Magazine

Designed for an engineer and an artist, the Topo House is an apt name, given the way it peels up gently from the Wisconsin landscape, melding itself with the site's topography. Johnsen Schmaling Architects' low-slung design can also be seen as a response to the state's cold...

Located in Nakanoshima, Osaka’s business district, Mitsui Garden Hotel Osaka Premier was designed around the concept of stimulating all five senses of its cultured clientele. Kanagawa Prefecture-based landscape design firm STGK (Studio Gen Kumagai) created the hotel’s gardens with an...

PRODUCTORA is a budding architecture studio with its headquarters in Mexico City, founded by architects from different countries: Abel Perles from Argentina, Wonne Ickx from Belgium, and Carlos Bedoya and Víctor Jaime from Mexico. Shortly after its beginnings in 2006, the studio came...

The workshop of O-office Architects in Guangzhou was built on top of an old silo building that was part of a brewery. Its views go south across the river towards downtown and north towards a generic new high-rise housing estate. The architects reused the industrial space with basic but radical...

This addition to a 100-year-old bungalow in Bay Village, Ohio (a small town west of Cleveland), is particularly striking for the way it melds architecture and landscape through the plants covering its wall and folded roof. Further, a sunken terrace helps to bring sunlight into the...

Mid-20th-century modern architecture is old enough that the question of demolition versus preservation comes to fore. In many cases the choice of preserving modern architecture involves renovations and additions, so particular buildings continue their usefulness over becoming museum pieces....

Shou Sugi Ban is an old Japanese technique for charring wood to make it insect resistant and weatherproof it on the outside of buildings. The technique, which creates a wildfire-resistant shell, is one way that this retreat on a cattle ranch between...

In the United States battlefields from the American Revolution and Civil War are considered sacred ground, preserved as open space and used as sites for education and interpretation. The American Revolution's Battle of Monmouth took place on a hot day in June 1778 in central New Jersey....

The state of Missouri is crisscrossed by a number of rivers making their way to the Mississippi, a few that have been dammed to create reservoirs and lakes that are also popular vacation spots. The snaking Table Rock Lake, formed by damming the White River, is an especially popular area near...

This head office for a human resource development and networking company was designed by Akitoshi Ukai of Aichi-based architecture firm AUAU. When the company decided to move the center of its operations to a site surrounded by paddy fields in Toyota City, client and architect seized the...

Manhattan is a small city in northeast Kansas that is affectionately called "The Little Apple" and is home to Kansas State University. While the K-State campus is predominantly limestone, buildings off campus are a more varied lot, such as the existing orange-brick Manhattan High...

In honor of its 125th anniversary, the Principal Financial Group helped create the Principal Riverwalk in its hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. The 1.2-mile (2-km) path uses landscapes, pedestrian bridges and public art to connect the east and west sides of the Des Moines River in the city's...

Much of the work of MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang has focused on water, in particular the river and lake of her hometown of Chicago. Her 2011 book Reverse Effect explores the natural, social and recreational future of the Chicago River. An outcome of this research is...

Pro bono, which literally means "for the good," is increasingly seen in the world of architecture as a source of excellent design. Many firms accept pro bono commissions as a means of expanding their creativity, recruiting and retaining employees, and creating strong ties with a...

Sugamo Shinkin Bank is a credit union that strives to provide first-rate hospitality to its customers in accordance with its motto: “We take pleasure in serving happy customers.” The unfortunate fact of the matter, however, is that most people feel more tension than joy when they walk...

As we've explored elsewhere, architecture students learn as much from the environments they work in as from their professors, so its no wonder that architecture schools pay attention to their "spaces for...

All states are at the mercy of natural elements to some degree, but none as much as Alaska, the 49th state and the only one entirely north of the 49th parallel, which forms the U.S. border with Canada. The harsh and sometimes dramatic effects of Mother Nature were the inspiration for...

What looks like a traditional, yet pint-sized house on Main Street in York, Alabama, turns out to be a transformable theater for the local residents, a public space where an abandoned house once stood. Artist Matthew Mazzotta's "Open House" taps into the country's housing...

The architects at Case Real turned a long-abandoned kominka, or traditional-style house, into a modern dormitory in this project on the island of Teshima in the Seto Inland Sea. The dormitory is used by the staff at Café Restaurant Il Vento, which itself was presented as a work of art by...

The Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) started in 1961 as the West Bend Gallery of Fine Arts, focused on the collection and display of one local artist, Carl von Marr. Five decades and two name changes later (in between the institution was the West Bend Art Museum) MOWA has moved into...

Immediately adjacent to last year's Building of the Year-winning Masonic Amphitheatre is the Smith...

As concrete buildings in the United States from the 1960s and 70s are faced with either demolition or renovation, hopefully projects like the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston point the way to the latter. WORKac's small yet dramatic addition and renovation gives the museum a...

The small market town of Baumgartenberg in the Machland in Upper Austria is a fine example of maximum ambivalence: due to the economic price of land and the good transport connections to the conurbation around Linz a number of industries and businesses of considerable size have settled here, the...

Tennessee is a state with diverse natural features as—from west to east—fertile plantations give way to rolling hills and then the rugged landscape of the Appalachian Mountains. Sanders Pace Architecture designed a house within the latter for a young couple's first home. The...

architecten de vylder vinck taillieu have a solid body of work, which ranges from renovations of homes and single family houses to public and institutional buildings. The studio, made up by Jan De Vylder (1968), Inge Vinck (1973) and Jo Taillieu (1971), belongs to the new generation of...

The architects at Snøhetta describe their design of the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University "in every way cutting edge," from an automated book delivery system to a video game research room. This is an intelligent stance to take in a library in the...

The defining characteristic of the campus at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is the Brutalist architecture by Paul Rudolph. He realized a dozen buildings from 1963 to 1989, following from his master plan for what was then the Southeastern Massechusetts Technological Institute. The...

Kennebunkport is a popular summer vacation spot overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in the southeastern corner of Maine—its most famous seasonal resident is the family of former President George H.W. Bush. As architect Carol A. Wilson describes it, a defining characteristic of the area is...

Geo Metria was designed by Mount Fuji Architects Studio, a Tokyo-based “creator’s collective” committed to developing quality living environments through architectural and other design work. The residence sits on a hillside where the plains of Odawara meet the mountains of...

adamo-faiden is an architecture studio that emerged from the ruins of the Argentinean corralito. After leaving the country and going to study and work in Europe, for Sebastián Adamo and Marcelo Faiden their return to post-crisis Argentina led to them reformulate their role as...

The Cyberinfrastructure Building houses Indiana University's 700-strong University Information Technology Services. This staff was previously scattered across several buildings on campus, but now they occupy an L-shaped building in a nearby technology park. SmithGroupJJR's design...

The Nihondaira Hotel, a long-standing institution on Shizuoka’s scenic Nippondaira plateau, sits within  Nihondaira Park. Recently created by Shizuoka's municipal government, the park presents the Nippondaira plateau as an open-air museum of natural landscape art; as part of the...

The Island of Hawai'i (aka the Big Island) is made up of five volcanoes and their lava flows—two volcanoes are still active, so the island keeps growing. With this geologic condition, it is no surprise that architect Craig Steely calls the modern houses he has designed on the island...

Tucked into a quiet corner of Fukushima Prefecture’s Bandai Atami hot spring district, the baths at Hanare no Yado Yomogino resort have an 800-year history. After the Great East Japan Earthquake and related nuclear disaster in 2011, however, the owners suffered from the public’s fears...

For years Portugal has captured the attention of the international architecture scene, but has also proven to be a breeding ground for architects beyond the great masters such as Fernando Távora, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura. The famous Porto School has given way to a...

Auburn University's Rural Studio is one of the most respected undergraduate design-build programs, started by D.K. Ruth and Samuel Mockbee in 1993. Under current director Andrew Freear, the Rural Studio focuses on community-oriented projects in "West Alabama's Black Belt...