End Concourse extending from New York's Penn Station under the Farley Post Office. Riding Amtrak from Washington’s Union Station to New York’s Penn Station is a trip, architecturally speaking, from heaven to hell. So it came as a surprise this summer when Amtrak announced plans to transform one of those stations into “a world class transportation hub,” at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion

Under African Skies: The first phase of an ambitious national university creates a community of buildings and outdoor spaces adapted to a hot, dry climate

The renowned Spanish engineer and designer is the subject of an exhibition opening today at Russia's Hermitage Museum—the institution's first retrospective devoted to a contemporary architect. Calatrava speaks candidly with Architectural Record about the show, his work, and the criticism he often faces

The new branch of the Louvre couldn't be more different from the museum's iconic Paris home

A new circulating library will be housed within the New York Public Library's main building on 42nd Street in Manhattan

It’s hard to imagine a country with more varied architecture than Mexico, and a show at the Palacio de Iturbide is devoted to the last century of that diversity. Mario Pani and Luis Ramos Cunningham. Nonoalco Tlatelolco Housing Complex, 1964. Mexico City. One of the challenges facing the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), as it gathers material for its planned 2015 show of Latin American architecture from 1954 to 1980, is that Mexico alone warrants as much space as MoMA is likely to allot to the entire region

Eight hundred people turned out for what was, in effect, a town hall meeting on the demolition of the Tod Williams Billie Tsien building

A competition challenged four architecture firms to come up with new ideas for Long Island downtowns. Utile, Inc.'s scheme for Rockville Centre, where a train station on columns already exists, would add monumental arcades to shelter a garage during the week and a pedestrian plaza on weekends. Proponents of smart growth, which generally involves reliance on mass transit, should find a lot to admire on Long Island, where the nation’s largest commuter railroad carries upwards of 300,000 passengers a day. The trouble is that many of those commuters arrive at local train stations by car

Plans to protect Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House by placing it on a hydraulic lift to be deployed in case of flooding are proceeding at a rate that has surprised even the plans’ supporters

The relationship between Le Corbusier and New York City involved love and hatred, passion and resentment, and ultimately a quest by the architect for “revenge, recognition, and money, money, money,” according to Jean-Louis Cohen

When Less is More Earth-friendly

When Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin, opens for tours for the first time in 60 years, visitors will see firsthand its functional shortcomings along with its spectacular innovations. 

Modular housing has already obscured most of the east facade of Barclays Center, long before the building has reached its full height. Until five years ago, the stretch of Flatbush Avenue between the Manhattan Bridge and Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn was an architectural wasteland. The strip started coming to life with a small project (WXY’s skillful security booths for the MetroTech center), then with a very big one—the Toren, an SOM-designed condo tower with an unusual, dimpled-metal façade

It's still early in 2014, but already several important modernist buildings have fallen​​, inclduing Bertrand Goldberg's cloverleaf-shaped Prentice Women's Hospital

The role of Jews in creating and popularizing post-war modernism is the subject of a new exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco. Think Eichler, Levitt, Guggenheim, and Fallingwater.

The Rotterdam-based firm West 8 has transformed 30 acres on Governors Island into parkland. Buildings have been leveled and parking spaces have been eliminated on the 172-acre island, leaving plenty of open space. When superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc around New York Harbor, Governors Island was largely spared, in large part because construction of a new park had involved both adding elevation and installing proper drainage. “I’m glad my landscape architect is Dutch,” says Leslie Koch, president of the Trust for Governors Island, referring to Adriaan Geuze, the principal of Rotterdam-based West 8

The exhibition materials are displayed in a series of curved vitrines that form a circle within the main room of the Archives building. Japan is one of the many countries—both Eastern and Western—that hasn’t been sufficiently respectful of its modernist architectural heritage. Still, preservationists in most countries would envy Japan its National Archives of Modern Architecture, conceived by the late architectural historian Hiroyuki Suzuki and created by the government in 2012. The Archives benefits from public funding, its own building (within the Kyu-Iwasaki-tei Garden in Tokyo’s Yushima neighborhood), and, if that weren’t enough, Tadao Ando as its honorary director

Museum curators tend to stay behind the scenes, especially when high-profile artists are involved. But the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, which runs through October 19, has been so lavishly praised that its curator, Scott Rothkopf, couldn’t stay out of the spotlight if he tried

Architects have something new to worry about

The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture can be as unconventional as its founder

David van der Leer, the institute’s new director, arranged to swap its longtime quarters on the sixth floor of a Flatiron district building for a storefront space in the same building

When Peter Wynne Rees became the chief planner of the City of London in 1985, the famous “square mile” had only one hotel. Now two of the City’s most important Edwardian buildings are becoming luxury hotels.

After 12 years of astonishing change in New York, Bloomberg earns mixed marks

Diller Scofidio + Renfro, H3 Hardy Collaboration, SHoP Architects, and SOM present plans to relocate the arena so Penn Station can be rebuilt. 

A confidant of I. M. Pei, Perry Chin was asked to consult on plans to give Pei’s East Building of the National Gallery in Washington new heating, cooling, security, and fire safety systems

Game Changer: Columbia University's quirky but tough field house bridges the divide between its gritty surroundings and the athletic playing fields beyond

Renewing an important campus by Paul Rudolph poses dangers and the chance to keep his work alive

A conversation with Bill Pedersen, whose firm Kohn Pedersen Fox is responsible for the development's master plan. 

The exhibition "Informal Studio: Marlboro South" at Johannesburg's Goethe-Institut explores the need for legal housing for armies of squatters

What happens to architecturally important private homes when families who have protected them—sometimes for four decades or more—decide to sell

Marmol Radziner has restored and adapted E. Stewart Williams' 1961 Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan building for use by the museum.

“La Sapienza" is a rarity: a fictional film about real architecture