Apocalypse-Proof

Sept. 12, 2023 Ι Places Journal  When it was completed in Lower Manhattan in 1974, 33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, was intended as the world’s largest facility for connecting long-distance telephone calls. 1 Standing 532 feet — roughly equivalent to a 45-story building — it’s a mugshot for Brutalism,… Continue reading Apocalypse-Proof

Step Down, Splash Down

June 15, 2023 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine  A few years ago, if you wanted to visit the site of Cascade Park in Chicago, designed by Claude Cormier + Associés (now CCxA), you’d find yourself near the shores of Lake Michigan at a 50-foot cliff overlooking a vacant pit bordered by a foreboding service road that… Continue reading Step Down, Splash Down

Top of the Rock

July 20, 2023 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine  Faced with the need for a meditative and richly planted landscape for an affordable and supportive housing project in the Bronx on top of exposed bedrock, Brian Green, a landscape architect at Terrain-NYC, looked to the other geologic formations in Manhattan, particularly in Central Park, and in the… Continue reading Top of the Rock

Bet the House

March 2023 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine  Pulling off the road during a hot and sticky New York City summer day two years ago, and into the Berry public housing complex on Staten Island, Kate Belski of Grain Collective had a bit of a revelation. She found herself in a central lawn dotted with trees, surrounded… Continue reading Bet the House

High in the Sky, Where the Money Stacks Up

Aerial view of First National Bank building in Chicago, Illinois, circa 1969.

August 31, 2023 Ι Architects’ Newspaper In the 1960s, the same Chicago city agency conjured some of the worst and the best in American residential high-rises, and in rapid succession. The Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) Robert Taylor Homes were the nation’s largest public housing project when they opened in 1963: the buildings locked in a… Continue reading High in the Sky, Where the Money Stacks Up

What Landscapers Can Teach Landscape Architects

July 26, 2023 Ι Bloomberg CityLab  At one of the nation’s most prestigious landscape architecture schools, the summer studio of Ohio State University professor Michelle Franco has students learning how to pull up weeds, prune trees and mix soil. Sometimes, this calls for expertise beyond what Harvard-educated Franco can provide. So she brings in the… Continue reading What Landscapers Can Teach Landscape Architects

The Lord’s Estate

August 1, 2023 Ι The New York Review of Architecture  There aren’t many industries that have been stripped of their architecture as consistently as legacy media. A brief roundup covering just the last few years would include 30 Hudson Yards by KPF, which AT&T/Warner Media sold to developer Related Companies just a month after the… Continue reading The Lord’s Estate

In downtown Chicago, office conversions are being used to create affordable housing

Architect’s Newspaper Ι June 21, 2023 Last fall, Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD) introduced the LaSalle Reimagined plan to revive the sleepy and pervasively vacant downtown LaSalle Street corridor. Its focus will be the conversion of office towers with an emphasis on affordability. A minimum of 30 percent of the units will be… Continue reading In downtown Chicago, office conversions are being used to create affordable housing

SOM’s Baxter International suburban office park is part of a vital but unheralded design legacy

Architect’s Newspaper Ι June 15, 2023 As a young architect with SOM in 1972, Richard Tomlinson saw something special in the Baxter International suburban office campus, which was already underway when he joined the firm. “It was conceived as a dynamic campus that made flexibility a fundamental principle,” he told AN. “What fascinated me about… Continue reading SOM’s Baxter International suburban office park is part of a vital but unheralded design legacy

Australia’s Timber Homes Are Where the Suburbs Meet the Frontier

May 10, 2023 Ι Bloomberg CityLab For an urban form of housing, Brisbane’s Queenslander houses are strikingly close to nature. Rustic but often elegant buildings constructed between the late 19th century and the Second World War, Queenslanders at their most refined are like breezy wooden tents, garden pavilions for full-time living. At their most utilitarian,… Continue reading Australia’s Timber Homes Are Where the Suburbs Meet the Frontier