Three Buildings, Three Different Approaches
Bay Area projects demonstrate that the retro fit of existing structures demands as much seismic sophistication as new construction.

Image courtesy SOM

Model Behavior: Anticipating Great Design
Cutting-edge projects throughout the Middle East rely on a variety of simulation programs to inform design and predict building performance.

Photo courtesy Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture

An Energy-Conserving Technology From Europe Makes Inroads in the U.S.
American architects and engineers are discovering the advantages of chilled beams, a mechanical device that provides cooling and heating. The energy-saving technology has been popular in Europe for more than a decade.

Photo © Peter Vanderwarker

Getting High Design from a Low-Tech Approach
Eschewing complex forms and technology, socially minded architects rely on age-old building techniques to create modern marvels.

Photo © Nicolás Cabrera Andrade

Some Assembly Required
Five firms explore the potential of prefabrication with digital tools, a diversity of materials, and varying degrees of on-site labor.

Photo © MOMA/Richard Barnes

Design Professionals Follow the Physician's Precept: "First, Do No Harm"
Innovative strategies improve air quality inside health care facilities so that patients don't end up sicker than when they arrived.

Photo © John Durant Photography

BAM’s Next Wave: A Forward-Looking Institution Updates Its Own Look with a Nod to the Past
Since the 1970s, Hugh Hardy’s work for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) has run the gamut, spanning new cinemas and a café for the experimental film and performing arts venue to, most recently, a faithful restoration of the 1908 facade of its historic Peter Jay Sharp Building.

Pictured: Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); Photo © Peter Mauss/Esto

Inside Beijing's Big Box of Blue Bubbles
A multidisciplinary design team employed an innovative digital process to produce a surprising, highly integrated envelope-and-structure combination.

Photo © Iwan Baan

A Sleek Skyscraper in San Francisco Raises the Profile of Performance-Based Design
The nearly complete tower demonstrates multiple benefits of a nonprescriptive approach.

Photo © Henrik Kam

Let the (Indirect) Sun Shine In
A highly collaborative design process and In-depth analysis produce daylighting systems for two expanding art museums on opposite coasts.

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Crimps, Facets, and Folds
An ingenious Y-shaped mullion supports a quartz-like facade on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue.

Photo © William Zbaren

Rapidly Renewable Materials' Complex Calculus
Evaluating the environmental impact of alternative building products is more involved than a straightforward examination of the length of planting and harvest cycles.

Photo © J.D. Peterson

Learning to Live on Alternative Energy
Three landmark projects show us how to integrate renewable-energy strategies into architecture, without compromising design.

Photo © Doug Snower Photography

Mutsuro Sasaki
Interviewed in his Tokyo office, the Japanese structural engineer reflects on the dramatic turn his work has taken since Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque, nearly eight years ago.

In Canada, a rammed-earth wall for the ages
The relationship between architecture and nature rarely gets more explicit than with rammed-earth construction.

Photo © Nic Lehoux

Groups advance two sets of high-performance building standards
In the not-too-distant future, there could be two U.S. standards for green buildings.

Pictured: Chandler Airport Commerce Center in Chandler, Arizona; Photo courtesy Green Building Initiative

Aiming at super-tall market, Mitsubishi opens record-breaking elevator testing tower
Inazawa City, Japan, is the home of Mitsubishi Electric’s elevator division, and accordingly, the city skyline includes six small peaks—all towers that the company uses to test its product.

Photo courtesy Mitsubishi Electric Corporation

Microalloy promises better steel structures
The U.S. Army, in conjunction with private industry, is involved in a multiyear research project that could yield stronger, lighter, and longer-span structures, for both civil and military applications. The research is examining the benefits of adding vanadium to steel.

Photo courtesy Simpson Gumpertz & Heger

Book Reviews
We review two recently published books: One tracks the relationship between the practice of medicine and architecture from ancient times to the present, while the other discusses the urgent need to reinvent medical facilities so they are better for patients and the environment.

Behind SANAA’s illusion of weightlessness
Now that the New Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is complete, and its structure enclosed, there is little evidence of the system that supports the seven-story building that seems to be made up of nothing heavier than precariously stacked cardboard boxes.

Diagrams courtesy Guy Nordenson and Associates

Multifaceted structure supports audaciously sculptural BMW Welt
The 172,000-square-foot roof that seems to hover over Coop Himmelb(l)au’s BMW Welt in Munich does more than keep out the elements.

Photo © Duccio Malagamba

Looking Back and Moving Forward
Postoccupancy evaluations offer a systematic process for assessing completed projects, pointing the way to better-performing buildings.

Photo © Peter Aaron/Esto

A base-isolated makeover for Pasadena's historic City Hall
Structural base isolation—effectively "floating" a building on rubber pads to safely ride out an earthquake—is nothing new in California.

Photo © Victor Muschetto

California hospitals get a seismic reprieve
The California Building Standards Commission (CBSC) moved in December 2007 to allow the reclassification of potentially hundreds of seismically questionable hospitals in the state to avoid possible closure due to code noncompliance.

Architecture, Hot and Cold
The collaboration between two Australian firms on Melbourne's new Council House 2 shows off the design possibilities for building-integrated HVAC.

Photo © Russell Fortmeyer

Fashioning an aural architecture
How do you protect a concert hall from extreme desert heat and noise generated by planes flying overhead? We examine how Barton Myers Associates and Architekton solved this problem in their roof design for the Tempe Center for the Arts.

Photo © John Edward Linden

Building Even Better Concrete
Manufacturers, scientists, and designers strive to reduce a vital material's environmental footprint while exploiting its many beneficial qualities

Photo courtesy Portland Cement Association

"Smart Glass" on the Verge
After languishing for years outside the mainstream, "switchable glazing" is poised to become a viable alternative and could soon have a significant impact on facade design.

Rendering © Werner Sobek

Hanging Loose
Perhaps the most famous cantilever in America is one of the shortest: Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1935 design for the exterior concrete terraces at Fallingwater, the longest of which extends a mere 15 feet to hover over the rush of Pennsylvania’s Bear Run stream.

Photo © Justin Maconochie

Chuck Hoberman wants buildings to change
Chuck Hoberman has a vision of Buckminster Fuller. As the New York–based artist, mechanical engineer, and product designer expands his projects to large-scale architecture, he is integrating his mechanized elements to develop a new strain of sustainable and flexible structures that conceptually relate to what the late Fuller had imagined, but never realized, decades before.

Rendering Courtesy Foster + Partners