Good Design Is Good Business
The winners of the 2009 BusinessWeek / Architectural Record Awards reveal that successful architecture is more than a grand gesture.

Photo © Iwan Baan

America’s Best Architecture Schools
RECORD looks at the 2010 survey and asks people in academia and the profession what it all means.

Innovation Blog
Architectural Record and GreenSource presented our annual Innovation Conference on October 7th and 8th. Read our editors’ responses to selected talks below:

• John Straube: Enlightening, if Chilling
• Hot Topic, Cool Ideas: Next-Generation HVAC Systems at 2009 Innovation Conference
• Colin Harrison: What Does IBM Have to Do with Cities?

View a full lineup of speakers here

Don’t roll your eyes: Architects can learn a lot by playing golf
Golf? Yes, golf. Critic Robert Campbell, FAIA, argues that architects can learn a lot by playing the game.

Photo © Peter Vanderwarker

Embassy designers face the apparent, maybe even inherent, contradiction between the democratic ideal of an open building designed to portray a transparent society, and the security restrictions that virtually jail diplomats in safety. We look at two projects in light of this tension.

Photo courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Stunning new galleries update interiors for the museum world’s old
guard.

Photo © Roos Aldershoff

An Unsung Modernist Master: RECORD’s editor in chief Robert Ivy, FAIA, talks with Ray Kappe, FAIA, a master of California Midcentury Modernism who has shown resilience in recent years, adapting to advances in prefabrication and sustainable building. Read the interview, view images of Kappe’s work, and take a video tour of his house.

Photo courtesy Charles Jencks

Working with existing structures to create histories or execute full program shifts requires a mix of historical, technical, and even ecological knowledge. Our Preservation and Adaptive Reuse section examines the state of historic preservation in the U.S., as well as exemplary projects that bring new life to old structures, and the building technologies that make it possible.

Photomontage © Margaret Riegel

RECORD’s guide to San Francisco, the host city of the 2009 American Institute of Architects national convention, features profiles of important Bay-Area projects, information for visitors, and more. Check back for regular updates, and beginning April 30th, live coverage of the event.

Machine in the Garden: Charles Jencks’s Garden of Scottish Worthies
American theorist, architect, and (increasingly) landscape architect Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie Keswick created a 30-acre garden on a Scottish family estate that engages both the mind and the senses.

Photo courtesy Charles Jencks

When looking at the 2009 AIA Honor Awards as a whole, it is easy to comprehend why this year’s winners were chosen. The group—which includes nine projects in the category of Architecture, 10 projects in Interiors, and six in Urban Design, along with the Gold Medal, Firm of the Year, and 25 Year awards—all reveal what could be called a connection to connections.

Photo © Tim Griffith

RECORD’s annual list of ten firms to watch features emerging architects—working in cities from Berlin to Nanjing—who have created thoughtful investigations of form, context, materiality, and construction. But could they also represent the end of an era?

Photo © Iwan Baan

This month, RECORD is focusing on people and projects that merge design with social responsibility. We profile firms at the forefront of humanitarian design, hold a design invitational for refugee housing, host a roundtable discussion about community-focused design-build programs, and more.

Photo © Werner Huthmacher

This summer, all eyes are on Beijing, and RECORD has put together a special section of our site dedicated to the city. View and comment on high-profile projects, browse photographs and post your own, read Beijing recommendations from people who know the city, and more.

Photo © Jennifer Richter

SOM’s Carl Galioto and Paul Seletsky on BIM
Carl Galioto, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s partner-in-charge of the firm’s New York Technical Group, and Paul Seletsky, SOM’s director of digital design, are two of the architecture profession’s leading experts on building information modeling. The pair discuss how BIM facilitated a major redesign of the Freedom Tower; address common misperceptions; explain BIM’s potential benefits for smaller practices; point out how BIM can lead to increased compensation; and lay out the potential ramifications of BIM on the architect’s overall role in the realization of buildings.

Image © dbox Studio

AIA Convention: Boston
We explore Boston, the host city of the 2008 national convention for the American Institute of Architects. Read about must-see buildings, recent projects, and the best places to dine. Watch videos, view slide shows, listen to podcasts, and contribute your own images to our Boston Photo Showcase. Also, RECORD editors will blog live from the convention, held May 15 to 17.

Photo © Bryant Rousseau

The AIA will recognize the recipients of the 2008 Honor Awards during its national convention in Boston. View winning projects in three categories: Architecture, Interiors, and Regional/Urban Design. Also, read about the winners of the 25 Year Award (Richard Meier's The Atheneum), the Firm of the Year (KieranTimberlake Associates), and the Gold Medal (Renzo Piano).

Photo © Jeff Weiner

BusinessWeek/Architectural Record 2008 China Awards
In 2006, we introduced the BusinessWeek/Architectural Record Awards program to China on a biannual basis. This year, we honor 13 building and planning projects ranging in size from a small house in Hong Kong to an 860,000-square-meter, mixed-use development near the center of Beijing. We also selected as best client a real-estate developer that has made design an essential part of its business strategy.

True Green
Given the growing concern about sustainability, it’s a good time to look back to the originating seeds of green, to the anarchic 1960s and Bucky Fuller’s philosophy of doing more with less.

Photo © Jack Fulton

New Museum of Contemporary Art
Having developed a reputation for exquisitely refined buildings, SANAA faced a very different kind of challenge with the New Museum in Lower Manhattan: Design a building for an anti-establishment museum in a scruffy-but-gentrifying part of town. Our Web coverage includes a slide show and video tour, along with a story about the project, a detailed analysis of the building’s structure, and a profile on leading engineer Mutsuro Sasaki.

Photo © Christian Richters

The New York Times Building
Renzo Piano Building Workshop and FXFOWLE present a quietly luminous addition to the Manhattan skyline with The New York Times Building. See images, view videos and read stories about the $1 billion project.

Photo © David Sundberg/Esto

New Video Series: My New York
In our latest video feature, we explore New York with noted architects, critics, artists, and others with impassioned opinions about architecture. They comment on buildings they love, hate or feel are critical to the context of the city’s built environment. Our “tour guides” include Robert Ivy, editor in chief of Architectural Record; noted artist Dennis Oppenheim; and Bruce Fowle, senior principal of FXFowle Architects.

A Floating Pool Drops Anchor in Brooklyn
Swimming in New York City’s East River has never been so alluring. Late last June, a barge hauling its unusual cargo of a 25-meter, seven-lane swimming pool moored along the Brooklyn waterfront and, since then, has hosted tens of thousands of New Yorkers looking to escape the summer heat.

Photo: © Philippe Baumann

Journal Entries from Kuala Lumpur
Robert Ivy, RECORD's editor-in-chief, recently traveled to Kuala Lumpur for the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture. He recorded his impressions of the event, diary-style, and also took a number of photographs, which we feature in a slideshow.

Photo: Bob Ivy

Topped/Tapped Out
The skyscraper has had more comebacks than Cher. From its humble, naive beginnings in Chicago after the fire of 1871; its idealistic representation in early European Modernism; its apex as the glam symbol of American corporate eminence; its bimbo phase in Postmodernism; its more recent dalliance with high-tech engineering; and culminating with its supposed demise on September 11, 2001, the skyscraper is one helluva contender.

Photo: Courtesy SOM

The Engineer's Moment
A shift in the architecture profession, already entrenched with issues of control and authorship, affords the engineer an expanded role during initial project design discussions, not just as consultants after the fact. Structural engineers like Chris Wise—formerly of Arup, now at Expedition Engineering—are literally drawing at the table, which is how he explains his collaboration at Arup with Norman Foster’s office on London’s Millennium Bridge.

Photo: Courtesy North Carolina State Fair Division

Between baby boomers pushing 60, and over-the-hill hospitals in need of a makeover, the demand for healthcare buildings couldn’t be healthier.  To meet your need for information about them, we’ve created this Record Review Health Care section.

Pictured: Johns Hopkins Hospital; Image courtesy Perkins + Will

Philip Johnson's Glass House: An Essay in Timelessness
A classic example of Modern architecture is spiffed up for its public debut.

An Architectural Record Contest
The Philip Johnson Glass House Guessing Game
Win the book, Glass House, edited by Toshio Nakamura, photographs by Michael Moran  (Monacelli, 2007, $95.00).

Photo © Arnold Neuman/Getty Images

Peter Marino's Brand Buildings
The New York architect combines respect for the past with a brand's essence in store designs for such luxury names as Dior and Vuitton.

Pictured: The exterior of the Chanel store in Tokyo. Photo: © Takashi Orii

Video Tour of a Chinese Town
Two noted Chinese video artists, On Ning (who trained as an architect) and Cao Fei, take us on an avant-garde, improvisatory tour of a Chinese town, San Yuan Li.

Video Tour of Kyotofu Restaurant
We visit a new Japanese dessert café in Manhattan with a unique, Minimalist façade and an interior that manages to be both ultra-modern and warmly inviting. The owners and the architect also discuss with us the impact that the strong design will have on the business’s bottom line.

The Schools of the 21st Century Web site was created for those who believe that the quality of our school buildings is directly related to the quality of education we give the students who occupy them.

Pictured: Sidwell Friends Middle School; Photo © Barry Halkin

After the Flood: An exhibition presenting proposals for replacement housing and redevelopment in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Click here for our Venice Biennale 2004 coverage

Welcome to RECORD's special site dedicated to the unrestrained, talented, and innovative architects who call Los Angeles home. With podcasts, interviews, and an informal design guide, the site will give you an inside look at the people who make L.A. a nucleus of thought-provoking design. Read on.

Best of China: Check out the 16 winners of the first BusinessWeek/ Architectural Record China Awards, as well as news and other features on architecture in China.

Plus, visit our 2004 China issue, winner of a Neal Award for "Best Single Issue of a Magazine" Be sure to check out our accompanying Web site coverage.

Innovation: This special section covers our annual Innovation conference held in New York City. Discover the featured projects that involve collaboration, technological sophistication, and attention to sustainability. We also include exclusive articles on building technology, products, and technology briefs. Be innovative.