Magazine

The 2015 Building of the Week feature on American-Architects is focusing on U.S. architects building overseas, so it's not surprising to see the importance of collaboration coming to the fore. The Melbourne School of Design is a particularly good example of this, since it is the result...

Harumi is an artificial island built on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay that saw the development of office and residential towers starting in the 1990s. That development will no doubt continue as the island is the site of the Olypmic Village for the 2020 Olympic Games. The announcement of...

Architect Zoka Zola may be based in Chicago, but her roots go back to Croatia, specifically to Rijeka, the country's third largest city. So it's fitting that one of her most recent projects took the architect back to her city of birth to design affordable housing after a competition...

Designed by Hiroshima-based architecture firm Keisuke Kawaguchi +K2-DESIGN, Locomotive Hills is an adult day service center located partway up a gently sloping, forested hill. The shape of the building itself is patterned on a hill and is designed to continue the thread of green through the city....

For the last two years the Buildings of the Week on the U.S. platforms of World-Architects looked at one building in each state over the course of fifty weeks. For 2015 we are going a different route and looking at buildings overseas designed by architects based in the United States...

This combined studio, gallery, and home by Fukuoka-based Masao Yahagi Architects features a wood-frame construction style appropriate to the building’s location in a historic district near the sea, and an open gallery space unbroken by columns. The site presented a number of design...

For a site in the Resonant Sand Bay in the Gobi Desert near the city of Baotou in Inner Mongolia PLaT architects from Beijing designed a hotel that reflects, in plan, the shape of a lotus flower. However, the inspiration of the design developed from the idea of creating a construction on top of...

Designed for an engineer and an artist, the Topo House is an apt name, given the way it peels up gently from the Wisconsin landscape, melding itself with the site's topography. Johnsen Schmaling Architects' low-slung design can also be seen as a response to the state's cold...

"Urban unfill" is the term that Spillman Farmer Architects uses to describe its "non-building" for Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. The Arts Plaza transforms an old auto-repair facility into a raw, open-air space for the school's art students. Architectural...

Single-family homes in the United States tend to be one- or two-story buildings that sprawl across the land. Another tactic is taken in the aptly named Tower House designed for a steep and narrow Portland lot by architect Benjamin Waechter. Building up four floors allows for economical...

This home for a family of four designed by Naoi Architecture & Design Office sits in a farming-district-turned-suburban-subdivision in Shiga Prefecture. In order to enable a lifestyle in harmony with nature for the outdoors-loving residents, the architects kept the surrounding landscape...

In the United States battlefields from the American Revolution and Civil War are considered sacred ground, preserved as open space and used as sites for education and interpretation. The American Revolution's Battle of Monmouth took place on a hot day in June 1778 in central New Jersey....

Site often determines a building's form, be it orientation, size, views, or materiality, among numerous characteristics. This cabin on the edge of Flathead Lake in western Montana finds inspiration in its site accordingly, also going so far as to echo the slope of the land in the green...

The state of Missouri is crisscrossed by a number of rivers making their way to the Mississippi, a few that have been dammed to create reservoirs and lakes that are also popular vacation spots. The snaking Table Rock Lake, formed by damming the White River, is an especially popular area near...

This head office for a human resource development and networking company was designed by Akitoshi Ukai of Aichi-based architecture firm AUAU. When the company decided to move the center of its operations to a site surrounded by paddy fields in Toyota City, client and architect seized the...

Think of the areas in and around Boston and most likely institutions of higher education come to mind: Harvard University, MIT, Boston University, to name a few. Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) is relatively small in comparison but a new 20-story tower gives the college...

Sports and history may seem like two areas that don't mix, but the memorabilia of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame and the displays of the Northwest Louisiana History Museum come together in the fluid interiors of Trahan Architects' new building in Natchitoches. Likewise, old and new...

Being an architect means acknowledging that even the smallest things are important. This position comes to mind when considering Architectural Artisans' design of a new accessible entry at the side of the Third Lutheran Church in Louisville. The small limestone portal invites visitors...

This home for a family of five is located on Amami Oshima Island, midway between Kyushu and Okinawa in southern Japan. Although the lot is close to both ocean and mountains, its immediate neighborhood is built up with three-story apartments. Architect

Much of the work of MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang has focused on water, in particular the river and lake of her hometown of Chicago. Her 2011 book Reverse Effect explores the natural, social and recreational future of the Chicago River. An outcome of this research is...

How a building expresses the functions that it houses is just one of the many considerations architects need to take into account in the design process. Very few contemporary buildings make bold statements derived from function, but Arquitectonica's design for FIU's School of...

Californian architect duo Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee are one of the few studios that, though modest in size, manages to survive in a field dominated by the large American offices. Since being founded in 1998, Johnston Marklee has undertaken small commissions that combine the best of...

The last project in our 50-state, A-to-Z (make that A-to-W – Alabama to Wyoming) tour of architecture in the United States is a modern residence in Jackson, Wyoming, designed by Carney Logan Burke Architects. The residence sits on a butte above the town, a site that gives the residents...

The Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) started in 1961 as the West Bend Gallery of Fine Arts, focused on the collection and display of one local artist, Carl von Marr. Five decades and two name changes later (in between the institution was the West Bend Art Museum) MOWA has moved into...

A site determines much of a building's form and orientation, and such is clearly the case with the aptly named Ridge House in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. GriD architects' design features two intersecting linear bars, one positioned to strategically frame views of the river and...

JUUL House, a two-generation residence designed by NKS Architects, sits adjacent to a river running through the suburbs of a small city in Fukuoka Prefecture. The client, a musician involved with music education in the local community, wanted a home that could also function as a small music hall....

The small market town of Baumgartenberg in the Machland in Upper Austria is a fine example of maximum ambivalence: due to the economic price of land and the good transport connections to the conurbation around Linz a number of industries and businesses of considerable size have settled here, the...

Modern architecture is a rarity in what Knowles Blunck Architecture describes as the "McMansions, strip malls, and the occasional ‘western’ themed buildings" of South Dakota. The development where this house sits even has a form-based code that prefers...

The Center for Sustainable Landscapes houses administrative and classroom functions for the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, while furthering the institution's mission "to advance sustainability and promote human and environmental well-being through action and...

Oklahoma sits atop some of the largest petroleum fields in the United States, so it's no surprise that the drilling and production of oil and natural gas is a major industry in the state. Kirkpatrick Oil is one of many companies making up the industry. Their headquarters is in Oklahoma...

bHAN EAST, the first international project by Kyoto-based interior design firm FHAMS, is a gourmet food shop in the Gangnam district of Seoul that offers Yamaya-brand mentaiko (spicy-salty marinated pollock or cod roe) along with a select assortment of other Japanese and Korean products....

The Great Plains stretch from Texas to Canada in the swath east of the Mississippi and west of the Rockly Mountains. North Dakota lies at the northern U.S. edge of this flat expanse of prairie, grassland, and farms. This house for an art collector in Fargo finds inspiration in the farmstead...

While only about 110,000 people call the Missoula metropolitan area home, that is enough to make it the second largest city in Montana, "Big Sky Country." On a prominent triangular lot near downtown—at the end of what is known as the "hip strip"—architect Eric...

„Schutzhaus“ nennen Marte.Marte Architekten zwar das kleine Haus, das sie im Vorarlberger Laternsertal an den Rand eines bewaldeten Tobels direkt in einen Schihang gestellt haben. Das in Wirklichkeit aber ein kleines feines Ferienhaus ist. Findet in ihm doch nicht der einsame Wanderer...

This vacation home designed by Kiyotoshi Mori and Natsuko Kawamura of MDS Co. Ltd sits in the foothills of Yamanashi Prefecture’s Yatsugatake Mountains. The team aims to help keep Japan’s cultural heritage alive by taking a fresh look at traditional crafts and culture,...

Geo Metria was designed by Mount Fuji Architects Studio, a Tokyo-based “creator’s collective” committed to developing quality living environments through architectural and other design work. The residence sits on a hillside where the plains of Odawara meet the mountains of...