Archinect - News

Learning from the last of Louis Kahn’s important sketchbooks

2024-07-13T10:00:00-04:00

The architect who designed some of the 20th century’s great buildings kept a notebook with intimate glimpses into his creative vision. Now it’s his daughter’s final goodbye. [...] We’re reminded of the nuts and bolts of architecture — how legends, too, are susceptible to so-called value engineering.

Sketches for posthumously completed projects for the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park in New York City are included in the recreated facsimile, which Kahn’s daughter Sue Ann put together for the 50th anniversary of his death with help from Swiss publisher Lars Müller.

The result, Sam Lubell writes for the Times, is a "remarkable creation." (It's important to note that these are separate from the Kickstarter-funded push for another facsimile copy of earlier sketchbooks from Designers & Books.)

Conservation work on the YCBA, meanwhile, is expected to wrap up later this year.

Sam Lubell on cultural institutions’ newfound embrace of landscape architecture

2024-04-23T18:30:00-04:00

[...] such projects have fundamentally transformed in recent years, reflecting, among other things, seismic shifts in both museums’ priorities and the profession of landscape architecture, as well as a surge in interest in outdoor space because of the pandemic. The first rule: don’t dare call them gardens. These are sophisticated landscapes integrating — and enhancing — institutions’ missions while also encouraging education, sustainability and a much-needed sense of civic welcome.

Sam Lubell of the New York Times talks to Walter Hood, William Fain, and Kate Orff for a survey focused on the expanding role of landscape architecture in major American cultural sector projects.

He says: "The ascension of landscape in the museum world shows no signs of abating." Projects of note include the Hirshhorn Museum’s debated Hiroshi Sugimoto-led sculpture garden redesign, Studio-MLAand Frederick Fisher and Partners’ work for the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, and the forthcoming Calder Gardens in Philadelphia from Piet Oudolf and Herzog & de Meuron.

"Museums are places where you can say something about the culture. Where we can begin to vet some of these things that we don’t want to talk about. It goes back to the idea of these being the new civic spaces, where honest conversations can be had," Walter Hood told him. (A look at his firm's contributions to the new International African American Museum in South Carolina by Moody Nolan and Pei Cobb Freed can be found ...

Sam Lubell on what's new at Lautner's Sheats-Goldstein House

2024-03-27T17:04:00-04:00

Goldstein and his team of architects, builders, engineers and landscape designers have been working on the Lautner house addition since 2003, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Goldstein’s property, which he has been tinkering with for more than 50 years. [...] “The purpose of all of this was to make the inside feel like it was outside,” said Goldstein, who describes a very collaborative working relationship with Lautner until the architect’s death, at 83, in 1994.

Sam Lubell examines half a century of renovations of and recent additions to James Goldstein's compound surrounding the famed John Lautner-designed Sheats-Goldstein Residence in Los Angeles.

Big kudos to the Times for referencing Lautner’s 1960 (now-demolished) Concannon House with a link to our 2012 feature story "Lautner's Concannon Residence, from Dust to Dust" by Archinect senior contributing writer Orhan Ayyüce.

Fernanda Canales talks to the New York Times about designing better social opportunities in a challenged Mexico

2024-03-04T13:22:00-05:00

“Without opportunities for social interaction, places are more insecure, divided and isolated [...] How can you provide value to a landscape that is neglected? How do you provide an opportunity to see your town in a new way?”

Against a national backdrop poisoned by femicides, border politics, and the equally toxic influence of cartels, Fernanda Canales is making democratic life in underserved Mexican communities more feasible through her highly user-sensitive and socializing designs.

The Mexico City-based architect tells the New York Times' Sam Lubell of her contributions to the government’s $2 billion Programa de Mejoramiento Urbano (or P.M.U.) program, "They will survive local circumstances — issues of budgets, politics and vandalism," adding that "Over time, the public starts to make decisions and inject life. Things change and adapt. Time teaches us what prevails. Often it’s what we can’t imagine now."

Canales was also one of a century profiled in RIBA’s new 100 Women: Architects in Practice, which came out in January and has been reviewed favorably as an essential guide to future equality in the profession. She has been teaching at the UT Austin School of Architecture since the Fall after seeing ...

COVID-19’s spatial impacts: Big or small?

2020-04-27T21:00:00-04:00

What will be the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the built environment? Of course, anything can happen and we should be skeptical of anyone offering predictions for what even tomorrow might bring, but that has not stopped architectural thinkers from positing the world as it might come to be.

A case in point, two dueling perspectives were recently published that offer differing visions of how our cities, daily lives, and homes might change in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Writing in The Los Angeles Times, author and architecture critic Sam Lubell highlights six aspects of daily life—modular construction, adaptive reuse, lightweight architecture, healthy buildings, work, and public spaces—that are likely to be impacted by the crisis.

Previously on Archinect: 2,500-bed hospital conversion at NYC’s Javits Center opens. Photo By: K.C. Wilsey, FEMA.

Among the least discussed arenas so far that might find new relevance amid the COVID-19 crisis, according to Lubell, is modular co...

MAD LA: Ma Yansong and Los Angeles

2020-04-02T12:08:00-04:00

Ma, who makes his home in Pacific Palisades, is in fact a superstar in his native country, China, where he has completed skyscrapers, opera houses, museums, apartments and entire neighborhoods. But both there and here, like a quiet, mysterious character in one of Lucas’ tales (Boba Fett comes to mind), he hovers in the background, nonetheless wielding enormous power.

The Los Angeles Times today published a Sam Lubell profile of Ma Yansong, founder and creative mind of of Beijing- and LA-based MAD Architects.

Rendering courtesy of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

Yansong talks about his under-construction Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, the Gardenhouse residential complex in Beverly Hills, reaction to criticism, inspiration by nature and movies, and why he actually doesn't like talking at all.

"I don’t know why artists need to talk so much," he says in the piece. "I think my work can speak for me."

Related reading: Archinect's conversation, A new nature: Interview with Ma Yansong of MAD Architecture

What's new, Miami? A look at the city's latest A-list architecture additions.

2018-12-04T13:37:00-05:00

Miami’s newest wave of designs could be its most ambitious yet. Fitting for a place that cherishes A-listers, virtually every celebrity architect in the world, and many rising stars, have built there in the last decade. The big names include Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & De Meuron, Grimshaw, César Pelli, Richard Meier, Arquitectonica, Rafael Moneo, Jean Nouvel and Bjarke Ingels. The impressive results are scattered citywide, from Miami Beach to the thriving Design District.

Sam Lubell takes a stroll from Downtown Miami to the Design District to Miami Beach for a NYT roundup of (fairly) recent additions to the city's impressive portfolio of landmark buildings by noteworthy architects, including Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road parking garage, OMA's Faena Forum arts center, Zaha Hadid Architects's One Thousand Museum condo tower, Grimshaw's Frost Science Museum, and, of course, the exuberant Museum Garage with facade contributions by J. Mayer H, WORKac, and others.

Garages, so hot right now.

Related: Listen to our podcast episode about Miami's garages, in our conversation with Thom Faulders of Faulders Studio.

Winners of the “Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA” giveaway

2017-07-24T20:14:00-04:00

Archinectors recently had a chance to win “Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA” by Sam Lubell. Published by Phaidon, this handy travel guide features over 250 Mid-Century Modern projects neatly organized into color-coded chapters that cover the Pacific Northwest region of Washington and Oregon, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and San Diego.

The lucky winners are:

Eric in Warwick, RI
Samson in Palo Alto, CA
Benjamin in Tampa, FL
Marcus in Chicago, IL
Thérèse in Brooklyn, NY

Congrats to all the winners! A big thanks to everyone who participated.

Win “Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA” by Sam Lubell!

2017-07-06T13:10:00-04:00

Any design maven is aware that America's West Coast is chockfull of historic mid-century modern architecture designed by the likes of Charles and Ray Eames, Rudolph Schindler, John Lautner, and Richard Neutra. Of course, there's more than just the most infamous icons, but where to begin? Whether you're planning a big West Coast excursion or want to brush up on your midcentury modern history, “Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA” by architecture critic Sam Lubell can help.

Thanks to publisher Phaidon, Archinect is giving away five copies of the book to our readers!

Read on for more, and find out how to enter the giveaway.

Authored by Sam Lubell, this handy travel guide features over 250 Mid-Century Modern projects all neatly organized into color-coded chapters that cover the Pacific Northwest region of Washington and Oregon, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and San Diego. Each entry is accompanied by historic tidbits from Lubell, project data, and ...

"Show audiences that it's okay to dream" by Kickstarting Never Built New York

2017-05-23T13:16:00-04:00

Architecture author and curator Sam Lubell is partnering with the Queens Museum to bring Never Built New York into the physical display space with a little help from Kickstarter. The drive, which needs to raise another $26K in 29 days, hopes to physically model some of the innovative, occasionally wild designs that were proposed decades ago but never realized. Lubell believes the project would "show audiences that it's okay to dream" in terms of imagining large-scale, inventive solutions to contemporary urban problems. The modeling would take place on one of the largest scale models of New York City and its surrounds, as explained in the accompanying video to the Kickstarter drive.

A Trump Tower in L.A.? Thankfully, that was only part of "Never Built Los Angeles"

2017-02-15T00:51:00-05:00

In LA, Trump bragged he was going to spend a billion dollars on what he claimed would become the world’s tallest building. His architect Bill Fain delivered a gilded 125-storey office tower etched in a diamond-patterned exoskeleton...David Martin also devised a skyscraper: ‘When I told Ivana [Trump] the basis of the idea was to put two diamonds together, she lit up,’ Martin said. ‘I think they were divorced a week later.’

Whether you've been following the tumultuous life of proposed architecture projects in Los Angeles or not (a stretch of Grand Avenue, for example, has been undergoing elaborate proposals designed in part by Frank Gehry for almost forty years) "Never Built Los Angeles," a book by architectural critics at large Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, shows us via The Guardian the almost-reality of a Los Angeles-based Trump Tower designed by Johnson Fain back in 1989.

One-to-One #45 with 'Never Built New York' authors Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell

2016-11-07T13:51:00-05:00

Never Built New York, by curators and authors Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, is an astounding collection of architectural projects that never made it into being. The book features projects from the last two centuries, sited all throughout the five boroughs, that range from the monumental to the mortifying. Alongside infamous projects like Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Key Plan for Ellis Island, visions for an alternate New York-urbanism abound: aborted reflections of their time, place and politics.

The book continues in the tradition of Goldin and Lubell's 2013 exhibition, "Never Built Los Angeles", including focused research on each project alongside gorgeous drawings and visualizations. I spoke with the authors about their curatorial approach to the book, and the projects that they were most excited by.

Check out a selection of the Never Built projects below and in the image gallery.

Listen to One-to-One #45 with Never Built New York authors Greg Gold...

The NYC that could have been – 'Never Built New York' to be released this fall

2016-07-27T20:16:00-04:00

The authors and curators behind 2013's Never Built Los Angeles, a collection of fantastical and aborted projects from LA's 20th century urban history, have now turned their attention eastward, to New York City.

In Never Built New York, Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin (with a foreword by Daniel Libeskind) uncover nearly 200 urban projects from the last two centuries that, for any host of reasons, failed to launch. Some of the showcased never-beens are Buckminster Fuller's glass-domed (Brooklyn) Dodgers Stadium, Stephen Holl's Bridge of Houses (destined for the spot where the High Line is now), and what would have been Frank Lloyd Wright’s final project: his dream city, the Key Plan for Ellis Island.

The book comes out in the U.S. on October 1. More info here.