Archinect - Features

'Everyone Talks About Silver Linings, It's Hard to Talk About Opportunities': A Conversation with Elizabeth Leber, Managing Partner at Beyer Blinder Belle

2022-02-01T12:01:00-05:00

"In times of crisis and seismic moments come great opportunities for how you reshape who you are and how your employees view you. You begin to reshape your values, and for me, becoming a Managing Partner was an important time." These are the words of Elizbeth Leber, Managing Partner at Beyer Blinder Belle (BBB). When we connected via Zoom on a Tuesday morning in January, our conversation developed into a wonderful chat about unconventional paths to architecture, her love for art history and adaptive reuse, and the importance of taking off your headphones.

Now that we're in the year 2022, practitioners continue to make efforts towards re-envisioning what a firm leader looks like. While women have resiliently changed and challenged the field of architecture for decades, Beyer Blinder Belle's Elizabeth Leber is no exception. “Any business leader needs to have empathy and the ability to identify with our clients and our staff,” expressed Elizabeth, “It’s important to remember that each...

In With the Old: The Los Angeles Conservancy’s Adrian Scott-Fine on the Past, Present, and Future of Conservation Work in L.A.

2021-10-14T09:00:00-04:00

Los Angeles, a city that is perhaps the most filmed, photographed, and written about metropolitan area in modern history, has been at the center of public discourse surrounding the typical array of conservation issues in the past few years as more and more of the former Spanish Pueblo falls victim to development schemes and the pressure to modernize.

Now, as the city stands poised for an unprecedented decade of changes in which it will play host to the 2028 Olympic Games, the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Adrian Scott-Fine sits down with Archinect for a conversation about some of the challenges, recent developments, and contriving dilemmas facing conservationists in the City of Angels.

A former Director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Scott-Fine shares his thoughts on the group’s efforts and upcoming projects in this exclusive interview.

It's a Great Time to Invest in the Maintenance of Public Lands

2020-07-27T13:11:00-04:00

Last month, the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to pass an amended version of the Great American Outdoors Act (S.3422), legislation originally introduced in the House of Representatives under a different name by the recently departed, legendary Congressman John Lewis. The bill — which passed in the House last and will now head to the desk of the president for his signature into law — would secure $900 million annually in permanent, dedicated funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, as well as money to tackle the $12 billion backlog of deferred maintenance for our National Parks, National Forests and other public lands. According to advocacy group Preservation Action, about 43% of the backlog includes valuable historic structures, too.

Urban Archive Opens a New Door for Digital Architectural Archives

2020-01-17T14:52:00-05:00

Historical archives and repositories are notorious for holding endless amounts of data and information of the built environment while struggling with offering public accessibility and access. The team at Urban Archive, a non-profit technology app, aims to merge passions for history, architecture, technology, and preservation to create a platform that enables others to not only learn about, but also experience the built environment in a whole new way.

Powered by a diverse team of professionals that includes preservationists, urbanists, coders, and museum specialists, Urban Archive has spent the past three years creating a new face for historical building archives. According to team member Sam Addeo, "This blend of technology, institutional buy-in, and data allows architects and students to trace contemporary debates over development and urban policy (including topics like gentrification, housing, and transit access) back to the records themselves." Archinect connected the multidisci...

Fellow Fellows: Unearthing the Architectural History of Early Schools for the Deaf with Kelly Daviduke

2019-11-29T09:00:00-05:00

Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the increasingly important role fellowships play in architecture academia today. These prestigious academic positions can bring forth a fantastic blend of practice, research, and pedagogical cross-pollination, often within a tight time frame. They also, by definition, represent temporary, open-ended, and ultimately precarious employment for aspiring young designers and academics. Fellow Fellows aims to understand what these positions offer for both the fellows themselves and the discipline at large by presenting their work and experiences through an in-depth interview. Fellow Fellows is about bringing attention and inquiry to the otherwise maddening pace of academia, while also presenting a broad view of the exceptional and breakthrough work being done by people navigating the early parts of their careers.

This week, we talk to Kelly Daviduke of the University of Washington, the recipient of the Society of Architectural Historians- and Ath...

Inside the Plan to Save LA’s Southwest Museum

2019-06-11T12:00:00-04:00

It’s an open question whether the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles has its best days behind or ahead of it.

The Spanish Colonial Revival-style mountaintop campus was built in 1914 by architects Sumner P. Hunt and Silas Reese Burns at the behest of anthropologist, historian, journalist, and photographer Charles Fletcher Lummis. Lummis, founder of the Southwest Society, the west coast branch of the Archeological Institute of America, created the museum several years earlier in Downtown Los Angeles to highlight a vast collection of Native American cultural artifacts he had acquired while traveling through the American Southwest. The museum, dedicated to supporting the “history, science, and art of the American Southwest,” contains the largest and one of the most important collections of Native American cultural artifacts in the country.

Today, it also exists today mostly as a shell of its former self.

#ArchinectMeets @adamnathanielfurman

2018-10-26T15:28:00-04:00

#ArchinectMeets is a series of interviews with members of the architecture community that use Instagram as a creative medium. With the series, we ask some of Instagram’s architectural photographers, producers and curators about their relationship to the social media platform and how it has affected their practice.

Social media has undeniably affected the way we perceive, interpret and share opinions about architecture today. While we use our own account, @Archinect, as a site for image curation and news content, we wanted to ask fellow Instagram users how they navigated the platform.

We spoke to Adam Nathaniel Furman, the creator of the eponymous @adamanathanielfurman account. As an advocate of postmodern architecture, Furman's Instagram account has served many purposes towards this passion: photos, memes, illustrations, screenshots and petitions to save postmodern structures at the brink of demolition are all featured on the page with equal significance. The sentiments of the accou...

A modernist city in Africa and Art Deco buildings in China, among others, get added to UNESCO"s World Heritage List

2017-07-11T19:51:00-04:00

The 41st session of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee has been taking place in Kraków, Poland since July 2nd. As the meeting comes to a close, the week has resulted in the designation of 21 new sites and five site boundary changes have also been approved.

Behind the façade: WORKac's hidden penthouse, 3D-modelled capitals, and other subtle interventions in 'the Obsidian Building'

2016-11-11T13:42:00-05:00

In the latter half of the 19th century, areas of New York City, in particular SoHo, got a facelift courtesy of a major new technology: cast-iron. Cheap, sturdy, and easily to install, cast-iron façades were used to dress up older industrial buildings and attract new tenants. The material was pliable yet durable, and could be easily cast into ornate forms, which were often informed by classical Italian and French designs with an American twist. More than just an aesthetic embellishment, replacing the façade dramatically changed the experience of the interior, allowing for enlarged windows and higher ceilings.

Examining the 2016 Venice Biennale: "Sarajevo Now"

2016-05-28T10:15:00-04:00

During the early days of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we've spoken with the curators of a few select pavilions to get a read on the ideas behind their exhibitions. For this feature, we share our conversation with Alfredo Brillembourg of Urban-Think Tank and Nina Baier-Bischofberger of Baier Bischofberger about their project, Sarajevo Now.