Articles by Ella Comberg

At first glance, The Stealth Building looks like a pristinely-restored cast iron apartment building. That’s because technically, it is. But upon closer inspection, the Lower Manhattan building is rife with innovative restoration and renovation practices by WORKac.

In the latest installment of PLANE—SITE’s short video series Time-Space-Existence, French architect Odile Decq gives this advice to young designers: be bold. “If you want to build and create the new century, you have to have people who have people who have specific personalities. I love when people express themselves strongly and very clearly.”

If you stand in Manhattan Avenue Park in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, you’ll see the Long Island City skyline across a small creek. On the Greenpoint side of the creek, a historic neighborhood of row houses and industrial sites is rapidly growing. On the Long Island City side, high-rise apartments and hundreds of art galleries and studios line the East River. Just a stone’s throw away, Long Island City can feel like a world apart from Greenpoint. That’s in large part due to the fact that only one bridge connects the neighborhoods—and it’s meant more for cars than pedestrians or cyclists. Isn’t there a better way? Architect Jun Aizaki thinks so. For the past few years, he and his team at CRÈME Architecture and Design have been working on the so-called “Timber Bridge at Longpoint Corridor.”

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected eleven recipients in its 2018 Small Projects Awards. Established fifteen years ago by AIA’s Small Project Practitioners, the program “recognizes small-project practitioners for the high quality of their work” and “aims at raising awareness about the value and design excellence that architects can bring to projects, no matter their size or scope.”

There’s something irresistible about Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s architectural romance. They met when they were both young professors at the University of Pennsylvania; Scott Brown held seminars in city planning, and Venturi gave lectures in architectural theory. As the story goes, Scott Brown argued in her first faculty meeting that Frank Furness’ masterful Venetian gothic library should not be torn down to build a plaza (then a dissenting opinion). Venturi approached her after the meeting, offering his support. As Paul Goldberger wrote of the couple in 1971, “as their esthetic viewpoints grew closer and closer, so did their feelings toward each other.” Architecture lovers can’t help but love the architect-lovers.

When we think of public housing architecture in the United States, we often think of boxes: big, brick buildings without much aesthetic character. But the implications of standardized, florescent-lit high-rises can be far more than aesthetic for the people who live there. Geographer Rashad Shabazz, for one, recalls in his book Spatializing Blackness how the housing project in Chicago where he grew up—replete with chain link fencing, video surveillance, and metal detectors—felt more like a prison than a home. Accounts of isolation, confinement, and poor maintenance are echoed by public housing residents nationwide.

The story of Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport never quite ends.

Yale University’s School of Architecture was in the midst of pedagogical upheaval when Louis Kahn joined the faculty in 1947. With skyscraper architect George Howe as dean and modernists like Kahn, Philip Johnson, and Josef Albers as lecturers, the post-war years at Yale trended away from the school’s Beaux-Arts lineage towards the avant-garde. And so, when the consolidation of the university’s art, architecture, and art history departments in 1950 demanded a new building, a modernist structure was the natural choice to concretize an instructional and stylistic departure from historicism.[1] Completed in 1953, Louis Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery building would provide flexible gallery, classroom, and office space for the changing school; at the same time, Kahn’s first significant commission signaled a breakthrough in his own architectural career—a career now among the most celebrated of the second half of the twentieth century.

In the nineteenth century, hundreds of artisans and shoppers would crowd around the Gjanica River in Fier, Albania on market day. Today, the river is nearly invisible, covered in some parts by overgrown greenery and at others obscured by tall buildings illegally constructed too close to the riverbank. A plan from Italian firm MAU Architecture termed “RI-GJANICA” reimagines Fier’s waterfront as the central element of their scheme for a new city center. Their project involves reopening connections between the urban core and the river through bike paths, pedestrian bridges, amphitheaters, and integrated mixed-use buildings.

Copenhagen firm WE Architecture has completed a proposal for a “Dog Center” in Moscow that challenges traditional notions of animal shelters. Nestled in the countryside, the one-story pavilion will rely on a series of courtyards divided by pergolas that disappear into the landscape. The firm notes that the courtyards, which provide enclosed outdoor space for the dogs, allow the center “to avoid the ‘jail-like’ fencing which is often associated with dog shelters.”