Articles by AD Editorial Team

Staircases can trigger conversations, provide a sense of arrival, and dazzle with ingenuity. As an architectural element, they are not just about circulation – so why are they neglected in the design of so many new projects? In this short film from Monocle, the breadth of ingenuity possible with the stair—from those of the Danish National Bank in Copenhagen to London’s Leighton House Museum—explore how they can come to embody the very essence of a good architectural project.

Staircases can trigger conversations, provide a sense of arrival, and dazzle with ingenuity. As an architectural element, they are not just about circulation – so why are they neglected in the design of so many new projects? In this short film from Monocle, the breadth of ingenuity possible with the stair—from those of the Danish National Bank in Copenhagen to London’s Leighton House Museum—explore how they can come to embody the very essence of a good architectural project.

One of only two projects completed by Le Corbusier in the Americas—the other being the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts—Casa Curutchet is located in La Plata, Argentina. Commissioned by the surgeon Dr. Pedro Domingo Curutchet in 1948, the four-story residence includes a small medical office on the ground floor. The form of the building echoes traditional Latin American courtyard houses while also exemplifying Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture.

The work of artist Alex Chinneck is grounded in architecture. From melting buildings to a slumping facade to a structure ripped in half and hovering, Chinneck’s work plays with the expectation of materials and tectonics, resulting in captivating mind-bending illusions. His latest work (and first permanent sculpture), Six Pins and Half a Dozen Needles, continues this exploration, taking the form of a large brick wall ripped down the center.

RISING Exchange Conference is bringing the architecture industry and its stakeholders together to highlight the potential of architecture to help solve future societal challenges.

Ah, clients. Sadly, we can’t all be paper architects, dreaming up improbable futures (and even the members of Archigram eventually settled down to found studios that actually build stuff). As a result, we’re forced to work with people who often think that just because they’re paying for our services, they own us like slaves. They come in many different varieties, from the client that thinks that everything is an emergency to the client that obsesses over the design budget. The following infographic produced by “startup studio and accelerator” Coplex will help you diagnose your own clients—and more importantly, offers some tips on how best to deal with them to make your life easier.

Columbia GSAPP’s Extraction Lab, led by Christoph Kumpusch, is a five year-long project beginning in August of this year with a student workshop at the 2017 Burning Man Festival in Black Rock Desert, Nevada. “With the desert as a canvas, and Burning Man as a context,” the project will deploy a roof structure into the heart of the gathering in order to—among other goals—”extract what is most absent in the landscape: water.” In this episode of GSAPP Conversations, Kumpusch outlines just what the new laboratory has planned.