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NEW VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE
"Vernacular architecture," strictly speaking, could be a contradiction in terms. The vernacular is the unconscious work of craftsmen based on knowledge accumulated over generations — perhaps the very opposite of architecture, which is often considered to involve a premeditated design process with a conscious appeal to the intellect. — Published 2002.0605
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CHINA'S BANNER STADIUM
In the last decade, the world has seen an unprecedented boom in the construction of sports stadiums. Among the new ones is the Guangdong Olympic Stadium in Guangzou, China, which will help host the 2008 Olympic Summer Games. — Published 2002.0501
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AIRFLOW ON THE BEACH
The architecture and culture of the small island nation of the Dominican Republic are endangered by large hotel complexes that are encroaching on formerly remote beaches. In their rush to capitalize on this big business, Dominicans seem to be forgetting how to design low-energy structures for their tropical environment. — Published 2002.0227
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UK GARDEN OF EDEN
It was like a scene out of Stanislaw Lem's science fiction classic Solaris, with the swirling mists spiraling upward from a giant crater deep within the earth. Slowly, through the haze, emerged a city, no ordinary urban conurbation but an epicenter under giant geometric domes on a lunar landscape.
This is not life, as we know it, this is the future. Welcome to the Eden Project. — Published 2001.0620
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NEW GATES FOR ASIA
This spring Incheon Airport brings South Korea, and all of Asia, closer to the rest of the world. Asia's newest high-tech airport reaches out from a man-made land bridge between two islands in the Yellow Sea. Incheon will make Seoul a new rival to Hong Kong and Osaka as gateway to the East. — Published 2001.0606
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ONE RAFFLES LINK
In Singapore, a city of skyscrapers, a new building by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates stands out as the city's first "groundscraper." The design of One Raffles Link nonetheless reflects a Singaporean tradition of efficient urban planning, conserving the city's precious land and allowing it to remain a garden city.
The building spans two cultures, with its ground-level colonnade providing shelter from Singapore's tropical climate and European-style rusticated stonework reminiscent of nearby colonial buildings. — Published 2001.0502
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OWNER-BUILT SUSTAINABLE SHELTER
Buying a tract house so insensitively placed on the land that extensively remodeled terrain results and using foreign materials that require large amounts of nonsustainable fuels for their manufacture and transport are signs of a people without guiding principles in their relationship to the environment.
That we have become such people and willingly pay for this disconnected life suggests the depth of our alienation and distance from a secure relationship with sustainability and environmental sensitivity. — Published 2001.0418
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