For years, overnight visitors attending Fallingwater’s educational programs have bunked down in a cramped, four-bedroom house near Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterwork in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. But Wright devotees will soon have the luxury of living in Patkau Architects’ competition-winning design for six low-impact, energy-efficient cottages.
Image credit: Courtesy Patkau Architects
Taking a snapshot of New York is no easy feat, as the Architectural League learned after setting out to capture sundry megaprojects, condominiums, newly-seeded parks, and a real estate landscape reeling from the recession.
Image credit: Jason Tax
Now in various stages of limbo, neglect, and ruin, America's forgotten psychiatric institutions are testament to an uneasy chapter in medical history, but also to a vanishing era of architectural aspiration. The intrepid photographer Christopher Payne has made a six-year journey through more than 30 states to capture this extraordinary legacy as it falls into oblivion.
Image credit: Christopher Payne
The savants at MIT's Media Lab have pioneered breakthroughs in connectivity—wireless networks, viral communications—but since 1985, its engineers, programmers, artists, and scientists have been shuttered inside a warren of walled-off offices. Thanks to Fumihiko Maki's gleaming, $90 million glass-clad lab, they're well on their way to a new century of social serendipity.
Image credit: Andy Ryan
The suburban stronghold of Long Island might seem an unlikely place for the inklings of a smart-growth insurrection, but from Hempstead to Patchogue, auto-centric hamlets are rediscovering density with new mixed-use, transit-oriented, and more all-round sustainable developments on the boards. Can Levittown be reborn as the New Suburbia?
Image credit: Courtesy Lighthouse Development Group
The Central Delaware waterfront is a seven-mile stretch of postindustrial wastes, remnant port uses, big-box stores, planned casinos, and decaying piers—a daunting swath for planners hoping to remake Philadelphia’s eastern flank.
Image credit: Courtesy James Corner Field Operations
Being a kid—or at least a playground designer—was a lot more fun in the 1970s, before the advent of telephone-book-thick ASTM standards, not to mention things like critical fall heights, head-entrapment guidelines, and the virtual outlawing of sand. But vestiges of that freewheeling age can be found in Central Park, where the spirit of adventure thrives thanks to restorations this summer of two pioneering playgrounds.
Image credit: Courtesy Central Park Conservancy
Once mocked as "Shanghai on the Hudson"—a back-office Wall Street annex, all but devoid of urban life—downtown Jersey City has become an unlikely showcase of smart growth, thanks in part to a $2 billion light-rail line that has unlocked a wave of new development, not to mention a major dose of Andres Duany's New Urbanist sensibility. Seaside on the Morris Canal?
Image credit: Victoria Monjo
To get to Ragnar Kjartansson’s countryside studio, I flew to Reykjavík, drove to a scarcely inhabited fjord called Borgarfjörður an hour north of the city, splashed across a tidal waterway in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and pulled up to a bluff overlooking the glacial river Hvítá. There, in a small cottage, I found the artist fixing a proper Icelandic repast of dried haddock and headcheese and bottles of Egils Gull beer. Little did I know what the prodigy of Icelandic performance art had in store for me.
Image credit: Wolfgang Träger
Thanks to New York City's deadening zoning rules, public waterfronts have often been dullsville: unbending bulkheads, forbidding railings, and nary a spot to quaff a beer. A new proposal now under review by city officials would, for the first time in 15 years, revamp the way developer-built public waterfront spaces are designed, owned, and managed. The Williamsburg, Brooklyn waterfront (above) has been something of a test case for the city's new rules, and while the result has been generally deemed a great leap forward, the zoning could still take a few tweaks to get us beyond high-and-dry.
Image credit: Courtesy FXFowle
