Category: Articles

Line/Shape/Space Ι Oct. 13, 2015 Ever since the Industrial Revolution gave architects a smorgasbord of new factory-made materials to create buildings with, certain designers have based their identity and designs around signature elements. For Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, it was brawny steel beams and glass. Frank Gehry chose billowing waves of titanium. Mario Botta indulges his postmodern… Continue reading Curling Iron: How Thermobimetal Could Change Architecture

CityLab Ι Oct. 9, 2015 Crow Island School, in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, is a beloved icon of progressive school design. With bright and airy L-shaped classrooms, exquisite material details, and kiddie-scaled everything, Crow Island is something like the Seagram Building of elementary schools. Celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, the school’s influence has reached… Continue reading Crow Island School: Why Don’t All Schools Look Like this One?

Metropolis Ι Oct. 6, 2015  Any architecture biennial worth its salt is a sprawling, unruly beast, with size enough for surreal thought experiments, art devoid of function, and slick, concise building models alike. The Chicago Architecture Biennial is no different, and its main exhibition in the Chicago Cultural Center gathers the majority of the event’s 100-plus participating firms… Continue reading 10 Highlights from the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Architect Magazine Ι October 2015  The stock in trade of David Adjaye, Hon. FAIA, is to start with a material-kit-of-parts influenced by things old and hand-crafted (fabric weaving, early decorative metal works, mud-brick construction) and end with public spaces that still read as Modern. Adjaye’s first mid-career retrospective focuses on his firm Adjaye Associates‘ spate of African… Continue reading Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye

I had the awesome experience of chatting with WBEZ Morning Shift host Jason Marck about the Chicago Architecture Biennial. I complimented his Italian, and got to hang out in the green room with Chicago rapper Rhymefest, who was on before me, which sorta makes him my opening act. He was plugging a documentary about reuniting… Continue reading WBEZ Chicago Architecture Biennial Preview

Dezeen Ι September 30, 2015 Visitors to the first Chicago Architecture Biennial, which opens later this week, will discover a raft of architectural treasures that are often overshadowed by the skyscrapers and institutions the city is famous for (+ slideshow). While the biennial has concentrated most of its exhibitions near the downtown business district of the Loop and the lakefront, organisers have… Continue reading 10 of Chicago’s Lesser-Known Architectural Gems

Dezeen Ι September 28, 2015 With the first Chicago Architecture Biennial kicking off later this week, Dezeen picks 10 of the projects – past and present – that have helped shape the city that gave birth to contemporary high-rise architecture. New York might be North America’s architecture and design capital, but Chicago is where all of the good ideas originally emerged. In the late… Continue reading 10 Projects that Sum Up Chicago’s Architecture History

Architectural Record Ι September 2015  With more than 100 projects from every inhabitable continent descending on Chicago for the city’s first architecture biennial, the work on display might seem to be grounded in a placeless globalist ether rather than the dozen represented countries. At least nine of the participating practices are located in two or more places… Continue reading Chicago Architecture Biennial Preview

Line/Shape/Space Ι Sept. 14, 2015 The Axiom House will take half the time typically required to build a four-bedroom, two-bath home. Plugged into the nation’s fastest commercial Internet service, nearly 40 monitoring systems in the Axiom will regulate temperature, oversee the safety of occupants, and dispatch robots to mow the lawn. It’ll consume net-zero energy, with… Continue reading A Net-Zero House for $220K? It’s All in How It’s Put Together

Architect Magazine Ι September 2015  Design with Company’s Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer have a modest body of experimental and built projects that exist somewhere between Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In their investigative studio, the Chicago-based couple explores Midwestern building archetypes and institutions that are bizarrely iconic. Their projects are playful and surreal,… Continue reading Next Progressives: Design With Company