SOLAR DECATHLON 2009 In mid-October 2009, twenty teams of engineering and architecture students erected houses on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the biennial Solar Decathlon green building contest. After spending two years designing and building cutting-edge solar houses, the teams — mostly from North America — sought the designation of "most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient" for their structures. — Published 2009.1028
	PIANO IN CHICAGO Renzo Piano is known for his finely tuned designs, especially for a refined talent in dovetailing elegant new architecture with an existing context, playing on contextual strengths without duplicating the neighbors. He has achieved this feat once again at the Art Institute of Chicago, where a light-studded new museum wing by Piano opened in May 2009. The Art Institute's new addition is laudable in its intelligent siting, sensitive scale, urban presence, and manipulation of light. — Published 2009.0805
	ROPE-ACCESS SURVEYING "Wanted: Project architect/designer with varied experience in construction documents, detailing, and construction administration. Minimum 5 years CAD experience and familiarity with digital photography. Experience in mountain climbing desirable; athletic ability with no fear of heights is required." — Published 2009.0311
	BUILD BOSTON 2008 The 2008 Build Boston convention and trade show seemed, on the surface, to be its usual hustling, bustling, active marketplace of hundreds of educational workshops, dozens of receptions and affiliated conferences, and a convention floor full of product booths centered around the design and construction industry. — Published 2009.0128
	DELFT MEDIA LIBRARY Durability through transformation. That was the architects' vision for the DOK Library Concept Center in Delft, the Netherlands. The multimedia library occupies part of the overhauled Hoogovenpand, a 1970s mixed-use building facing a public square. Architects Liesbeth van der Pol of Dok architects (no relation) and Aat Vos of Aequo BV revitalized the gloomy building, creating the library space among existing commercial and residential functions. — Published 2009.0128
	DESIGNING FABRIC STRUCTURES The first step in designing a fabric structure is to create a form with sufficient pre-stress, or tension, to prevent it from fluttering like a flag or sail. Lightweight structures with minimal surfaces optimally should have double curvature — a surface that possesses a high-point (positive) curvature along one principal axis and a low-point (negative) curvature along the other principal axis. — Published 2008.0924
	HOUSE FOR SWEDEN The 70,000-square-foot (6,500-square-meter) building for the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., is set on a narrow peninsula at the confluence of Rock Creek and the Potomac River. Surrounded by water on three sides, the peninsula faces south and commands spectacular views up and down the Potomac. The prominent site called for an emblematic building through which the essence of Swedish culture, technology, design sensibility, and governance would be expressed. — Published 2008.0910
	BEIJING BIRD'S NEST - ARCHITECTURE This is the first part of a two-part series about Beijing National Stadium. Part one looks at the stadium from the architects' perspective, part two from the engineers'. In the weeks and months leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese government faced a range of complications, from polluted skies to Tibet protests. — Published 2008.0820
	A BLOCK IN TEMPLE BAR O'Donnell + Tuomey Architects spent ten years working on one block in Temple Bar, the cultural quarter of Dublin, Ireland. We started on conversion of the former Quaker Meeting House into the Irish Film Centre in 1986. Meeting House Square, with the National Photographic Archive and the Gallery of Photography, was opened to the public in 1996. — Published 2008.0130
	CONTINUING EDUCATION ONLINE We live in a wonderful age in which architects can be educated in almost any subject you can imagine, via the Internet. Over the course of this last year, I have gone "back to school" online for lessons in such diverse subjects as book publishing, SketchUp photo modeling, calibrating bitmaps in DataCAD, doing ZiPCAD punch lists, and solving a Rubik's Cube. — Published 2007.0221

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