One of the most exquisite works of recent architecture seeks to fade into its bucolic surroundings. From a ridge at the high point of an 80-acre former horse farm in New Canaan, Connecticut, a pathway protected by a breathtakingly thin roof hairpins around mature trees as it glides down a slope. The roof broadens to cover five pavilions, each one a curved-wall bubble of floor-to-ceiling glass. Grace Farms, hunkering amid forested exurban splendor, is a spare-no-expense destination for … [Read more...]
Fortified Island: New Orleans Changes, Yet Remains True to Itself
Drivers in New Orleans who make a wrong turn may confront the high concrete walls that line drainage canals and top levees. They, and enormous flood gates and pumping stations, are the product of some $14 billion in flood-protection, funded largely by federal taxpayers, that has been built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 10 years since Hurricane Katrina left the city stewing in fetid flood waters for weeks. The Corps is the same agency that under-engineered the levee walls that failed … [Read more...]
Architectural Record Sale: Wane or Gain of Architects’ Influence?
It’s hard to see the sale of Architectural Record magazine (and its sister publication ENR) to BNP Media as anything but a shift downmarket, since it joins a portfolio that includes Stone World and Floor Trends. It is Record's second sale in less than a year, having been already spun off from its longtime corporate parent, the McGraw-Hill Companies. Record and other publications aimed at architects are not immune from the struggle of condescendingly termed “legacy” publications that teeter in … [Read more...]
Historic Preservation: Fighting the Wrong Battles?
The Frick Collection’s formality is as astringent as a dry martini. We marvel at the works of great art hung within rooms of impersonal splendor. Yet the Frick is rather contrived, an elegant knockoff of a French country seat, by Thomas Hastings, of Carrère and Hastings, carefully re-proportioned to fit on a New York City block. Its horizontality and stiff front garden set it defiantly in contrast to the much larger buildings that surround it. Does it lose its relevance if it can’t evolve and … [Read more...]
Sprawling Atlanta Tries to Be a City
Along Atlanta’s potholed Howell Mill road, sagging sheds of metal salvagers, brake liners, and security-gate fabricators are rapidly giving way to Texas donuts: faux-loft apartment buildings wrapping parking structures. Amid the light-industrial detritus can be found a contemporary-art incubator and the White Provisions development, a huge residential/commercial loft complex that anchors a wildly popular restaurant and retail scene. It’s a real-estate wild west, as Atlanta tries on the idea of … [Read more...]
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