After School Closings, a Renovation Challenge

Bloomberg CityLab Ι Oct. 9. 2023 Dwight Perkins isn’t among the most familiar names associated with Chicago architecture. But unlike Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, his work left a particularly vivid impression on the childhoods of generations of Chicagoans from all corners of the city, because he designed their schools.

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

5 Insights as Architects Lead Hospital Conversion for COVID-19 Response

Autodesk’s Redshift Ι April 21, 2020 In February 2020, Molly Scanlon—a licensed architect and environmental health scientist—started noticing curious videos of modular hospitals in Wuhan, China, for patients who had contracted a mysterious new virus. The hospitals were austere and institutional, bordering on factory-like, with wide, segmented bays. Prefabricated components were trucked on-site and slotted… Continue reading 5 Insights as Architects Lead Hospital Conversion for COVID-19 Response

Mulligans

Landscape Architecture Magazine Ι February 11, 2020  Just a few years ago, Keri VanVlymen, a landscape designer with Ratio in Indianapolis, had never driven a golf cart, but now she’s an expert. Over five months in 2018, she surveyed each of Indianapolis’s 13 public golf courses, trekking “every mile of every trail of every course,”… Continue reading Mulligans

How a Gehry building came back ready for the spotlight

The American Institute of Architects Ι Aug. 21, 2019  In the pantheon of Frank Gehry buildings, his American Center in Paris, completed in 1994, was a decidedly transitional artifact. Gehry was rebuffed from using steel on the building by planners with context-attuned designs for its newly redeveloped district on the banks of the Seine, so instead… Continue reading How a Gehry building came back ready for the spotlight

For the Atlanta-Based Firm BLDGS, No Building Is Beyond Rescuing

Metropolis Magazine Ι March 2019  Atlanta’s west side is strewn with recycling centers, warehouses, shipping companies, abandoned rail lines, and other markers of light industry. It’s a grimy setting but one that architects Brian Bell and David Yocum felt ineluctably drawn to; there, inside a former auto-parts shop in 2006, they founded BLDGS. A comically… Continue reading For the Atlanta-Based Firm BLDGS, No Building Is Beyond Rescuing

From Filth to Fun: Big Designs for the Chicago River

CityLab Ι Sept. 29. 2017 Until its direction was reversed in 1900, the Chicago River was such a receptacle for effluent and filth that it poisoned Chicagoans’ beloved Lake Michigan (from which they drew their drinking water). Then it was channelized and entombed in concrete. The river has long been the city’s forgotten waterfront. But that’s… Continue reading From Filth to Fun: Big Designs for the Chicago River