Magazine

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...

Buildings housing architecture schools can have a large impact on the future architects studying inside them. The decision to renovate rather than build anew can instill students with respect for existing buildings as well as an appreciation for the juxtaposition between old and new. The...

Geographically Florida is defined as a peninsula and a panhandle. Jacksonville sits in the northeast corner of the state, at the confluence of these two conditions. One result of this location is what architect Christopher Frye describes as eclectic buildings that are rooted in their place....

Bookstores may be a dying breed, but they are integral to universities, where they provide more than just textbooks to students. But when a national chain runs the bookstore there is the risk of inserting a standard big-box into the context of the school and town. Thankfully for the...

Oak and Laurel Halls serve the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Leers Weinzapfel Associates carefully inserted the contextual yet contemporary buildings into the school's Storrs campus. Although separated from each other...

Theatre Aspen opened its new facilities last June, just in time for a summer of concerts in the city's beautiful Rio Grande Park. The new structure consists of a demountable black box theatre that is removed after the summer season and a permanent pavilion that houses the lobby,...

If one state embodies the merits of modern, single-family residential architecture it is California, the land of Eichlers, the Case Study Houses, and now Dwell magazine. The influence of the latter and the broader "tyranny of consumerism" can be found in the "fresh voice and...

This urban infill project in Fayetteville is a house and studio for a painter who is also a professor at the University of Arkansas. The house is situated on the south to take advantage of the sun, and the studio is on the north for that side's ever-important indirect light; a carport...

Phoenix is a sprawling desert city that encompasses and is surrounded by a number of mountains. One within the city limits is South Mountain, home to the largest municipal park in the United States. About one mile north of its namesake mountain is the South Mountain Community Library, serving...

A quick glance at the aptly named Snowhaus would lead one to think the building is covered in snow. In reality the white exterior is a bit more conventional, but it is also less dependent on the weather; even in Alaska the snow melts in the summer. The mixed-use project in Anchorage is...

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...

Brooklyn's phenomenal popularity this century has resulted in a lot of new apartment buildings mixing with the borough's distinctive residential fabric. But much of the new is questionable in terms of scale and design. This six-story building with three duplex apartments, designed by...

Circuit of The Americas (COTA) is a new auto racing facility in Austin, Texas, that hosts events like the Formula 1 U.S. Grand Prix™. Architecture for motor sports runs the risk of being lost in the cars, crowds, and advertising, but Miró Rivera Architects' designs...

The winding Cumberland River cuts the city of Nashville, Tennessee, roughly in half, a situation that necessitates a number of bridges to traverse the waterway. A density of bridges occurs near downtown, including the Shelby Street Bridge, whose distinctive truss structure originally carried...

Ohio is home to enough starchitect-designed buildings—by the likes of Coop Himmelb(l)au, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and SANAA—to make the state a must on any archi-tourist's radar. But cultural icons alone, like Farshid Moussavi's MOCA Cleveland, do not a city make....

The town of Bethlehem in eastern Pennsylvania was home to the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, which churned out steel for buildings, ships, and weapons for close to 150 years. The company went bankrupt in 2001 after decades of decline, selling its six plants two years later. This move led to...

Studio 804 is the final design studio for graduate students at the University of Kansas (KU) School of Architecture, Design and Planning in Lawrence, Kansas. While the design-build studio is typically focused on sustainable housing for disadvantaged communities, their latest undertaking is a...

The E.J. Ourso College of Business's new Business Education Complex is comprised of four volumes: a circular commons, a semi-circular auditorium, and two rectangular classroom wings. Facades of wood, glass, and bronze look upon a landscaped courtyard at the project's center. Ikon.5...

In contrast to the "existing Beverly Hills clichés," as architect Dan Brunn calls them, Yojisan's quiet facade of cedar, Cor-ten steel, and glass greets passersby along North Beverly Drive, just steps away from Wilshire Boulevard. Inside, the home for Yoji Tajima's haute...

Faced with a client that wanted to expand their existing house in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood, and limitations placed on formal expression through the block's historic designation, architects SFOSL built up the house vertically and covered it in a material typically used...

The form and construction of the Harvest Pavilion at Common Ground High School in New Haven, Connecticut, may be simple, but the result is a very appealing building whose character changes during the day and when open or closed. This responds to the pavilion's various uses: It serves to...

In what is common in many parts of the United States, Santa Monica, California's industrial buildings have been transformed into office spaces for replacement business, in this case for entertainment and tech companies. Many of these old industrial spaces near Los Angeles feature large...

Buildings for wineries have become one of the most unexpected typologies for high-profile architecture, resulting in designs by Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, Herzog & de Meuron, Steven Holl, and other household names. Yet flashy forms are not appropriate for all vitners. Studio B...

A 19th-century barn in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhooed was originally used as a dairy distribution center and later as an artist's studio and gallery. It was recently transformed by Vinci | Hamp Architects into a house for a family of five. Forced with literally rebuilding the...

Massachusetts' Cape Cod is famous for, among other things, the namesake style of residential architecture that started hundreds of years ago but has persevered in suburban landscapes across the country. The traditional form and construction was a response to the cape's harsh natural...

While every four years the Summer Olympics brings attention to the host city and the architecture built to serve the games and the athletes, the impact of the Olympics is geographically much larger. Taking into account the trials that determine which athletes are sent to compete is one such...

Architecture may result in buildings, but it is as much process as stable forms. This fact is evident in this house in Upstate New York designed by New York City's Grzywinski + Pons; what looks to be a design strongly determined by its skin is actually a result of factors beyond the...

In May the Brooklyn Botanic Garden opened its new Visitor Center, designed by architects WEISS/MANFREDI. Partners Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi actually live nearby, and maybe that proximity allowed them to craft a building that appreciates the existing characteristics of the place while...

The Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is not alone in having to deal with a lack of land, symptomatic of development in American cities and suburbs. Yet this condition is balanced by the growing trend of cremation and other above-ground burials, which has pointed the way for...

Part rain shelter, sunshade, and weather vane, the Cotillion Pavilion is also a contemporary means of making a public park a distinctive place. As architect Mell Lawrence describes in his answers to our Q&A about the pavilion, it is just one of many structures that the city of Dallas is...

The Middlebrook Studios are four sleep/work cabins south of San Francisco that benefit from views of the Pacific Ocean. Architect Cass Calder Smith designed the cabins to go above and beyond the local green-building requirements; most notable is a prefabricated steel canopy that straddles the...

Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital was founded in 1811, when the United States could boast of only two hospitals. Two centuries later that number exceeds 5,000, and medical facilities are one of the few building types booming during the economic slowdown. A small addition to Mass...

Previously, World-Architects featured the Covington Farmers Market, designed and built by the design/buildLAB at Virginia Tech. That structure reused wood from a warehouse whose site...

Cookie cutter retail environments may promote brand recognition, but often at the expense of spaces that respond to their contexts. Anthropologie, like another company that starts with A, opts for unique stores that nevertheless convey the character of the brand. Fifteen of the stores have...

Portland Community College (PCC) is the largest institute of higher learning in Oregon, with close to 100,000 students enrolling every year. Three campuses serve the various needs of the students, while seven smaller centers make up PCC's Extended Learning Campus. Newberg Center opened in...

Time spent in high school chemistry class will no doubt make one realize that the name of this house refers to salt (Sodium Chloride). The white walls and cantilevered volumes certainly warrant the moniker, given that salt is marked by a cubic crystal structure. But it is not an arbitrary...