August 2010 Blog Posts (68)

The $300 million Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doesn’t look much like a research lab. Its brightly colored collision of angular and cylindrical forms seems to line-dance down dour Vassar Street in Cambridge. The skeptics gleefully piled on.…

Whether you are gainfully employed or not, you should always be keeping your resume, portfolio and other related documents current. In doing so, you won’t need to panic to get all of your materials ready to go job hunting.

I recently wrote about this in Career Guide: Getting Started series so I…

Many readers that have come to the website and have contacted me have been those that are laid off, recently graduating, or looking for a major change in their career situation. The content that is written on YoungArchitect is really aimed at accommodating these people as there is not much career advice for architects on-line. Below is a comprehensive guide of some of my best…

The value of a home isn't so much in how it looks, but how it functions and what it offers you. This house by Seoul based BCHO Architects is, I believe, a wonderful example of how a home can almost make you forget that it's there. If we think about the home as the medium instead of the message, you begin to unlock the true value of architecture. It becomes less about itself and more about awakening the…

Sometimes it's not really about the architecture. Don't get me wrong, I like this project and I definitely suggest you check out other work by Ron Arad, the designer, but the design itself isn't as interesting to me as how he chose to represent it. I've always had this attraction to the silver screen typology in holywood. It didn't have the realism…

It's not often that you see such a "heavy" building these days. le Corbusier and Louis Kahn were masters at wielding the heavy materials into poetic formal geometries, but architecture now trends toward the less imposing rendition of the minimalism given to us by the modernist movement. When I was in school I often wanted to design buildings like this, but it was never as easy as I thought it would be. While there are many…

A memorial is a daunting task for any architect. This Holocaust Memorial by Zerafa Architecture Studio attempts to create a tribute to one of the most universally impactful tragedies in recorded history. The horrors of the Holocaust, along with the accompanying strife of World War II has had an unquestionable effect on the global community. This architecture portrays the void imposed by such a tragic event, and how that…

I think that the hipped roof has probably stunted the advancement of architecture in the last hundred years more than any other single architectural trait. In part, that's why this project got my attention. This project was a competition submittal for a Children's Center by Olgga Architectes a couple of years back, and I thought it was interesting how they took a typical idea of how a building should…