This Botanical Garden’s New Addition Is as Subtle as Light and Shadow

Oct. 30, 2024 Ι Metropolis Magazine  As the front door to one of the nation’s oldest botanical gardens in continuous operation, the new Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s most important job was to get out of the way and let the 79-acre campus filled with historic architecture and some of… Continue reading This Botanical Garden’s New Addition Is as Subtle as Light and Shadow

How a Health Care Clinic Applied Trauma Informed Design to Serve the LGBTQIA+ Community

Corey Gaffer

Jan. 27, 2023 Ι Metropolis Magazine At the Family Tree Clinic in Minneapolis designed by Perkins&Will, a floor-to-ceiling bank of windows faces the street, leading to a lounge filled with sharp, graphic murals by local BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists, focused on the theme of healing. Brightly colored Modern furniture matches the art, and polished, sealed… Continue reading How a Health Care Clinic Applied Trauma Informed Design to Serve the LGBTQIA+ Community

Mary Dill Henry’s Life-long Search for the “Vital Forces” of Art and Technology

Jan. 25, 2023 Ι Metropolis Magazine As an art student from California studying at László Moholy-Nagy’s Institute of Design in the mid-1940s, Mary Dill Henry described the world as such in her MFA thesis: “The world we live in is a vast and beautiful place, full of vital forces that work upon us and within… Continue reading Mary Dill Henry’s Life-long Search for the “Vital Forces” of Art and Technology

The North Lawndale Employment Network Sees Through Employment Barriers for the Formerly Incarcerated

February 17, 2022 Ι Metropolis Magazine  Even from outside the new North Lawndale Employment Network (NLEN) building on Chicago’s West Side, where approximately half of residents live in poverty and the neighborhood’s many architectural treasures suffer from brutal disinvestment, passersby can see through two layers of glass into the heart of the building, where formerly… Continue reading The North Lawndale Employment Network Sees Through Employment Barriers for the Formerly Incarcerated

Edward Lyons Pryce, the Black Landscape Architect that Preserved the Tuskegee Institute

February 2, 2022 Ι Metropolis Magazine  Not long before he died in 2007, Edward Lyons Pryce asked his daughter Marilyn Pryce Hoytt for an important favor. “Patty,” he said, using her nickname, “don’t let the world forget about me.” It’s a common sentiment for the end of anyone’s life, but an it’s especially daunting task… Continue reading Edward Lyons Pryce, the Black Landscape Architect that Preserved the Tuskegee Institute

Shanghai’s Longhua Airport Is Converted into a New Public Park

Metropolis Magazine Ι November 30, 2020 At Xuhui Runway Park on the banks of Shanghai’s Huangpu River, in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, it’s impossible to miss the history of what came before. Designed by Sasaki, Xuhui offers a palimpsest of a reused airport, preserving its materials and forms.… Continue reading Shanghai’s Longhua Airport Is Converted into a New Public Park

At Washington University, A Cluster of New Buildings Enlivens a Neglected Part of Campus

Metropolis Magazine Ι Oct. 18, 2019 A middle-American Oxbridge, the campus of Washington University in St. Louis is staunchly Collegiate Gothic, all nested quads and pink granite buildings. It’s often hard to tell where one building ends and another begins. But traverse the campus to its far eastern edge and this monotony starts to let up:… Continue reading At Washington University, A Cluster of New Buildings Enlivens a Neglected Part of Campus

Virgil Abloh’s MCA Exhibition Reveals the Power—and Limits—of Design Disruption

Metropolis Magazine Ι July 15, 2019 Architecture is an attractive medium for the trendsetter-turned-multidisciplinary designer and artist Virgil Abloh. Because buildings are often the face of the establishment, they are ripe targets for subversion—Abloh’s calling card. So it’s no surprise that bits of buildings are strewn throughout Figures of Speech, Abloh’s first solo museum exhibition now… Continue reading Virgil Abloh’s MCA Exhibition Reveals the Power—and Limits—of Design Disruption

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