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SAN FRANCISCO AIA AWARDS 2008
With 40 different awards given by the San Francisco chapter of the AIA, and only a few repeat winners among them, there were plenty of happy architects by the Bay this year.
Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne and his Santa Monica firm, Morphosis, received one of four honor awards for excellence in architecture. Morphosis shared the award for the San Francisco Federal Building with the local office of SmithGroup. — Published 2008.0528
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RENZO PIANO'S NEW YORK TIMES BUILDING
Ask most architects to name the most elemental ingredients of great architecture, and chances are they will say "space and light."
But these are not necessarily the first two words that come to mind when thinking about skyscrapers, especially tall buildings in New York City. — Published 2008.0416
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HEARST TOWER
Pritzker Prize laureate Norman Foster is a master of levitating buildings of dubious design, treatment, or association to the pantheon of architectural icons. The Hearst Tower in Manhattan, which he designed in collaboration with architects Adamson Associates and Gensler, is the most recent example of this resuscitation.
The 42-story glass- and metal-skinned tower is characterized by a large diagonal grid, emphasized by vertically alternating recessed and projecting multistory corner triangles. — Published 2007.0523
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TOYO ITO INTERVIEW
Japanese architect Toyo Ito is credited with influencing a generation of younger architects with his ideas about contemporary urban forms. While presenting some of his recent work at an exhibition at the Tokyo Opera City Gallery in 2006, he spoke with journalist Colin Liddell about his designs, his theories, and their origin. — Editor
Colin Liddell: In all your buildings, you seem to be trying to get away from straight lines. Do you hate straight lines? — Published 2007.0110
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MILAN TRADE FAIR
"When you build one million square meters, you really don't know if what you envisioned will be good or bad," says Massimilliano Fuksas, the Rome-based architect for the New Milan Trade Fair. The 10.8-million-square-foot convention complex, which opened in April 2006, has a mile-long canopy that wows visitors with its whimsical flair, transforming a glass and steel structure into a fabric that billows and then touches down like tornados to the floor. — Published 2006.1129
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Y INSIDE
In this suburb of the nation's capital, the Fort Washington, Maryland YMCA project is overshadowed by all the surrounding built history. Yet this rehabilitation of a former supermarket should not be underestimated. The firm of GTM Architects has successfully transformed the nondescript building into a "Y" that is at once visually poetic, pragmatically functional, and admirably committed to its community. — Published 2006.0719
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SMOKE AND MIRROR SLEEPOVERS
Two new hotels, one small and one very small, are explorations in the use of light and reflection to transform space — and to create a world unlike anything hotel guests might inhabit day-to-day. — Published 2006.0628
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RECREATIONAL MORPHING
A generation ago, the University of Cincinnati was a commonplace American commuter school riddled with surface parking lots, the campus severed by a busy thoroughfare. Despite being nestled in the heart of a large city, it felt suburban. But over the ensuing years, the university has undergone a billion-dollar makeover. — Published 2006.0426
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LIBRARY ENLIGHTENED
The original Skillman Library was always a bit of an arsenal for books. Designed by Philadelphia architect Vincent Kling and constructed in 1963 on the campus of Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, it was a limestone and brick fortress with narrow slit windows and all the warmth of a bunker. The design of the limestone cornice at the building's top even suggested battlements. — Published 2006.0125
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DUBLIN HABITAT
In crafting a modern setting within a historic context, the Irish firm of Douglas Wallace Architects has struck a delicate balance between respectful homage to the past and a stylish adventure into the future. In the new Habitat store in Dublin, they have converted an 18th-century Bank of Ireland and a 1960s office building into a large retail establishment for the city center. — Published 2005.1214
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