The tower was commissioned by an oil pipeline construction company and a Mr. Harold Price in 1952. The intention was to build a structure to serve as an up-to-date headquarters for the company. The Tower’s design plan was developed from a 1929 Wright design for a cluster of apartment buildings in Manhattan that Mr. Price had admired.

His new headquarters was to earn for Mr. Price an AIA award and ultimately designation as a National Historic Landmark. Later, Mr. Wright called the building “the tree that escaped the crowded forest.”

Writing in Dezeen, Lilly Cao explained that phrase:

This short, but evocative phrase brings to a point much of what makes the Price Tower so meaningful even today. The high-rise was designed around a core or ‘trunk’ of four elevator shafts, which functions as both the primary structural support and an integrating element around which the rest of the design evolves. Each of the tower’s floor plates are cantilevered from this central trunk, resembling the branches of a tree. Accordingly, the building’s outer walls are lined with long copper wings, their textured green

Frank Lloyd Wright

We must recall a bit about FLW:

Wright was born on June 8, 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1885–86, where, in the absence of instruction in architecture, he took engineering courses. But greater things awaited him, and he departed in 1887 for the architectural Mecca of Chicago. There, he eventually became an assistant to the great Louis Sullivan. Thus began a career based on his concepts of “organic architecture,” promoting a rational harmony between the built environment and nature, leading him inexorably to architectural immortality.

I have never been the greatest fan of Mr. Wright’s work. However, most of that opinion was not formed by his actual work; it was shaped by living in suburban America in the 1960s and observing the numerous middle-American homes that attempted to be Frank Lloyd Wright-style residences.

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But the facts are that Frank Lloyd Wright, particularly after appearing on the cover of Time magazine on January 17, 1938, was, at the time of the Price Tower design, one of the most famous people in America and certainly the most well-known architect. In essence, Wright was the ”starchitect” of this American era.

More than his design skills and fame, Wright offered many philosophical “dictums” that have come to be symbolic of his “brand.” For example:

The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful.

And:

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

Love him or leave him, Wright may have generated more interest in American architecture, amongst the general public, than anyone before or since. Good on him!

H.C. Price

Let’s learn more about Mr. Price from the Price organization website:

Harold Charles Price, Sr. (1888-1962); or H.C. Price as he was fondly known, graduated from the Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado, in 1913 and began working for the Bartlesville Zinc Company. Due to changes in the economy he lost his job but enjoyed life in Bartlesville and wished to remain in the community. In 1921, he formed the Electra Welding Company, on Second Street in downtown Bartlesville, where he developed new techniques in electrical welding which were very successful and, in time, he became the largest welding contractor in Mid-America by 1926.

This was the preamble to Mr. Price’s company becoming one of the world's top oil pipeline builders. H.C Price passed away in 1962, leaving his son as President and his widow as Chairman of the Board. In 1981, the Price Tower was sold to the Phillips Petroleum Company, and the company's HQ moved to Dallas.

In 1990, the Bartlesville Museum [later to become the Price Tower Arts Center] opened on the ground floor under a no-rent agreement with Phillips. Eventually, Phillips donated the Tower to the Arts Center.

Today, the Tower is undergoing a significant renovation scheduled to be completed in mid-2027. Given that the Price Tower is Frank Lloyd Wright’s only built high-rise, it seems a great shame that Mr. Wright didn’t bring his unique approach to more skyscraper projects.

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In our previous post, we reviewed the Presidential libraries of FDR, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford. Let’s continue with Harry Truman.

Truman Library - Independence, Missouri- 1957

The Truman Library is located in Independence, Missouri, the town where President Truman was raised. It was constructed with private funds that Truman himself helped raise; the city of Independence contributed by donating the land. The library also serves as the final resting place of the President, his wife, and his daughter.

Truman’s choice as design architect was Edward F. Neild, a man from Louisiana, with whom he had previously worked on miscellaneous projects in Jackson County, Missouri, and on a significant renovation of the White House during his term in office.

The library reflects the Truman ethos:

Do your best, history will do the rest

Carter Library, Atlanta -1986

 The Carter Library, unlike many of our other examples, was built in an urban setting in Atlanta. The local architects were Jova, Daniels, and Busby, who worked with President Carter to produce a low-key building that allows visitors to focus on Carter’s voluminous papers from both his Presidency and his personal life.

At the dedication of the library, President Carter said:

We appreciate the past. We are grateful for the present and we’re looking forward to the future with great anticipation and commitment

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Reagan Library

My first thought is, how does a Modernist architect, such as Hugh Stubbins, design a structure that could be a set on the old “Death Valley Days” TV show? A show that was once hosted by Ronald Reagan.

A very intriguing website, dailyjstor.com, said this:

Reagan wanted his library to play an active role in public policy discussions in the years following his retirement, and an early plan for it included a highly ambitious Center for Public Affairs.

Presidential Libraries have become a key piece in how Presidents hope to craft their Presidential legacies. The original site intended by the Reagans was reportedly at Stanford University. However, the Stanford faculty and students pushed back, and the next choice was Simi Valley in Southern California, which had the additional benefit of the Reagan “Western” image.

Reflecting on this work, Stubbins said:

The building is one, we hope, that reflects the personality of the president

George H. W. Bush Library -1997

The George H. W. Bush Library is located on the campus of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. The grounds also serve as the final resting place for both the President and his wife, Barbara.

The library was designed by the firm, Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum.

Writing in Dezeen, Ellen Eberhardt explained the building:

It has a neoclassical style, seen in its massive rotunda, mixed with modern elements, such as spans of glass connecting the different elements and unadorned surfaces. The architecture studio sought to utilise local materials, seen in the reddish stone cladding, aligning it with the dominant materials of the adjacent campus.

Clinton Library- Little Rock, Arkansas -2004

The Clinton Library, opened in 2004, sits adjacent to the Arkansas River in the greatly underappreciated small city of Little Rock. It was designed by the New York-based architect James S. Polshek and features a theatrical cantilever over the river, meant to pay homage to all the bridges built to cross the Arkansas.

When it opened, the New York Times said this about the architectural work:

With its sleek horizontal form hovering at the edge of the Arkansas River, the new William J. Clinton Presidential Center has been called by promoters a "bridge to the 21st century," a trite allusion to one of the former president's favorite themes. Locals snicker that it looks like an enormous double-wide trailer. Actually, its best elements fall somewhere between those two extremes.

I saw the building in 2005, and my thoughts were not from an architectural textbook. I thought it was “cool as hell.”

George W. Bush Library - Dallas, Texas 2013

The George W. Bush Library, on the campus of Southern a Methodist University in Dallas, was designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects. Reportedly, the architectural cooperation between the architects, the President and the First Lady was closer than typically between architect and client in a positive manner. In my experience, “increased involvement by the owner does not a better project make.” However, in this instance that dictum may be inappropriate.

The architects indicate below a compromise of sorts:

The brick and Texas Cordova Cream limestone building complements the historic American Georgian character of the Southern Methodist University campus which it adjoins.

During the design development for the library, the President was deeply involved with the problems of his office. Hence, much of the interaction with the architects fell to the First Lady. Somehow, all the stakeholders persevered, leading Architectural Digest to describe the completed work:

The structure Stern has created is both modern and classical. Columns of beige limestone have been reduced to a square, minimalist essence, spacious terraces are shaded by dark aluminum brise-soleils, and walls of glass impart a sense of clarity. The Bush center “is not a Georgian building—it’s the essence of Georgian,” Stern says. “It’s carefully proportioned. It distills elements from the past but makes them respond to expectations of what a building in the 21st century should be.

The First Lady was quoted on more than one occasion as saying that during her involvement, the President asked that the building should not be about him. Times change!

Obama Library - Chicago, IL - 2026

In 2016, the Obama Foundation announced its selection of the New York-based firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien as the project's lead design architects. Of note, this project is not a single structure but rather an entire campus, including a branch of the Chicago Public Library, a presidential reading room, and a full NBA-sized basketball court, known as Home Court (shown below).

The signature building on the campus will ultimately be the 425-foot-tall museum, clad in New Hampshire granite. The tower reminds me of the Whitney Museum in New York. Both of them, in my view, tend towards the brutalist style that is not my favorite. Below are the two structures for your consideration:

As President, Barack Obama cut a cool, slim, sartorially resplendent silhouette in his typical dark presidential suits. Of course, he took a lot of “stick” when he ventured away from that and famously wore the tan suit. I wish this project were more adventurous, like the tan suit. However, from where I sit, this tower seems to be the gray suit

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FDR Library- New Hyde Park,NY - 1941

I have visited here quite a few times. The first visits would have been part of elementary school “field trips.” However, the last time was only a few years ago, when, as an adult, I felt the whole facility showed a great deal of architectural restraint.

FDR first floated the idea of the library in the late 1930s. These were decidedly different times; to illustrate that, in 1939, the Roosevelt family deeded the land to the government, and FDR himself did the first architectural sketches, as shown below:

The original Roosevelt design called for Dutch Colonial architecture, utilizing local fieldstone and timber. The resultant project looks very much like the initial FDR idea. The President would eventually turn the architectural work over to Henry Toombs and finally to Louis A. Simon.

If you are in the metro New York area and are looking for a low-key historical destination. This library provides a great deal of information, just a short trip north of Manhattan in the Hudson River valley.

Eisenhower Library - Abilene, Kansas - 1962

The Eisenhower Library and Museum is not the sort of flamboyant work by a celebrated architect that typically comes to mind when discussing “Architecture for the Soul.” Rather, it seems fitting for an all-American soldier, war hero, and president, who carried himself with humility and an unassuming manner. In keeping with this personality, the library and museum appear to be perfectly suited to serve as a community college building anywhere in America, which is, I expect, exactly what the General [as he preferred to be called post-presidency] wanted.

The night before D-Day, Eisenhower penned a letter to be made public in case the invasion failed to achieve its objectives:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

JFK Library - Boston -1979

In November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. I was in grammar school, sitting in Mrs. Vianni’s class in suburban New York, but I remember it like it was yesterday. We now know that, prior to his death, the President had visited the Boston area to begin selecting a location for his Presidential Library. Somehow, after his murder, the family carried on. They decided on a waterfront site in Dorchester.

The process of selecting the architect became the stuff of legend. The advisory committee named to help in the process included Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Alvar Aalto, Hugh Stubbins, Pietro Belluschi, and Benjamin Thompson. In the end, according to the museum website:

Jacqueline Kennedy played a major role in the selection of I.M. Pei to be the architect of the Kennedy Library. At an early meeting in 1964, Mr. Pei explained to Mrs. Kennedy, somewhat apologetically, that as a relatively young architect he had not worked on monumental projects. Though relatively unknown and obscure at the time, Mrs. Kennedy nevertheless selected Pei.

The architect was selected in December 1964, but due to more factors than can be chronicled here, the groundbreaking did not occur until June 1977. Pei considered it to be quite an emotional project. His clients were, after all, not only Jackie Kennedy and the Kennedy family but the American public in general and the donors in particular.

I.M. Pei commented that his selection of the white concrete reflected his thoughts that the building, given its proximity to the water, made it a lighthouse of sorts. I confess to having never been inside. But the architect succeeded in creating a symbiosis between the sea and the structure, contributing in no small measure to the Kennedy legend.

LBJ Library - Austin, TX 1971

Situated on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin, I was surprised, in researching this post, to learn that Gordon Bunshaft and SOM had designed this Library. Maybe the combination of the “big city” architects and the decidedly not “big city” President seemed odd. More clarity on this later.

The general concept and preliminary planning for the LBJ library began soon after his landslide re-election in 1964. The University of Texas at Austin provided the land and a portion of the funding.

In my memory, the First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, was very active. One of her major causes was beautifying our highways and public spaces in general. But for our purposes today, Lady Byrd was extremely influential in the planning of the building, going so far as to tour existing Presidential Libraries around the country, and was instrumental in the selection of SOM and Gordon Bunshaft as design architects.

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The Texas Architectural Society, in giving an award to the building, had this to say:

Designed by SOM in association with Brooks, Barr, Graeber & White, the library houses a collection of material from President Johnson’s entire political career. The 10-story, travertine-clad building’s signature space is its Great Hall, which prominently displays four floors of archival stacks that contain 45 million documents from Johnson’s term as President of the United States

I have seen the LBJ twice, but I never went inside. Despite being clad in travertine, the building resembled a concrete example of “Brutalism.” Which is not my favorite.

Nixon Library, California - 2007

The library was initially intended to be built at Nixon's alma mater, Duke University. After considerable protest from a group of Duke faculty members, this idea was abandoned. In 1990, the Nixon Library opened in Southern California on land formerly owned by the Nixon family.

Leon Whiteson, writing in the LA Times, explained his view of the library architecture:

Designed by Langdon Wilson Architecture & Planning, a national firm headquartered in Newport Beach, the library is a fine and appropriate building with no pretensions of being a great act of architecture. Its style expresses the down-home, ordinary-guy side of Nixon’s character rather than the ambiguities of his complex soul.

Ford Library - Ann Arbor, Michigan

The Ford library was designed by  Jickling, Lyman, and Powell Associates based in Troy, Michigan.

Writing for Dezeen, Ellen Eberhardt briefly described the architectural design of the library:

The mostly brick structure features clean lines and light orientation typical of midwestern mid-century modern architecture.

This building is similar to the Eisenhower Library in that its straightforward, unadorned structure certainly seems to reflect the man.

It is appropriate that the Presidential library of a true “Michigan man” like Gerald Ford is located on the campus of the University of Michigan. Of note, the Ford library in Ann Arbor is separate from the Ford museum in his hometown of Grand Rapids. If my research is correct, this is the only instance where a President’s library and Museum are not co-located.

The original subject of this post was the newly opened Obama library. It quickly became apparent that the broader topic of Presidential libraries was a more appealing write and hopefully a better read. But very soon after that decision came the realization that 10 or 11 Presidential libraries would require a part one and part two.

Stand by for a second post covering the Truman, Carter, Bush, Clinton, and Obama libraries

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MAD is an international architectural practice led by partners Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, and Yosuke Hayano. Which was, according to the firm's website, founded by Ma Yansong in 2004, with his partners Dang Qun and Yosuke Hayano. Ma Yansong had previously worked with Zaha Hadid, an experience that seemed to influence his later efforts. Today the firm maintains offices in Beijing, Los Angeles, and Rome, and were recently recognized as the Dezeen Magazine architects of the year for 2025.

The firm says this about their motivations:

MAD approaches architecture as a way to shape emotion and experience, embodying atmosphere, memory, and human connection. Each project is designed to deepen our relationship with the environment, community, and ourselves. MAD’s work responds to the subtle rhythms of urban life, the natural world, and human presence, creating spaces that are innovative, thoughtful, and alive with meaning.

Let’s take a look at few MAD projects:

The Absolute Towers, 2012

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Today, this MAD design is generally known to the locals as the Marilyn Monroe towers, owing to their supposed resemblance to the curvaceous figure of the late Marilyn Monroe.

Ma Yansong Said:

These buildings celebrate the curve. They are about how a floor plate rotated around a central axis creates a sense of movement. The towers change as you travel around them; from every point of view, they are something different.

Harbin Opera House, Harbin, China -2015

The Harbin Opera House is a performing arts center in Harbin, China.

The online trade publication Architectural Review described the building:

Bursting forth from its wetland setting, MAD’s incongruous Harbin Opera House and urban park belie the exquisite spaces within

We recently posted about parametric architecture and its computational capabilities, which allow architects to design buildings in forms beyond square corners and straight edges. There are many opinions on the merits of curvilinear buildings resembling beehives or towers, evoking 20th-century Hollywood actresses, etc. But one thing is for sure, the Zaha Hadid, “queen of the curve” approach is a trend that is not yet dissipating. Young architects start their careers with a strong understanding of the innovative approaches computational design enables. Adding to this are the increasingly bold designs that clients are willing to discuss and eventually build.

One River North, Denver

One River North is in Denver’s River North neighborhood. It may also serve as a clear example of a client willing to take a chance on an atypical design. After all, there are not many glass facades that appear to have a mountain ravine carved in them.

One River North is located in Denver’s River North (RiNo) neighborhood and stands as a great example of a client willing to consider an unconventional architectural vision. After all, it is not every day that you encounter a glass-clad tower whose façade appears to have a mountain ravine carved directly through its center.

The architects had this to say:

A crack of natural terrain carves through the 16-story glass facade of One River North, (ORN), a mixed-use development near the center of Denver, Colorado’s River North Art District (RiNo)”

Quzhou Stadium, Quzhou China

The astute online publication, Archello described this MAD work below:

Built as the world’s largest earth-sheltered structure, spanning around 700,000 sqm, the Quzhou Stadium is the centrepiece of the Quzhou Sports Park in Zhejiang Province. The stadium’s undulating form mirrors the distant mountain ridge while its landscaping evokes a supernatural feature reminiscent of science fiction. Unlike the conventional fortress-like stadiums found in urban settings, MAD Architects strived to create a stadium that would integrate much of the technology that went into its manufacturing so that it could instead be open to the surrounding public space from practically every viewpoint.

The works of MAD follow a theme: their determined architectural creativity and technological competence find a brave and progressive client. And from where I sit, we are all the better for it.

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Paris and Parisians have the interesting distinction of having “hated on” both the Eiffel Tower and the I.M. Pei Louvre pyramid. In keeping with such a resume, this project was first proposed in 2010. However, due to both public and legal opposition, construction did not commence until late 2021.

After an international competition, The Swiss firm, Herzog & de Meuron, was chosen to design the building. According to the firm’s 2001 Pritzker Prize citation:

Herzog & de Meuron Architekten is a Swiss architecture firm, founded and headquartered in Basel, Switzerland in 1978. The careers of founders and senior partners Jacques Herzog (born 1950), and Pierre de Meuron (born 1950), closely paralleled one another, with both attending the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. They are perhaps best known for their conversion of the giant Bankside Power Station in London to the new home of the Tate Museum of Modern Art (2000). Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have been visiting professors at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 1994 and professors at ETH Zürich since 1999.

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The weight of responsibility on the architects must have been considerable. After all, designing a skyscraper in one of the world’s most skyscraper-averse cities is no small undertaking. There were undoubtedly more than a few anxious moments along the way.

In an ironic twist, given the fierce opposition that preceded construction, the Tour Triangle now stands as the third-tallest building in Paris and is likely to retain that distinction for years to come. Former Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, who played a key role in securing approval for the project, also guided the reinstatement of the citywide building height limits through the Paris City Council. As a result, the Tour Triangle is effectively assured of remaining on the city’s architectural “medal stand” of height for the foreseeable future.

The”faces” of the Tour Triangle

The firms website had this to offer:

Conceived as a fragment of the city, pivoted and lifted into the vertical plane, the tower assumes an exceptional silhouette that shifts in appearance according to the viewer’s position within the city’s network of axes and monuments. Its triangular form preserves generous views of the sky and reduces the projection of shadows onto neighboring buildings. Located on the Place de la Porte de Versailles, the base of the tower is open to the public, stretching along Avenue Ernest Renan and recreating a lively street frontage, while providing a link between the historic city center and Greater Paris.

Paris-based writer and critic, Andrew Ayers offered a summary of sorts:

For its detractors, Triangle is a project from a bygone age that leaves a stain on Hidalgo’s legacy; for its champions, it symbolizes the city’s dynamism and supplies the first-rate, state-of-the-art offices that Paris currently lacks. Whatever its merits and drawbacks, it will be the city’s last skyscraper, at any rate for the foreseeable future: in 2023, the city council—which counted a higher number of Ecologist Party members following the 2020 municipal elections—voted to bring the maximum building height back down to 37 meters. That restriction does not apply to the business district of La Défense, however, where skyscraper construction continues.

For those who opposed the Tour Triangle, several aspects of the design may have provided at least some measure of reassurance. The tower was carefully shaped and positioned to minimize the shadows cast on the surrounding neighborhood. Its distinctive form also helped address concerns about sight lines within one of the world’s most politically and culturally sensitive urban environments.

As shown in the third image gallery from the top above, the building presents only its narrow edge when viewed from central Paris, while its broader façade is oriented along less sensitive viewing lanes. In addition, the southeast elevation is clad with approximately 1,000 square meters of photovoltaic panels, which are reportedly capable of supplying enough electricity to meet nearly 35 percent of the building’s office energy needs.

In the end, time will tell whether the Tour Triangle is to achieve the level of public and critical acceptance that the Eiffel Tower and the Lourve Pyramid have attained.

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The online publication Architizer defines parametric design:

Parametric design in architecture uses computer tools to define how different design parts are connected. These parts, called “parameters,” can include design and building aspects such as materials, feasibility and energy efficiency. Instead of adjusting each part manually, architects create formulas or algorithms to automatically generate designs. This approach allows for more flexibility and precision and can create stunningly complex and dynamic forms.

Patrik Schumacher is a German architect and principal of Zaha Hadid Architects. Since 2008, he has generally been credited with coining the term parametricism, referring to "a type of design process characterized by the interrelation of design variables (or, parameters) through computational tools and techniques.” Given his background, Mr. Schumacher offered these “taboos and dogmas” to follow for the successful practicing of parametric architecture:

Negative principles (taboos)

Avoid rigid forms (lack of malleability)

Avoid simple repetition (lack of variety)

Avoid collage of isolated, unrelated elements (lack of order)

Avoid rigid functional stereotypes

Avoid segregative functional zoning

Positive principles (dogmas)

All forms must be soft

All systems must be differentiated (gradients) and interdependent (correlations)

All functions are parametric activity scenarios

All activities communicate with each other

How have we gotten here?

Hard as it may be for some of us to remember, there was a time before digital design when large architectural firms relied on armies of draftspeople drawing everything by hand on paper. The process depended on physical rulers, compasses, triangles, and sharpened pencils rather than computer screens and software.

In the earliest years of the 1980s, I vividly remember walking into almost any architectural office in America and passing rows of busy drafting tables on my way to a conference room somewhere on the floor. Within a decade, the drafting tables were still there, but now personal computers sat on them.

Let’s take a look at a few buildings using parametric design capabilities:

Museo Soumaya, Mexico City -2011

Museo Soumaya in Mexico City is owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and was named in honor of his late wife, Soumaya Domit. The museum was designed by Mr. Slim’s son in law, architect Fernando Romero and his firm, FREE (Fernando Romero Enterprise).

Mexico City based journalist, Geri Smith, offered this on the museum:

Imagine a gleaming aluminum cube that has been stretched and twisted so that it soars 150 feet into the sky, its thrusting, curving upper contours reminiscent of the bow of a ship. It's a design that is at once whimsical and structurally daring.

The Glasshouse, UK -2004

The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, formerly known as Sage Gateshead, is a landmark venue dedicated to both musical performance and music education. The building was designed by Foster + Partners after the firm was unanimously chosen in an international design competition that attracted more than 100 entries from around the world.

Galaxy SOHO Beijing -2012

Galaxy SOHO is an urban mixed-use project completed in 2012. It is the first of three works designed by Zaha Hadid and her firm for SOHO China. The other two are Wangjing SOHO and Leeza SOHO, shown below.

After reviewing these three works, there can be little doubt why the late Pritzker Prize–winning architect Dame Zaha Hadid earned the title “Queen of the Curve.” Her visionary designs pushed the boundaries of architecture, transforming fluid, sweeping forms into some of the most iconic structures of the modern era.

Dame Zaha offered this as a part of her philosophy of design:

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

The Hive (UOB Innovation Hub) Singapore - 2015

This striking project is the work of British designer Thomas Heatherwick and his London-based firm, Heatherwick Studio. The structure is composed of twelve eight-story towers that taper as they descend toward the ground. The resulting form has often been likened to a stack of traditional dim sum baskets, giving the building its distinctive, highly recognizable appearance.

Guangzhou Opera House

Here is another project designed by Zaha Hadid. It was her first built project in China. Dame Zaha and her firm were selected for this project after an international competition that included the architectural luminaries of the day.

Writing in the New York Times, architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff said this:

Still, if you’re an architecture lover willing to find your way to the building, you probably won’t care much……the new Guangzhou Opera House is gorgeous to look at. It is also a magnificent example of how a single building can redeem a moribund urban environment. Its fluid forms — which have been compared to a cluster of rocks in a riverbed, their surfaces eroded by the water’s currents — give sudden focus to the energy around it so that you see the whole area with fresh eyes.

Conclusion:

Catherine Slessor, an architecture editor, writer and critic wrote this:

Ceding control to the algorithm, parametricism is even more disconnected, a reductivist, technophile triumph of fetishised process over outcome. Perhaps it will quietly atrophy, as decon did, and be superseded by the next big thing.

I can’t say that I agree with Ms.Slessor. Her view seems overly harsh, but it also indicates the interest the topic generates. The folks who like these works should enjoy the buildings. If you are not so inclined, that’s fine also.

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In my view, since at least the turn of the century, high-rise architects and their clients have been seeking sophisticated and marketable alternatives to the glass boxes and cylinders of the twentieth century.

Writing for Dezeen, Aaron Betsky said this about Jenga style:

They rise up in pumps and jumps, pushing in and out of the sky while they teeter on bases that seem too small for the pulsations of the shaft…….I am talking about the Jenga towers that have become all the rage for developers around the globe.

Let’s back up and learn more about the game.

Jenga the Game

Jenga is a clever game designed by Leslie Scott and introduced in 1983.

According to the game website:

Jenga is a game of physical and mental skill. Built on the simple premise of stacking blocks, Jenga engages players of all ages, across all cultures. Jenga’s success rests on its solid play value. Players take turns to remove a block from a tower and balance it on top, creating a taller and increasingly unstable structure as the game progresses.

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Jenga the Tower

56 Leonard Street, in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan, is a 57-story high-rise designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron and opened in 2017.

The architects had this to say about the structure:

The high-rise tower is an important ingredient within the contemporary city. However, towers have come to be defined solely by their height and, as a type, they have become anonymous. Typical residential towers, while successful in aggregating the living unit, often fail to improve upon the living environment.

The history of the Jenga Tower begins with the developer's 2007 purchase of both the land and the air rights from New York Law School. Construction got off to a prompt start but was paused in the difficult times of 2008, before restarting in 2012.

Even the briefest of glances by a non-construction-savvy civilian leads to questions about the practicality of stacking asymmetrical cubes on top of each other. After all, the cantilevers formed by those overlaps, are at the bottom of the building about 10 ft, but they extend to approximately 25 ft at the point where the glorious penthouses protrude into the sky above the city.

How did the engineers handle the various challenges presented by this project?

Cantilevers - Regarding the cantilevered areas on the lower floors, the slabs were simply designed thicker to carry the load. Going higher in the structure, where the cantilever length was greater, the design called for the addition of perimeter beams.

Moving even further up in the structure, where cantilever depths might reach 25 feet, the engineers used Vierendeel trusses to prevent obstruction of views. See second image below:

Building movement - at 56 storeys, 56 Leonard Street is not one of the true supertall high-rises. Nevertheless, the irregular shape tends to increase wind management problems. The fear that the building might sway and vibrate a bit too much had to be addressed. The problem was solved by a liquid-tuned damper.

Project engineer, Hezi Mena, said:

Considering that the motion perceived by building occupants is linked to the peak acceleration at the top occupied floor, it was necessary to provide adequate strength and stiffness,” Mena said. To achieve this, a liquid-tuned damper (LTD) with a footprint of 32 by 36 feet, and a total height of 10 feet, was placed at the top of the building.

56 Leonard Street has been generally well received but seems still to be plagued by off situations. for example,

Justin Davidson in New York Magazine said this prior to the building’s completion:

The 60-story condo tower, a year from completion and only three-fourths of the way to its 821-foot height, is already taking shape as the most alluring addition to the downtown skyline in decades.

However, the tower still seems to be plagued by odd situations. For example, a man who paid $28.5 million for his unit filed a lawsuit in March of 2018. He alleged in the complaint that his 14-foot ceilings, private elevator, breakfast bar, and motorized curtains were not delivered. This strikes me as odd. At what point did the buyer realize that the unit's ceiling height would not be 14 feet? Or that there was no elevator going to his property? or that the breakfast bar was AWOL?

In conclusion, is this work an architectural novelty or a further step towards a new way of understanding urban design?

Architect Michael Molinelli put it this way:

So while the Jenga Tower enters into everyday life in New York City, only time will tell us if it is an enduring design or just an odd diversion.

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Silodam

This structure looks alternately like a multicolored layer cake and then a series of cleverly assembled shipping containers. Silodam is a mixed-use and residential project located in the Houthaven section of Amsterdam. It was designed by Rotterdam architects MVRDV.

According to the authoritative website, arquitecturaviva.com/

Located on the Ij River in Amsterdam, the Silodam houses a mixed program of 157 apartments, shops, offices, retail areas, and public spaces. The different uses are stacked in ten levels over the water with a structural grid of piles and loadbearing walls, generating a compact block that evokes a huge docked ship packed with containers.

Van Gogh Museum

The Van Gogh Museum website gave us a brief description of its early history:

The Van Gogh Museum was created through a unique contract between Vincent van Gogh's heirs and the Dutch state. After Vincent van Gogh's death, a large portion of his art remained preserved within the family, but they were concerned that the collection would eventually be dispersed. In 1962, the family and the government reached a special solution. The family transferred the entire collection – over 200 paintings, five hundred drawings, eight hundred letters plus other art that the family had collected over the years – to the specially established Vincent van Gogh Foundation.

The Museum is actually three distinct architectural efforts. The Main Building, also known as the Rietveld Building, opened in 1973. Imagine the challenge of designing the Van Gogh Museum! Can the architecture meet the moment, given the inevitable comparison to the artist's body of work?

In 1963, renowned De Stijl architect Gerrit Rietveld was selected. Let’s take a moment to quickly review the De Stijl movement for background information.

According to the architectural historian, Ashley Gardini:

De Stijl (The Style) was an early twentieth-century avant-garde movement founded in 1917 by two Dutch artists, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. Mondrian and van Doesburg believed that their style of art, based on strict geometric forms and a simplified color palette, would bring unity to the world.

Ms. Gardini also commented on the particular approach of Mr. Rietveld:

Rietveld’s architectural design emphasized the geometric forms of the building in the same way as would a De Stijl painting.

This original building was widely lauded, but eventually the Museum's popularity and sheer number of visitors overwhelmed it. More space was required. A new building was opened in 1999, designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa.

The museum website said this of Mr. Kurokawa’s work:

All his major design principles are reflected in the exhibition wing—for example, the symbiosis between environment and architecture, and between Japanese and European culture. As a contrast to Rietveld’s cube, Kurokawa opted for asymmetry—the building is elliptical and the box-shaped print room is at an angle to the axis of the wing.

The new addition by Kurosawa did a fine job of accommodating the number of visitors the museum attracted. Nevertheless, another piece was needed. The answer was a new entrance in 2015 to better organize and orient the visitor experience. This structure was designed by Hans van Heeswijk of Amsterdam-based firm Hans Van Heeswijk Architects.

Writing in architizer.com, architect-trained editor and writer Paul Keskeys said:

The architects’ main aim was to create an atrium in which there was a great clarity of space and a clear path for visitors to quickly orient themselves….While the building is designed as a largely functional space, it possesses a touch of refinement and sophistication that Van Gogh himself would surely approve of.

The museum welcomed a record high of over 2.25 million visitors in 2017. Since then, management has sought to cap attendance at slightly under 2 million per year.

The Whale

The Whale is a residential and mixed-use project in Amsterdam’s Borneo-Sporenburg area, opened in 2000, and designed by Dutch firm de Architekten Cie.

The informative online publication, MAS Context, described The Whale:

With two sides of the building elevated, the lower floors receive sunlight coming in from under the building. Light and space have free access into the heart of the building, redefining the typology of the closed block: the inner area transforms the traditionally private domain into an almost public city garden.

Eye Filmmuseum

The EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam is located on the river Ij. It was completed in 2011 and designed by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects (DMAA).

According to DMAA:

The building is conceived as a highly tense and dynamic geometric solid. The light is reflected in multiple ways by smooth, crystalline surfaces, thus subjecting the building’s appearance to permanent optical changes during the course of the day. Movement and light manifest themselves clearly as essential parameters for the film as a medium in the architectural production. The entrance into the building is characterised by continuous spatial concentration and directed visual relations. Spatial development, light incidence, and materiality define the path that leads from the southern glass front and the museum shop into the heart of the building.

The online publication, archello.com, said:

The attractive building cannot be missed as it rises from the banks of the IJ river and guarantees a different appearance depending on your point of view. The building opens up towards the south with large areas of glazing. Closed areas of the façade are directed northwards, offering room for cinemas and exhibition areas in the interior.

It seems that Amsterdam has carefully cultivated its Bohemian image in post-war Europe. On the other hand, it has also lived up to that flamboyant civic persona. The snapshot of modern architectural projects that we have reviewed speak to a tolerant citizenry open to creative advancement in the arts, including architecture.

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Immediately below is our original post from August, 2025. We have added an addendum further below that reflects the latest efforts to solve this ongoing problem.

__________________________________________________________________________

The Millennium Tower was developed by Mission Street Development LLC, designed by Handel Partners architects, and opened in 2009. Sadly, in 2015, the residents were told that the building was settling unevenly. Given the high-profile residents involved, this was not going to be an easy situation.

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Early Chronology

The team

Mission Street Development LLC is an affiliate of Millennium Partners, a group that self-describes on their website:

Millennium Partners has developed more than 3,200 luxury condominiums, eight five-star hotels, two extended-stay luxury hotels, 2,000,000 square feet of office space, 1,000,000 square feet of retail space, 4,150 parking spaces, five Loews Cineplex theaters and five magnificent health clubs. Today, Millennium Partners owns and operates a portfolio worth more than $5 billion.

In other words, not an inexperienced group. In addition, the general contractor, Webcor, was highly experienced, having built the Oracle World Headquarters, the Moscone Center expansion, and the Salesforce Transit Center, among others.

The engineers were DeSimone Consulting Engineering, their website says this:

Founded in New York City in 1969, the firm is organized to support clients around the country and around the globe with offices in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. To date, DeSimone has designed over 13,000 projects in 45 states and 60 countries. Our project portfolio demonstrates the firm’s dedication to pursuing and developing superlative structures. The firm is also consistently listed on Engineering News Record’s Top 500 Design Firms.

The architects were Handel Architects, a firm founded in 1994 that offers this:

With over 120 architects and designers in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Hong Kong, our work encompasses projects like the National September 11 Memorial, urban infrastructure and master planning projects, high-density mixed-use developments, multi-family projects across all income bands, hotels, corporate headquarters, and buildings for non-profit, institutional and educational clients around the world.

That was the basic team: developer, engineer, architect, and general contractor. A significant amount of experience was brought to bear, seemingly with the best of intentions.

The Problems

The last units were sold in 2013; soon thereafter, the developers disclosed to the relevant authorities and to the public that the structure was sinking and beginning to tilt.

The San Francisco city attorney filed suit against the developers in 2016, alleging that they failed to properly inform potential buyers about the settlement. The city attorney, Dennis Herrera, said:

We are not going to sit by and allow a developer, or anyone else, to enrich themselves at the expense of others by hiding crucial information that they're required by law to disclose. Buyer beware doesn't cut it here.

In 2017, the homeowners' association filed suit against Millennium Partners, Webcor, Handel Architects, and others, seeking $200 million to cover repairs. The developer responded by asserting that the sinking problem was caused by the construction of the adjacent Transbay Transit Center. The hole in that argument was that the sinking issue predated the commencement of the work on the Transit Center. The Transit Center countered that the Tower had already sunk ten inches before they began.

So how did such a high-profile, seemingly sophisticated project, produced by professionals with lengthy resumes, go so wrong?

We recently discussed, in a post on 128 Maiden Lane in Manhattan, the many problems that high-rise construction faces in urban areas where the bedrock is so far below the project site. To recap, cities such as San Francisco and New York have many instances where the historical solution for reclaiming land from rivers and bays has been landfill. As you can imagine, it is problematic to get the soundest possible foundation in landfill material. However, unlike the tilting building in New York, the major issue here in San Francisco was not legacy landfill. As you can see below, “artificial fill” is only about 15-20 feet deep.

Obviously, skyscrapers are heavy. To put that in perspective, a typical one-story home places about 100 pounds per square foot on the ground beneath it. The Millennium Tower, by contrast, was designed to exert roughly 1,000 pounds per square foot. Its foundation piles were driven into the Colma Sand layer rather than all the way down to bedrock—a fairly common practice in San Francisco.

In fairness, a highly experienced team designed and built the tower using an established approach fully approved by the city’s planning commission. Even so, the unexpected happened: the building began sinking faster than anticipated and, by 2017, had also tilted much more than anticipated.

The Potential Solution

In November of 2020, a repair project began that entailed driving 52 piles down to the bedrock. These piles would then be connected to the existing foundation in order to prevent further sinking. In August of 2021, this repair effort was stopped because the tower appeared to have sunk and tilted further while the piles were being driven.

Today, the foundation analysis shows a recovery of nearly 1 inch of tilt following the final load transfer. The Tower expects the recovery to continue in the coming months and years. In 2023, the stabilization was deemed complete, with the engineers involved stating that the structure had stopped settling.

Conclusion

It is easy to feel bad for the original buyers of units in this building. To illustrate this point, the Wall Street Journal was not subtle:

The Millennium Tower Stopped Sinking, but Apartment Values Did Not. Resale prices at the infamous San Francisco condo building have yet to recover, even after owners spent more than $100 million to resolve its structural issue.

By 2023, the building is said to have tilted 29 inches. However, since authorities have deemed the building habitable, the unit owners can take some solace in being able to live in their units. In the case of the New York leaning tower, 128 Maiden Lane, that is not the case.

Our final thoughts are pretty simple. People naturally want to live in certain places—big global cities like New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, or Tokyo, and of course, in prime waterfront spots in Florida, California, etc. But the truth is, there’s only so much real estate to go around in these A-list locations. That scarcity pushes prices up, and developers are left with one real option: build higher. Which brings us to the age-old question—just how high can we really go?

Addendum

Upon concluding our original post on the Millennium Tower (above), there was an optimistic sense that a resolution was in sight. The Perimeter Pile Upgrade, despite some fits and starts, had come close enough to its engineering goals to appreciably lower the legal and political temperature surrounding the problem.

At the time, I didn’t feel such optimism was misplaced. After all, the owners’ association had sent out a press release in June of 2023 that seemed almost effusive in its description of the results of the engineering fix.

The Millennium Tower Association issued a press release on Jun 21, 2023:

SAN FRANCISCO, June 21, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Millennium Tower announced today that its engineering upgrade to stop the building from tilting and sinking has succeeded following the final stage of its Perimeter Pile Upgrade load transfer, which successfully loaded all 18 concrete piles to 100% –1 million pounds-force per pile – over the last 10 days. The Tower’s engineering upgrade, known as the Perimeter Pile Upgrade, involved the installation of 18 concrete piles that anchor the building to bedrock below ground. The upgrade relieves stress on soils that have compressed beneath the building, which caused its unanticipated movement. Today, the analysis of the foundation shows recovery of nearly one inch of tilt following the final load transfer. The Tower expects the recovery to continue in the coming months and years.

Reports from San Francisco now suggest that the Perimeter Pile Upgrade has successfully strengthened support along the perimeter of the foundation, slowing the rate of sinking. However, a new concern has emerged. The foundation is now reportedly “dishing.” In other words, the center of the foundation slab is settling more quickly than the perimeter, creating a gradual “cupping” or “dishing” effect.

Both our original post and this addendum have explored the Millennium Tower’s problems from an academic standpoint. Yet for the unit owners, the situation is far more complicated. Imagine being stuck in the difficult position of owning a residence you may not be able to sell, while also facing mounting assessments and repair costs tied to the tower’s structural issues.

Previously posted:

Fallingwater is arguably Frank Lloyd Wright's most famous work. So many words have already been written about it that I am loath to post about it at all. On the other hand, how can a series about architecture leave Fallingwater out? That said, I lived very close by for a short period and made two visits. Architecture for the Soul—Fallingwater will contain a liberal dose of personal observations.

Update from fallingwater.org:

Preserving Fallingwater has been ongoing almost since its completion. From daily maintenance and housekeeping tasks to larger efforts to protect the house, the care of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece is paramount to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy as it continues the important practice of monitoring and preserving Fallingwater for future generations.

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Previously posted:

Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1885–86, where, in the absence of instruction in architecture, he took engineering courses. But greater things awaited him, and he departed in 1887 for the architectural Mecca of Chicago. There, he eventually became an assistant to the great Louis Sullivan. Thus began a career based on his concepts of “organic architecture,” promoting a rational harmony between the built environment and nature, leading him inexorably toward Fallingwater.

Update from Architectural Digest:

Arguably, his [Wright’s] most famous design, the singularity of the home has meant it comes with equally unique challenges. Among the most pivotal, its integration into the natural site has made it particularly vulnerable to the elements.

Previously posted:

Mr. Wright designed this residence for Edgar Kaufmann, Sr., and his family in 1935. The Kaufmanns were well known for their department store chain, of the same name. The site is about an hour southeast of Pittsburgh, as you can see on the map below, and was intended to be a weekend home that the Kaufmanns could access quickly from The ‘Burgh. Here is the first personal aside: when I was a young man, I was told I needed to “build up my credit.” Since I lived in Western Pennsylvania, you guessed it, my first credit card was from Kaufmann’s Department Store!

Update from John Niland in Dezeen:

Located in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, Fallingwater’s well-known flaws included recurring leaks, material degradation, failures in the building envelope, and moisture-sensitive original interior finishes. “One of the biggest challenges was Wright’s decision not to install through-wall flashing,” Architectural Preservation Studio president Pamela Jerome told Dezeen. “Another issue was Wright’s use of river pebbles instead of broken stone for concrete aggregate.”

Previously posted:

Both [my personal] visits [to this site] were in the late ’70s, before I had any professional connection to architects or architecture. It was supposed to be a cool place to go. So, off we went. Once was certainly in the fall, and the other was probably in the spring, and each had a seasonal uniqueness. The staff folks were amazingly knowledgeable. Their passion for the subject matter blazed through. They taught us “cantilever.” It is one thing to hear about cantilevering and another to experience it at Fallingwater. I felt damp. The proximity of the water was slightly disorienting but still pleasant. To a person who had spent fifteen years in suburban ranch houses, it seemed less like a place where people had once lived and more like a museum where people should have lived. Well, enough of this.

An earlier round of major repairs had already tackled some of the building’s problems. That effort, which began in the late 1990s and continued into the early 2000s, centered on concrete restoration and—crucially—reinforcing the cantilevers.

The most recent, more comprehensive restoration went further, adding major waterproofing upgrades, continuing structural and concrete repairs, restoring the stonework, and upgrading the windows and doors.

After the death of his parents in 1963, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., donated Fallingwater and over 400 surrounding acres to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, saying goodbye to what had been a part of his life for almost thirty years.

In the end, while Wright’s genius is undeniable, it’s also fair to wonder whether the home’s practical shortcomings would have been as acceptable had it been used as a full-time residence rather than a weekend retreat.

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Mary Jane Colter was an American architect born in 1869 in Pittsburgh, Pa. Her family moved around a bit before finally settling in St. Paul, Minnesota, which she would come to call home. During that time period, St. Paul had a significant population of native Sioux Indians. Thus began Ms. Colter's lifelong fascination with Native American cultures. She eventually attended what is now the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied art and design.

The web publication, pioneeringwomen.org, told us:

Colter’s time in California was brief: when she graduated from the San Francico Art School in 1891, she returned with her family to Saint Paul and accepted a teaching position at the Stout Manual Training School in nearby Menomonie, Wisconsin.

After this period of teaching in St. Paul, Ms. Colter began working for The Fred Harvey Company in 1902. This would be both a career and life-defining event. She would stay with the company until her retirement in 1948. Any serious discussion of the life and work of Mary Jane Colter must also delve into the corporate history and social significance of The Fred Harvey Company.

The Fred Harvey Company

It is difficult to find a modern business comparable to The Fred Harvey Company. From 1876 onward, the company sought to provide train travelers with top-quality food and lodging on their journeys through the American Southwest. There is no train travel experience in modern America comparable to that of the Santa Fe Railway of the late 19th century. The automobile and the airplane eventually ended the languid pace of 19th-century long-distance train travel. That said, the current great hospitality brands, such as Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, obviously operate in a very different environment, one driven by airplanes and automobiles.

One more thing to note about The Fred Harvey Company is that it had no intention of being merely a concessionaire. The company did not sit on its laurels. It expanded its business plan to eventually work with other railroads and passenger destinations, reportedly serving 13,000 miles of railroads in one way or another.

The famous Harvey Houses became beacons for the traveler seeking something a notch better than typical travel fare and service. The company was said to have made “the desert blossom with beefsteak and pretty girls.”

According to the Northern Arizona University archives:

This attention to quality service and food created a business legacy that would last for four generations of Harvey family members. In 1968, the Fred Harvey Company merged with Amfac (American Factories). In 1988 Amfac was purchased by JMB Realty, which became Xanterra in 2002. Several Harvey establishments remain in operation to this day in the Southwest, most notably the facilities at the Grand Canyon operated by Grand Canyon National Park Lodges and the privately owned and operated La Posada in Winslow, Ariz.

The web publication, pioneeringwomen.org, said this about the role Mary Colter played for The Fred Harvey Company:

From 1902 through 1948, Colter served as the primary architect and designer for the Fred Harvey Company, completing twenty-one hotels, curio shops, and rest areas along one of the major routes of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway

Let’s review a few projects by Mary Jane Colter.

Hopi House

Located on the rim of the Grand Canyon, this Mary Jane Colter design might best be described on the nomination form that was completed for its inclusion in the National Registry of Historic Places:

Hopi House (1905) is a large multi-story structure of stone masonry, shaped and built like a Hopi pueblo building. The building is rectangular in plan, and the multiple roofs are stepped at various levels giving the building the impression of pueblo architecture. The sandstone walls are reddish in color. Tiny windows, like those of true Hopi structures, allow only the smallest amount of light into the building.

Hermit’s Rest

According to the National Park Service:

Hermits Rest was built to resemble an old miner's cabin with native stonework, a giant alcove fireplace, and front porch. It presently offers a gift shop, snack bar, and west end views of Grand Canyon. Restrooms and a water bottle filling station are available outside, behind the main building.

Lookout Studio

On the South rim of the Grand Canyon, Lookout Studio is part of the Grand Canyon Village Historic District. Of some interest is that the rubble stone structure has an irregular parapet. Today the building operates as a gift shop and observation spot for tourists.

Winslow Station (La Posada Hotel)

According to the La Posada hotel website:

In 1930, La Posada (The Resting Place) opened to great acclaim as the crown jewel of the Fred Harvey series of luxury railroad hotels. Renowned architect Mary E.J. Colter envisioned every aspect of the design and considered it to be her finest work. Today, that vision is impeccably preserved for the modern traveler. La Posada is more than a hotel stay, it is an immersive experience in art, architecture, fine dining, and the history of early travel in the southwest--located on historic Route 66!

Painted Desert Inn

Located in the Petrified Forest National Park in eastern Arizona. The inn was originally designed by architect Lyle Bennett and the National Park Service Branch of Plans and Design. In an interesting historical note, the construction of the project was handled by the Civilian Conservation Corps, of New Deal fame, during the 1937-40 period.

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After World War 2, Mary Jane Colter was engaged in renovating the inn. The property was then operated by the Fred Harvey from 1947 to 1963, when it was closed. It faced the wrecking ball before being saved in 1976 and ultimately was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987.

Bright Angel Lodge

www.grandcanyonlodges.com/ gave us this background on the Lodge:

Bright Angel Lodge, designed in 1935 by famed Southwest architect Mary E.J. Colter, has a natural rustic character and is a Registered National Historic Landmark. This iconic lodge and its surrounding cabins are rich with cultural history. Over the years it has gone through many transformations – originally a hotel, then a camp, and finally a lodge. All of its changes were to accommodate increased visitation after the arrival of the train in 1901. Under the direction of the Santa Fe Railroad, Colter was tasked to design a fresh look for Bright Angel Lodge in an effort to provide more moderately priced lodging in contrast to El Tovar “up the hill.” She drew inspirations from many local sources in her architecture. For example the ”geologic” fireplace in the History Room featuring all of the rock layers of Grand Canyon, from the river cobbles to the youngest stone strata on the rim. Included in this lodge design were a couple of historic

Phantom Ranch

The Phantom Ranch lodge, opened in 1922, is at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Arizona and within the confines of the Grand Canyon National Park. The site of Phantom Ranch was frequented by Native Americans for centuries, if not thousands of years.

The National Park Service gave us this background information:

In the 1920’s, the National Park Service selected the Fred Harvey Company to build a tourist facility within the canyon. Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter was commissioned to draft the plans for the facility. She produced sketches for a series of cabins. Everyone was pleased, and it was soon announced that the accommodations would be named Roosevelt’s Chalets. Upon which Colter snatched up her blueprints and declared, “Not if you are going to be using my work.” A consummate perfectionist, she had already chosen the name: Phantom Ranch. The rustic cabins and main lodge are built of wood and native stone blending with the natural beauty of the setting

There are many things that point to Mary Jane Colter’s unique genius. Here are two that I consider paramount.

First, her works do not jump out at you screaming, “Look at me!” Rather, they seem to have grown organically out of their environment. While this may appear obvious, it is also somewhat rare. Second, a century later, her buildings are mostly still in use.

Writer and architect Arnold Berke seemed to agree saying this of Mary Jane Colter:

Mary Colter may well be the best-known unknown architect in the world: her buildings at the Grand Canyon National Park--which include the Lookout Tower, Hopi House, Bright Angel Lodge, and many others--are admired by almost five million visitors a year.

It’s hard to measure Mary Jane Colter’s impact on women in American architecture, but it’s just as hard to deny that she helped pave the way for those who followed. In that context, the American Institute of Architects notes that female membership rose from 18% to 26.2% between 2014 and 2024.

Ms. Colter passed away in 1958, aged 88. We can hope she passed secure in the knowledge of her important place on the spectrum of American architecture.

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The 20th century was not particularly kind to the Korean peninsula. At the end of World War II, it was divided along the 38th parallel. The North was essentially a client state of both the Soviet Union and Communist China. The South was politically and militarily supported by the Western Allies, as they were constituted during the War.

In 1950, the North invaded the South in the hopes of unifying the two countries under their Communist ideology. After a bruising war, a ceasefire took effect in 1953, with a demilitarized zone established along the 38th parallel.

Since then, the North has established itself as a closed totalitarian society, albeit one with nuclear weapons. The South stands as the 13th-largest economy in the world, with an annual GDP of 1.9 trillion. Let’s take a look at a few examples of modern Korean Architecture:

Roof Sentiment

Designed in 2015 by the Seoul firm, Society of (Architecture), for the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. This example of cultural architecture is composed of woven reeds mounted on steel pipes and stainless-steel wire.

The architectural web publication, archeyes.com. offered a bit of background:

MMCA, Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, …presents the installation Roof Sentiment, by Society of Architecture. The roof is the outstanding feature in traditional Korean architecture, as seen in the Gyeongbokgung Palace, which faces the MMCA. The pitched shape refers to the surrounding mountainous landscape. The traditional Korean architecture style is called han-ok, and a han-ok roof is characterized by its great height and size. A han-ok roof is exposed underneath, allowing one to experience fresh air and shade.

Seoul City Hall

The former Seoul City Hall, built in 1925 but now serves as the Seoul Metropolitan Library, as shown in the image above. It is placed in front of the current City Hall. After an international competition for the design of a new City Hall, the commission was awarded to Kerl Yoo of iArc in 2008.

Kerl Yoo described the process as:

Major keywords for designing the new building are traditions, citizens, future. I analysed low-rise horizontal elements, curvaceousness, and shades of leaves in our traditional architectural characteristics, and I applied these to the design so I can recall comfortable feelings of old things.

The project has a few unique elements:

One of them is an internal Green Wall, essentially a vertical garden, said to contain over 70,000 plants from 14 species. Another unique element is the art installation “Metaseosa Seobeol” by JHEON Soo-cheon. It consists of white balloons installed in a tornado pattern. Both are shown below.

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Chungha Building

The Chungha Building is located in the Gangnam area of Seoul. A district made virtually world-famous by the 2012 K-Pop dance hit “Gangnam Style.” The architectural firm MVRDV, based in Rotterdam, was selected by the building’s management firm to reimagine the building, as it was deemed to have fallen behind the design curve and, therefore, the all-important marketing curve. The architects had this to say about their task:

The Chungha building had become a rotten tooth in a fast changing streetscape dominated by single brand stores, this building contains a collection of brands in one. On the previous facade, a motley collection of fonts competed for the attention of passersby. The sober building’s s beige natural stone facade was ruined by commercial messages.

The well-thought-of web publication, arquitecturaviva.com, described a few of the ideas the architects came up with:

The solution was to attach a mosaic of shop windows that extend the interior space up to 2,5 meters. The perimeter of these curvaceous frames is illuminated with LED lights that change color transforming the building’s appearance and adapt to the identity of each brand. The exterior facade tiles resemble smooth white stone from afar and white foam in a geometric pattern from up close, and this same pattern continues in the transparent glass surfaces, generating a watery appearance.

Boutique Monaco

Boutique Monaco is a residential tower in Seoul's Seocho-gu district. The building was designed by architect Minsuk Cho, who studied architecture at Yonsei University before pursuing advanced studies at Columbia University in New York.

The tower is particularly noted for its distinctive design. The voids and recesses so immediately visible are not solely design elements; they were specifically designed to comply with local floor area ratio codes.

Lotte World Tower

Lotte World Tower, designed by Kohn, Pedersen and Fox, is a supertall skyscraper in the Songpa District of Seoul, South Korea. When it opened in 2017, this was the fifth-tallest skyscraper in the world.

KPF said this about the Lotte Tower:

Elegance of form was one of the prime objectives, following Lotte’s desire to bestow a beautiful monument to the capital city skyline. The sleek, tapered form of the 123-story tower stands out from the city’s rocky, mountainous topography and is organized around a stacked mixed-use program, comprising retail, office, officetel, and a 7-star luxury hotel. The building’s top ten stories are earmarked for extensive public use and entertainment facilities, including an observation deck and rooftop café.

Writing in ArchDaily, Patrick Lynch gave us his opinion:

The design of the 123-story tower draws from the forms of traditional Korean ceramics and calligraphy, rises in a sleek, tapered profile that contrasts with the city’s mountainous topography. Inside, the tower contains a wide variety of program types, including retail spaces, office floors, a seven-star luxury hotel, and an “officetel.”……..officetels offer studio-style apartments for employees who work in the building and feature service typically found in hotels such as standard furnishings, front desk services and gym access.

As previously discussed, I have never “met” a modernist glass tower I didn’t like. However, in this case, I can understand how the anti-modernist-glass-tower crowd might see this work as just another boring glass appendage, cheekily jutting skyward.

S-Trenue Tower - Bundle Matrix Building

Located in the heart of Seoul, the “Bundle Matrix Building” or S-Trenue, is a mixed-use project featuring commercial spaces on the lower levels, officetels (live/work spaces) on the middle floors, and community facilities on the top levels. It was designed by the Korean architectural firm, MASS Studies, and opened in 2009.

The building is a ‘bundle tower’, in this case, a project in which three different volumes intersect and intertwine.

The architects describe the three bundles below:

The core tower is of reinforced concrete construction whilst the two side towers are steel. With the core tower at the center, the slimmer steel construction towers lean at varying angles but maintain structural soundness. This creates space between the three towers which is utilized as external, outdoor space.

Will South Korea’s thriving economy continue to allow the capital investment needed to fund spectacular architectural design? Time will tell.

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Needless to say, World War 2 and the post-war Soviet hegemony did not bring better prospects for the people of Central Europe. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent opening of greater ties to the West began a long process of reawakening in almost all sectors of Central European life. Let’s review a few developments in modern Polish architecture.

Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw -2014

After an international competition won by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamäki and Ilmari Lahdelma, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2014.

J. Goldmann, a writer who has penned articles on European and Jewish culture, offered this upon the opening of the museum:

One of the most significant Jewish cultural projects in contemporary Europe, the museum will tell the story of the Jewish people’s 1,000-year history in Poland. According to museum officials, the core exhibition, which will be installed in the spring of 2014, will demonstrate how Jewish history and Polish history have been intertwined for the greater part of a millennium.

The museum is proximate to the site of the infamous 1944 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, where the Polish underground had bravely fought the occupying German army to a temporary standstill. Their military activity was predicated on receiving help from the Soviet Red Army, which was positioned on the other bank of the Vistula River. Sadly, that help never came. The Germans destroyed the city in retaliation, and while an exact number has never been agreed upon, somewhere in the area of 150,000 to 200,000 civilians were killed.

International Congress Centre - City of Katowice

This work is part of a “Culture Zone” that includes the Spodek Arena, a sporting venue, and the locally focused Silesian Museum. The ICC was designed by JEMS Architekci in Warsaw and opened in 2015.

According to the ICC website:

The construction of the International Congress Centre is based on noble materials. The outside area and foyer feature black openwork expanded metal mesh, and the conference interiors are constructed from wood and concrete.

The architects added this for more background:

The general philosophy behind the design was to create a facility with a value created not only by providing functional solutions of a utilitarian nature, but also by creating conditions for its existence within the social space of the city. The Centre building, with its straightforward, distinct and clear-cut form, has been integrated into the plan.

ICE Krakow Congress Centre - Krakow

In 2007, the City of Krakow announced an international competition for the Krakow Congress Center. The eventual winners were the Kraków-based studio Krzysztof Ingarden, Jacek Ewý Architekci sp. z o.o., along with the Japanese design consultant Arata Isozaki & Associates.

Today, the ICE Krakow Congress Center describes itself:

The ICE Kraków Congress Centre is the business and cultural flagship of the city. Located in the very heart of Kraków, it is a convenient place for the organisation of diverse events: from international congresses, conferences, symposiums and business meetings, through cultural events such as concerts, opera, theatrical and ballet performances, to social meetings

This work seems to represent a logical progression from the past to the present. Consider 19th-century wood and stone- anchored firmly in tradition, the Soviet bloc period of brutalist concrete- inflexible and austere, and now the glitteringly optimistic Krakow Congress Center.

To that point, the informative website archello.com said:

It is expected that the building will become a new architectural landmark on the banks of the Vistula River in Krakow, while at the same time successfully blending with both the historical and modern components of the Old City, Kazimierz and Podgorze.

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Malopolska Garden of Arts

Designed by the Polish firm, Ingarden & Ewý Architects, and opened in 2005. The architects describe their work as:

The Malopolska Garden of Arts is a culture venue with a performing arts centre and mediatheque, located in 19th-century urban block of Kraków. It draws inspiration from the context by making references to the geometry and tissue of the nearby buildings but due to its abstract, free composition creates a modern architectural sign in historical surroundings……..In this place, the cultural life of the Kraków’s young artistic set will blossom under a shared roof. Modern ballet, contemporary theatre forms, audio and video arts, concerts, and all and any other artistic pursuits will find their home here.

PGE Narodowy- Warsaw - 2011

PGE Narodowy, essentially the national stadium of Poland, was opened in 2012 and designed by the German-Polish joint venture gmp Architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners, J.S.K. Architekci Sp. z o.o. The Stadium features a retractable roof and a heated field (pitch) with specially cultivated Dutch grass.

As befitting a national stadium, the facade and the seats reflect the red and silver colors of the Polish flag.

As a venue, the stadium has hosted the European football championships in 2012 and concerts including such star attractions as Madonna, Beyoncé, the Rolling Stones, and Taylor Swift.

Warsaw Spire - 2016

Opened in 2016 and designed by the Belgian firm Jaspers-Eyers Architects, the Warsaw Spire is the 3rd tallest building in Poland and features a remarkable hyperboloid glass façade, as detailed below this geometric shape, resembling an hourglass, is considered to be superior in terms of stability when compared to more conventionally rectangular shapes.

Krzywy Domek / The Crooked House - Sopot, Poland - 2004

Opened in 2004 and designed by Polish architects Szotynscy & Zaleski, who are said to have drawn inspiration from the fairytale works of Polish illustrator Jan Marcin Szancer and surrealist efforts of Swedish artist Per Dahlberg.

Being an American of a certain age, when looking at this work, I can’t help but hear Grace Slick singing her 1967 acid rock anthem, White Rabbit:

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

Moving on from faded memories of my occasionally misspent youth, the Crooked House is much more than a semi-psychedelic conversation piece. Rather, as a practical venue, the Crooked House contains offices, shops, a bookstore, medical offices, nightclubs, and the renowned Krzywy Domek Food Hall!

Karlowicz Philharmonic- Szczecin, Poland - 2015

Designed by the Barcelona-based firm, Barozzi Veiga, who said this about their work:

The Philharmonic Hall, designed to accommodate a symphony hall and a chamber music hall, is a very complex building occupying the same space as its predecessor. This is a synthetic design that shares identifying elements from the surrounding context, and where mass, verticality and the shape of the rooflines predominate.

Jessica Mairs is a freelance architecture journalist. In 2015, writing for Dezeen, she commented on this project:

This concert hall in Poland by Spanish studio Barozzi Veiga features ribbed glass cladding and a spiky roof, giving it the appearance of an icy crown……The most noticeable feature of the structure is its zigzagging roof profile, made up of a series of sharply pitched gables. This gives the appearance of many smaller conjoined buildings.

In 2015, the philharmonic was awarded the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture.

European Solidarity Centre, Gdansk- 2014

Opened in 2014 and designed by a Polish firm, FORT Architects, who designed the walls of the building to resemble the hulls of ships built at the nearby Gdansk shipyard. This is the same shipyard that gained international attention when Lech Wałęsa, a shipyard electrician, organized the Solidarity movement, which led to the eventual end of Communist rule in Poland. Mr. Walesa would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and also be elected president of Poland.

The progress and prominence of Polish Modern architecture is a story still unfolding. We will follow closely.

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The 2026 Pritzker Award recipient, Smiljan Radić, was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1965 to a Croatian father and a British mother. He graduated from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1989 with a degree in architecture and eventually opened his own firm in 1995.

Let’s review a few of his more intriguing works:

Teatro Regional del Biobío - Concepción, Chile

The Architectural Review offers a description of this project:

From the absolute blackness of the auditorium at its heart to its ethereal translucent skin, Smiljan Radić’s Teatro Biobío in Concepción, Chile, is a theatrical performance of light

The remarkable facade, referenced above, is composed of a membrane attached to the structure via aluminum extrusions and stainless steel bolts. This membrane is polytetrafluoroethylene, commonly known as Teflon.

Nave Performing Arts Center- Santiago, Chile

Arch Daily opined:

Smiljan Radić also engages with existing structures, treating architectural intervention as a process of layering rather than replacement. Projects such as NAVE (Santiago, 2015) demonstrate this approach. The building, originally an early-twentieth-century residence damaged by a natural disaster, was transformed into a cultural venue for performances and workshops while retaining much of its original structure. Above the restored building, a rooftop terrace covered by a circus tent (below) introduces an unexpected sense of lightness and celebration, contrasting with the grounded spaces below.

The House for the Poem of the Right Angle

Eleanor Gibson Writing in Dezeen, ventured a summary of this structure:

Architect Smiljan Radić has designed this secluded black-concrete house among woodland in Vilches, Chile, to feature three huge rooflights that extend at odd angles.Twelve-centimetre-thick reinforced concrete walls form a mishmash of shapes including the three rooflights, curved walls, harsh right angles and a cantilever.Radić based the unusual forms on one of the abstract paintings in Le Corbusier’s series called The Poem of the Right Angle. Called Flesh, the lithograph features a woman, a foot, a large stone and the markings of a hand overhead.

Serpentine Gallery

The renowned Serpentine Gallery in London has, for many years, invited architects who have not previously built in the UK to design and produce temporary pavilions that showcase their ideas and vision. Working within a tight six-month timeframe, each architect brings their concept to life for public use during the summer season. Afterward, the structures are dismantled and often relocated to a permanent site elsewhere. In 2014, Smiljan Radić was given his chance at the Serpentine.

In 2018, Arch Daily said:

Of all the chosen architects, Chilean Smiljan Radic was the least-known before receiving the Serpentine commission, and from the least-known came arguably the most out-of-this-world. In an article by qa, Radic’s design was likened to “a bulbous white cocoon, still sticky with the excretions of whatever creature made it,” but the “weird” structure had more thoughtful underpinnings. In response to the thick, layered assemblies of buildings in the UK, Radic sought to create an extremely thin building envelope. With a fiberglass skin of just 10 mm thick, the donut-shaped structure was juxtaposed with boulders scattered throughout the site.

The Guatero

According to the Pritzker Award:

Created for the XXII Chilean Architecture Biennial, Guatero is a luminous pneumatic form that occupies the exhibition space as a temporary atmospheric environment rather than a fixed object. Soft, contoured, and gently unstable, the structure relies on air pressure, transforming fragility into spatial experience. Its translucent skin diffuses light and amplifies sound, creating an interior that feels intimate despite its scale. Light, sound, and movement subtly alter its interior condition. At once playful and elemental, Guatero creates an ambience of invitation within a volume that feels provisional yet fully inhabited.

Years ago, when I first began working regularly with architects, the single most admirable skill I observed was their imagination. The work of Ridic, in designing The Guatero, is, in my opinion, the perfect example of transcendental imagination at work.

The Pritzker Award jury said this of Mr. Radic:

His buildings appear temporary, unstable, or deliberately unfinished — almost on the point of disappearance — yet they provide a structured, optimistic and quietly joyful shelter, embracing vulnerability as an intrinsic condition of lived experience.

After being made aware of his Pritzker recognition, Mr. Radic expressed a cautionary sentiment :

In architecture, you generally can’t create your own opportunities. Clients and competitions appear unevenly, and you have to make decisions quickly, trying to experiment as much as possible.

Conclusion

The purpose of the Pritzker award is described by the organization below:

To honor a living architect or architects whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.

Sadly, this year’s award was delayed by the alleged involvement of a Pritzker family member with the notorious Jeffrey Epstein. In the end, Mr. Radić received his recognition.

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Rosanna Hu is a Taiwanese architect, born in 1968 and raised in Taiwan. She earned undergraduate degrees in architecture and music from University of California, Berkeley, followed by a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. In 2006, she co-founded the Shanghai-based firm Neri & Hu with partner Lyndon Neri. Let’s take a closer look at a selection of their projects.

The Sanctuary | Suzhou Chapel

According to Dezeen:

Lyndon Neri and Rosanna Hu's Shanghai studio designed Suzhou Chapel for a site within the Sangha resort, which is described as ‘a life learning and wellness community on the shores of the beautiful Yangcheng Lake’.

The main chapel is interesting in that it comprises two layers: a solid interior block and a perforated metal-skin exterior layer, allowing for light to filter in. The reclaimed gray brick used for the ramps, stairs, and the surrounding courtyard is an intriguing juxtaposition with the main chapel.

German architect Eduard Kögel in reviewing this project said:

The white cubic volume of the chapel space seems to float above the grey brick walls. It composes a simple double height space with a negatively inclined roof, clad by two layers of façade: an outer perforated metal cladding that gives the appearance as a solid box during the day, and an inner skin punctuated on all sides by differently sized windows. During the day the interior is lit via these openings that filter in natural light, whereas at night the windows emit a soft glow from the interior, turning the box into a strong landmark for the wider neighbourhood.

Junshan Cultural Center

Rossana Hu and her partner Lyndon Neri were commissioned to renovate an old brick building outside of Beijing with the goal of turning existing offices into a cultural center that would contain a library, an exhibition hall, and a multipurpose area.

Arch Daily offered this summary:

Drawing inspiration from its context, the architecture combines traditional northern architecture with contemporary architectural language and transforms into a new interpretation of architectural expression. The building quietly rises out of the water as a brick mass with carved out spaces for programs interlocked with gardens that blur the boundary between inside and outside.

Aranya Art Center

When asked to design the Aranya Arts Center for a seaside community in Beidaihe, China, the Neri & Hu design team decided to reimagine the space used for art display versus the space used as a community area. This forced the design intent to focus on the internal courtyard. The architects further note the impact of the seaside location:

Drawing inspiration from the seasonal ocean waters nearby—azure and calm in the summers, splintered ice though winter—the building design attempts to encapsulate the natural wonder of water at its core.

The center website described the architectural effort:

Its architecture is designed by Neri&Hu. Its heavy volume, dark facade and concrete wall tiles with different textures make the exterior of the art center look like a tough rock. The spiral staircases inside the building connect the open-air atrium at the bottom with each exhibition gallery.

Winka Dubbeldam

Winka Dubbeldam was born in the Netherlands in 1960, received her first architectural training in Rotterdam before attaining her Masters in Architecture from New York’s Columbia University in 1992.

In September of 2025 Ms. Dubbeldam was named CEO of the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Let’s take a look at a few of her projects after Columbia but before the CEO appointment.

Hybrid Stadium and Concert Hall - Hangzhou, China

The intriguing shape of this project is explained by the architects as being derived from a local jade stone artifact known as the Cong.

The architects added more background to their work below:

Archi-Tectonics parametrically designed this optimized shape to facilitate the stadium’s conversion from a sports arena to a performance venue. The stadium features a suspended dome roof resting on the inner bowl and cantilevering out to support the outer shells with brass shingle cladding and a glass diagrid. The choiceto keep the glass planar on a double-curved surface led to the design of aluminum ‘eyelids’, which optimized costs, construction time, and beauty

512 GW Townhouse

According to the architectural firm:

By adding a large extension onto an existing building with a modest footprint of 19 x 40 feet, we converted the building into an 8-story townhouse for 1 family, wrapped by a spacious lattice envelope functioning as a climatic skin, a third 'building.'A glass elevator connects the floors with connective voids that allow for a fluid living environment. The highly recognizable climate envelope, whose spatial and performative properties serve as an adaptable perimeter of the building, is made from a lightweight steel frame and folding panels. This skin can be opened and closed with ease, and adds new exterior spaces in different, variable conditions. This project achieves 45% energy savings with an innovative operable folding screen that was integrated into a residential building.

V33 Residential Building (Vestry Building)

The architects further commented below on the intriguing facade on the front of the building:

The historically varying building-fronts within a ‘pixelated’ facade; a pattern in translucent stone & glass—making this the first time the untreated translucent stone was used as an exterior building skin.

* A note to any architects who may want to create an exterior or interior with thinly cut stone. Current technology can create a level of translucence that allows a panel to be backlit. The dramatic possibilities are up to the design team. Leave a comment for more information.

London Solar House

The architectural firm described some of their thoughts during the design process:

In search of the most ergonomic and frugal housing unit, the firm first maintained the solid masonry structure of the original two-story building as the gravitational core, forming a largely opaque boundary of the building, from which a new roof extension and other building projections materialize. These new geometries translate between the adjacent townhouses to form a multifaceted, folded zinc and glass envelope, thus creating at once continuity and a somewhat strange "otherness" within the existing context.

Dorte Mandrup

Dorte Mandrup was born in Copenhagen in 1961. She initially studied medicine before migrating to art. After a period in the States studying sculpture and ceramics, Ms. Mandrup graduated from the Aarhus School of Architecture in 1991. In 1999, she founded her current firm, Dorte Mandrup A/S. in Copenhagen. Let’s take a look at a few of her designs.

Holmbladsgade Cultural Centre

The Dorte Mandrup website provided this introduction:

Emptying an old industrial building from 1880, Dorte Mandrup created an unconventional arrival point for the new neighbourhood centre and added an interpretation of a treehouse in the shape of an assembly hall balancing on crooked concrete columns. Not your garden- variety neighbourhood centre! Most importantly, the centre has succeeded in housing everything from conferences and debates to concerts and children’s theatre and is now the centre of gravity for local democracy and networks.

The Whale

A cultural center situated about 186 miles North of the Arctic Circle in Norway, Dorte Mandrup hoped it would:

Inspire and open the way for a meeting between humans and whales, culture, and nature. Through art, science, and architecture.

Looking at this project you see a direct effort to combine architecture and the adjacent marine life without disturbing the natural elements.

Originally scheduled to be open by now, the project faced numerous unseen delays, not the least of which was the discovery of a Viking-age settlement on the site.

Wadden Sea Centre

This remarkable structure is primarily built of lightweight wooden panels and locally collected reeds. Approximately 25,000 bundles of reeds directly cover the building without any processing other than drying.

According to the architect, these reeds:

are naturally impregnated by the salty air and the wind keeps them dry and free of fungus leaving little need for maintenance. To create a harmonious expression, both the existing building and the boathouse is clad with the European hardwood Robinia. Robinia is a very durable, sustainably grown material that helps to keep the building's environmental impact to a minimum and require no further maintenance.

This unique project was named Danish Building of the Year in 2017 by a group of prestigious Danish architects.

The Crystal Sport and Culture House

This project is nicknamed “the Crystal.”

According to the website, archello.com:

Nicknamed “The Crystal” because of its semi-translucent “skin” made out of polycarbonate that allows for the inner light to escape into the dark Copenhagen night, The Crystal has become somewhat of a local landmark.

Conclusion

In the two posts we have done commenting on women architects, I have been troubled over using “female architect” vs simply “architect.” In a 2017 article with Dezeen, Dorte Mandrup stated:

Allow me to explain; I am not a female architect. I am an architect…. I do not approach assignments as a woman, but as a professional architect. But this last part seems to be confusing to many men and women within the business.

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Frida Escobedo was born in 1979 in Mexico City, where she studied architecture at Universidad Iberoamericana before earning a master’s degree at Harvard Graduate School of Design. She reflects on aspects of her design philosophy shaped during her time at Harvard below: Architecture was not just about developing housing, retail, or hospitality, or these very traditional things; it could be something else. You could be doing an installation, it could be doing furniture, it could be writing about it, or it could be doing a performance. All of these were talking about space.

Let’s look at a small sample of Frida’s work:

La Tallera Siqueiros

La Tallera Siqueiros is a museum, workshop, and artists’ residence built on the site of what was once the residence and studio of the famed muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in the last years of his life. The work of Escobedo is described by the website www.arquitecturaviva.com:

In a simple gesture, the intervention of the Mexican architect Frida Escobedo opens the museum courtyard onto an adjacent plaza by rotating a series of murals from their original, vertical positions. This creates a connection between the museum-atelier and the areas around it.

Casa Negro and Boca Chica Hotel

Early in her career, while she was still partners with Alejandro Alarcón, Casa Negro (below left) was designed as a studio/home for a photographer friend. This was a project on a limited budget, situated in the hills of Mexico City… given her quoted philosophy that “Simple forms work the best,” such a budget could leverage her strengths. The location and constraints on materials led to the structure being raised and set within a visual frame against the Mexico City sky.

The Boca Chica Hotel in Acapulco was a 2010 renovation of an old-school “rat pack-jet set” era hotel. A property like this one had an inherently playful nature. Escobedo commented on that playful nature being a part of her effort during an interview with Dezeen.

Serpentine Pavilion, London 2018, and Tang Wing of Metropolitan Museum of Art

According to the Serpentine Gallery (below left) in London:

Each summer, Serpentine invites an internationally renowned architect to create their first built structure in England. The Pavilion commission has become an international site for architectural experimentation and has presented projects by some of the world’s greatest architects.

In 2018, Frida Escobedo was selected as the architect. Her comments on this work:

The design for the Serpentine Pavilion 2018 is a meeting of material and historical inspirations inseparable from the city of London itself and an idea which has been central to our practice from the beginning: the expression of time in architecture through inventive use of everyday materials and simple forms. For the Serpentine Pavilion, we have added the materials of light and shadow, reflection and refraction, turning the building into a timepiece that charts the passage of the day.

In December of 2024, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in conjunction with Frida Escobedo, made public the architect’s designs for a planned expansion of the Tang Wing, the first such Museum effort to ever be designed by a woman.

Frida Escobedo commented below on this project:

Our goal has been to create a building that fully meets the needs and aspirations of The Met, weaving together vital connections between the Modern and Contemporary Art galleries and other areas of the Museum and at the same time expressing the special significance of the Tang Wing’s place in the city. The wing is in New York, yet of the world; it reflects the global nature of this great collection and also draws inspiration from The Met’s unique surroundings. Such an ambition can be realized only through close and consistent collaboration. We are deeply grateful to our extraordinary partners at The Met and to all the members of the expert design team.”

Pompadou Center (renovation)

The famed Pompidou Center in Paris closed in late 2025 for a major renovation, which the Center’s website described below:

Following the gradual closure of all levels of the historic Beaubourg building, the major renovation project—entrusted to the architectural firms AIA Life Designers (technical component) and Moreau Kusunoki (cultural component), in collaboration with Frida Escobedo Studio—will begin in early 2026.

As much as I loved this building, upon first looking at it many years ago, the “inside-out” design, which obviously leaves important areas exposed to the elements, has not aged all that well.

Frida Escobeda said this about her approach to the renovation, and what it entailed:

reflecting on time, interpreting existing traces and considering the new ones the project will leave…….architecture bears the marks of duration, life and weathering.

Frida Escobedo has given many interviews available on YouTube, in which she speaks of architecture so lyrically that it approaches mysticism. I wish her luck.

Tatiana Bilbao

Tatiana Bilbao was born in Mexico City in 1972. Her family were architects, with her grandfather being Tomás Bilbao Hospitalet, a Basque architect who left Spain for Mexico in 1942. She received her bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Universidad Iberoamericana.

According to the Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO, the firm is:

An architecture studio, founded in 2004. At the core of the studio's practice is an analysis of the context surrounding projects, which scale from masterplans to affordable housing strategies, from city planning to furniture design.

Let’s briefly review a few of the studio's architectural projects.

The Sea of Cortez aquarium

According to the architects:

The project is part of the regeneration program for the Mazatlan Central Park. The intention is to complement the public, natural, and cultural area of great social interest, marked by the quality and uniqueness of the overall intervention. The project will offer a complete experience of the marine ecosystems of the Sea of Cortez, as well as the terrestrial ecosystems of its shores.

JINHUA ARQUITECTURE PARK

This park in Jinhua contains 17 pavilions designed by international and Chinese architects. Architizer described the contribution of Ms. Bilbao and her team to this effort below:

The Exhibition Room by Tatiana Bilbao reveals its different facets incrementally through exploration, provoking curiosity in a manner reminiscent of traditional Chinese gardens. Comprising irregular volumes in rendered concrete, stone and glass, Bilbao’s structure is designed to surprise inhabitants with an unfolding sequence of tunnels, pathways and terraces.

Sadly, according to Karissa Rosenfeld writing for ArchDaily in 2013:

The vast majority of the pavilions are literally falling apart. Operable wall panels are stuck or broken, doors are locked or rusted shut, wood is beginning to rot, paths are overgrown. The impression is that you’ve stumbled onto the remains of some future society.

In 2012, Paul Keskeys, writing in Architizer, describes the park as:

Now uninhabited and slowly deteriorating following political wrangling over maintenance of the structures, the forgotten park contains surreal artifacts designed by some of the most influential architecture firms of the 21st century.

Biotechnological Park, Tecnológico de Monterrey campus

According to the architects:

Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Culiacán, one of the campus of the largest national private university system in Mexico, commissioned us to design a new biotechnological park building, that could work as link between academic and business environments in the state of Sinaloa. This mexican state stands out for its agricultural production, because of this, the university wanted a building that could bring together academic research and student work with the development of new technologies in professional life, giving space to corporations.

Lina Ghotmeh

Lina Ghotmeh was born in Lebanon in 1980 and raised in Beirut, where she also earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture from the American University of Beirut before gaining her Master’s from the École spéciale d'architecture in Paris.

Let’s review a few of her projects.

Stone Garden Housing - Beirut

The architect said of her work here:

Beirut’s contemporary cityscape is the product of the country’s geopolitical situation and tormented political tensions. Violence had always left its mark on the city’s buildings’ skins, hollowing these, and leaving nature to invade every left out concrete skeleton.

This mixed-use project marked the architect’s first building in her hometown of Beirut. Situated on the edge of the city center—an area heavily scarred by years of conflict—the project engages directly with the legacy of Lebanon’s recent past.

According to ArchDaily in 2022,

The building’s façade is composed of a combination of cement and local earth, hand-applied by artisans to evoke the textures and memories of traditional architecture in the city. The design speaks to themes of post-war recovery and renewal, suggesting the emergence of new life within a once-devastated landscape.

In the summer of 2020, an explosion occurred less than a mile from the site. Remarkably, the structure sustained only minor damage—perhaps a testament to the strength and thoughtfulness of its design. Lina Ghotmeh seemed to agree, saying:

It Has to Resist any Earthquake, and That’s Why it also Resisted the Explosion in the Port’‘

The project was awarded Architecture Project of the Year at the Dezeen Awards 2021.

Serpentine Pavillion

As discussed earlier in this post regarding Frida Escobedo, the Serpentine Gallery in London offers an interesting program described below:

Each summer, Serpentine invites an internationally renowned architect to create their first built structure in England. The Pavilion commission has become an international site for architectural experimentation and has presented projects by some of the world’s greatest architects.

The architect’s website described their work:

This pavilion offers a celebratory space where people can listen to nature, work, eat, meet, and think together. It features a lightweight structure built entirely from bio-sourced and low-carbon materials, with locally sourced wooden ribs supporting a suspended, pleated roof inspired by tree leaves

Estonian National Museum in Tartu

In 2005, an international competition was announced for a new Estonian National Museum building. This competition was won by an international collaboration of architects, which included Lina Ghotmeh.

The architect’s website commented on their approach to this project below:

The proposal for this Museum challenged the competition brief. Instead of locating the building on the proposed site, the museum was anchored near a former Soviet military base - a physically present ‘ruin’ of a painful history

Writing in The Guardian in 2017, architecture critic Rowan Moore observed

It is unusual to put a museum at the end of a runway, still more if it also straddles a chain of ornamental lakes, but then the Estonian National Museum is not a usual sort of institution. Its past is wrapped up with that of the country itself. Now it somehow has to represent the the complex and precarious history of Estonia, in a fraught present, with a combination of pride and sensitivity.

Conclusion:

I first began my career in the architectural products space in the summer of 1980. Since that “space” was very broad - architects, engineers, interior designers, contractors, etc - there was a fairly wide demographic. However, women were more typically interior designers rather than architects. This was more apparent on job sites than in offices. By 2020, this had changed, not dramatically, but changed nevertheless.

In 2026, I would suggest that the future of women in architecture will be determined by the female architects who can secure commissions and make it “rain.” Will that entail simply designing what the client wants, or will that be the time to convince the client to take an innovative approach? As the father of two daughters who benefited from societal changes, I hope that time will tell a good story of more women in architecture.

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Richard Rogers was born in Florence in 1933, where his father was studying medicine. The family left Italy in 1938, relocating to London to escape the regime of Benito Mussolini.

In England, Rogers struggled academically as an undiagnosed dyslexic. Despite these early difficulties, he went on to earn a diploma from the Architectural Association School of Architecture before later completing a master’s degree at Yale University. While at Yale, he met his future wife, Su Brumwell, and his future architectural partner, Norman Foster.

The Centre Pompidou, Paris -1977

The 1960s proved to be a turbulent period for Paris and for France in general. After years of postwar leadership under Charles de Gaulle, the political climate was beginning to shift. Students were increasingly restless, and many workers shared their frustrations.

Pent-up tensions erupted in the May 1968 protests in France, and student demonstrations were soon followed by a massive general strike that effectively brought the French economy to a standstill. Although the movement failed to achieve many of its specific aims, it nonetheless shook the nation.

In 1969, Charles de Gaulle resigned from office and was succeeded by his prime minister, Georges Pompidou. While Pompidou largely continued the Gaullist political framework, he introduced a fresher, more modern approach to governance.

Early in his Presidency, Pompidou decided to go forward with a cultural center to be located in an area of Paris formerly occupied by the Les Halles food markets. This ultimately put into motion a design competition that drew approximately 681 entries. In 1971, the joint venture design of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano was announced as the winner.

At some point in the late 80s, I was in Paris with a colleague for a meeting that was repeatedly rescheduled, leaving us with quite a bit of time on our hands. This is obviously not the worst thing in the world, and during that time we took a serious look at the Pompidou Center.

Having previously seen imagery of the building, I should not have been shocked when seeing it in person. But startled I was. The functional elements on the outside of the building gave it an industrial feel, somewhat softened by the dramatic color coding. All leading to the question, “What the heck is going on here?”

In fairness, we should have known what the color-coded exposed elements meant, but sadly, we did not at the time. Later, we learned that green = plumbing, blue ducts = climate control, yellow = electrical wiring, and red = circulation elements and safety devices. Renzo Piano’s firm, in perhaps a moment of self-aware acknowledgement had this to say:

The Center is like a huge spaceship made of glass, steel and colored tubing that landed unexpectedly in the heart of Paris, and where it would very quickly set deep roots.” — Renzo Piano’s firm.

The Center closed for renovation in September of 2025 with a scheduled reopening in 2030. All these years later, for better or for worse, this Rogers- Piano effort lingers as a masterpiece in my memory.

Lloyd’s of London, London - 1986

Another example of Rogers creating an inside-out building in which the “guts” of the structure, such as pipes, ductwork, stairs, and elevators, are exposed externally, leading to the style being referred to as “Bowellism.” No more on that choice of words.

The current surviving firm, Rogers Architects, said this:

Similar to Centre Pompidou the Lloyd’s building is designed “inside out.” All of the service functions are removed from the interior and placed at the exterior of the building. This not only allows for easy replacement and maintenance on the elevators, plumbing, or electrical facilities, but it frees up the interior to create an open and flexible plan that allows for uninterrupted activity on each level.

But then Richard Rogers said in his 2017 memoir:

The Lloyd’s Building was designed as a flexible machine for a financial marketplace,” says Rogers, “but also as a carefully considered expression of those activities

While the former Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, is not known to have specifically denounced the Lloyds tower, it must have fallen into a basket of buildings that, collectively, would eventually draw his Royal ire.

The Millennium Dome (the O2 Arena), London -1999

Designed and built to grandly celebrate the entry of Great Britain into the 21st century, while highlighting “Cool Brittania” with a spectacular opening including the Queen and a vast array of “A-listers.” Then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, declared that the dome would be “a triumph of confidence over cynicism, boldness over blandness, excellence over mediocrity.”

Here also began the year-long “Millennium Experience,” which was expected to draw millions of visitors and produce bazillions in revenue. The event did not meet expectations for either attendance or revenue. In hindsight, those expectations now seem unrealistically exuberant.

The relatively unsuccessful “Milennium Experience” caused the Dome to lose both business and political momentum. However, since it’s rebirth as The 02, it has become one of the most successful entertainment and cultural venues in the world.

Richard Rogers and his team designed a great deal of symbolism into The Dome that speaks to its location on the Greenwich Peninsula, and what that means for Greenwich Mean Time and world navigation. For example, the Dome is 365 meters in diameter, aligned with the number of days in a typical year. There are 12 supporting towers corresponding to months and/or hours. The Dome is 52 meters high at its apex, or one for each week.

**** [Click here for a refresher course on GMT and Greenwich as the Prime meridian (0 degrees Longitude).]

Despite the initial fits and starts, today, the O2 arena ranks as one of the most attended entertainment venues in the world, keeping company with The Sphere in Las Vegas and Madison Square Garden in New York. That said, The unique vision of Richard Rogers gave this project the room it needed to adapt to changing times and programming.

Terminal 4, Barajas Airport, Madrid - 2005

Assuming the types of commissions an architect will receive reflect the needs of society is no surprise. Hence, so many of the A-list architects in the 20th and 21st century I’ve been involved in designing or redesigning airports.

And so it was when a design competition for a new terminal at the Madrid-Barajas airport was launched in 1997. The goal was to elevate the Madrid airport to the standard of the other major European international airports. The Richard Rogers firm, then known as Richard Rogers Partnership – was awarded the project along with the Spanish architectural office Estudio Lamela.

Jon Astbury, assistant curator in architecture and design at the Barbican, said this about the result of the Rogers and colleagues design product:

The vast terminal – one of the largest in Europe – represented a high-point in airport design, during which the typology became synonymous with the predominantly British style of high-tech architecture.

With its undulating, bamboo-lined roofs, generous skylights and brightly coloured columns, Madrid-Barajas Terminal 4 achieved the rare feat of humanising the airport terminal, a space more often associated with anonymity, homogeneity and general unpleasantness.

The Leadenhall Building ("The Cheesegrater"), (London - 2014

The Leadenhall Building or Leadenhall Tower has also had the rarer “honor” of developing a third name, since it is also colloquially known as the “Cheesegrater” due to its unique shape. This intriguing building opened in July 2014 having been designed by Rogers’s firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. The nickname derives from the wedge shape similar to the ubiquitous the kitchen device .

The structure’s tapered profile is a result of the requirement that views of St Paul’s Cathedral, especially from Fleet Street, be strictly preserved. This rather rare shape ensures that mandate. Rogers explained how site requirements, as in this case, could be creatively dealt with:

One of the arts of architecture is to use constraints, turn them upside down and see whether they can help you to design the building

The Prince of Wales and Modern London Architecture

While still the Prince of Wales, King Charles III was quite critical of modern architecture. He famously called a proposed addition to London’s National Gallery, “A monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”

He also taunted his audience during an address to the Royal Institute of British Architects, accusing them of “ignoring the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people in this country.” The Prince declared Birmingham’s city center “a monstrous concrete maze,” with a library that resembled “a place where books are incinerated, not kept.”

The Guardian reported in June of 2009:

The Qatari royal family has scrapped Richard Rogers’ modernist plans for the £1bn redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks in west London following vehement opposition from the Prince of Wales. The investment arm of the Gulf emirate which owns the prime site on the edge of Belgravia today announced that new architects will be brought in and Rogers’ scheme for 548 apartments, half of them affordable, spread over 14 glass and steel buildings will be consigned to history.

Since ascending the throne as Charles III, His Royal Highness has maintained a lower profile in terms of architectural criticism. Between the general demands placed upon a monarch, his own health issues, and the scandals surrounding his brother Andrew, his attention must certainly be directed away from architectural reviews. Richard Rogers passed on in 2021. The fates of King Charles, the former Prince Andrew, and the English Monarchy are still to be determined.

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For the purposes of this post, let’s date the beginning of the Colonial Period in Indian history as 1757, following the decisive Battle of Plassey. British Crown rule commenced at that point and continued until 1947. After independence from Britain, the former colony was partitioned into the two nations of India and Pakistan, with India formally becoming a republic in 1950.

As India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru played a major role in introducing modern architecture to the country. His invitation to Le Corbusier to plan and design the new city of Chandigarh in northwestern India marked a critical embracing of modern architecture in the post-independence era.

Chandigarh

Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of a planned city for a newly independent India drew on clear historical precedents, notably Pierre L’Enfant’s 1790 plan for Washington, DC, and the 1913 design of Canberra by the American architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin.

Chandigarh was followed by other ambitious purpose-built capitals, including Brasília in 1960 and Abuja, Nigeria, developed during the 1980s.

Rachel May, of the Harvard School of Design, explained:

In 1950, Nehru commissioned Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh, setting in motion the country’s nascent development program and national identity under the era’s premise that…A culture could be determined by its design.

Image credits:

Top left: Palace of Assembly - photo: Lillottama • CC BY-SA 4.0

Top right: Palace of Assembly - photo: duncid

Bottom left: Secretariat - photo: Sanyam Bahga • CC BY-SA 3.0

Bottom right: Punjab and Haryana High Court photo: Sanyam Bah

The Indian digital magazine Scroll offered this somewhat tough critique:

An obvious mistake is Chandigarh’s unnecessarily large scale. In the early days, while senior officials would have had government cars and drivers, many of the clerks, peons and other staff who kept the administrative processes functioning would have commuted by bicycle. Overlooking these realities, the city was built for cars that most of its residents couldn’t yet afford. Today, Chandigarh still feels like it hasn’t been grown into yet: its wide avenues are striking but impersonal, and distances between places are unnecessarily long. Given the number of bicycles in archival photos and bike lanes across the city today, perhaps alternative and cleaner mobility patterns could have emerged if the city wasn’t designed for the automobile.

My long-distance observation is that, given the time period and the Le Corbusier approach, there has to be the requisite amount of Brutalist concrete, leavened by the occasional splashes of color. Writing in the New York Times, Barbara Crossette offered this observation:

Le Corbusier's work here, his largest single project, has been particularly controversial. More fundamentally, his urban vision may have never really been in tune with the soul of India.

The Lotus Temple, Delhi, India 1986

Designed by Iranian and American architect Fariborz Sahba, The Lotus Temple serves as a temple for the Baháʼí Faith. Mr. Sahba reportedly worked on the project for 10 years as both architect and project manager. In researching this post, we discovered this description in Daily Art online magazine:

It’s striking design features 27 large petals, arranged across three levels to form the shape of a lotus flower. The petals are clad in pristine white Greek Pentelic marble, well-known for its durability. These petals are not merely decorative but are integral to the building’s structure, supported by a precise arrangement of concrete ribs that ensure stability. The design beautifully combines form and function, creating a harmonious, awe-inspiring structure.

The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad India

Designed by none other than Louis Kahn, the Indian Institute of Management opened in 1974. Writing in ArchDaily, Andrew Kroll said:

It was [Indian architect] Balkrishna Doshi that believed Louis Kahn would be able to envision a new, modern school for India’s best and brightest. Kahn’s inquisitive and even critical view at the methods of the educational system influenced his design to no longer singularly focus on the classroom as the center of academic thought.

Did anyone ever use brick as elegantly as Louis Kahn?

Lodha World Towers, Mumbai - 2020

Lodha World Towers, Mumbai - 2020

Designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners for the Lodha Group, these towers seem conceived for a skyline in London, New York, or Los Angeles. That observation is not a critique but a compliment. Mumbai clearly positions itself as an emerging global “power city,” and architecture of this caliber reinforces that ambition.

The sweeping curvilinear façade would feel entirely at home in any of those major metropolitan centers. The Indian glass manufacturer FG Glass described the façade this way:

The building's podium and car parking levels up to level 6 are clad with CLIMACOOL PRO-1 units with Saint Gobain KT155 single-silver MSVD coating and an ENAMELITE dual ceramic coating in two gray shades to either completely opacify the glass or provide a shading effect in a linear pattern

Egg Building, Mumbai

The unique skeleton of the Egg Building in Mumbai is described by www.worldarchitecture.org below:

The structure of the Cybertecture egg uses a diagrid exo-skeleton (made of cast steel nodes of solid steel to create fire resistant structure), due to which it becomes a stiff structural system providing large floor plates without any columns, resulting in the reduction of construction material usage to approximately 15% in comparison to usual buildings

Infosys Pune Campus

Designed by renowned Indian architect Hafeez Sorab Contractor for the Infosys Limited campus in Pune. The remarkably interesting website, www.re-thinkingthefuture.com, said this about the “Spaceship” building:

Infosys Limited, Pune, stands as a triumph in corporate architecture, a testament to Hafeez Contractor’s mastery in crafting innovative and functional workspaces.

Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur -1986

Designed by one of modern India’s most esteemed architects, Charles Correa, in 1986 but opened in 1992, this project was originally programmed as a multi-arts center and is said to follow concepts from ancient architectural principles called the Vastu Vidya. Turkish architect Sümeyye Okumus wrote:

Blending India’s cultural and climatic conditions with modern architecture, Charles Correa argued that buildings are not just physical structures, but also spaces that shape the relationship between people and the environment.

Conclusion

Admittedly, I have never been to India, so why write about Indian architecture? The answer is fairly straightforward. First, India has recently surpassed China as the most populous country on earth. Second, as a relatively young nation in terms of its modern political form, it is fascinating to consider what may emerge on the nation’s architectural canvas. I think the world architectural community should look forward to the developments in modern Indian architecture.

In the meantime, stand by for a post on modern Indian residential architecture

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The famous 20th-century fictional philosopher, Ferris Bueller, told us:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it

So it is with architecture. If you don’t stop and look around, you will certainly miss some new faces making a mark. In my experience, I vividly recall walking into the original Arquitectonica office in Miami 45 years ago and knowing instantly that I needed to keep an eye on them. Through the prism of time, that might now seem painfully obvious, but not so much then. While researching modern architecture, I recently came across the London-based firm Serie Architects, led by founding principals Christopher Lee and Kapil Gupta.

Lee and Gupta founded the firm in 2006 and now maintain offices in London, Mumbai, and China. Let’s take a quick look at a few of their projects.

Satsung Hall, Shrimad Rajchandra Ashram, Dharampur, India - 2025

Mr. Lee and Serie Architects described the design as:

An assemblage of perforated, curving white volumes informed by the concept of the ‘samavasaran’ in jainism, which describes a mythical building which represents the aggregation of knowledge — through discourse and learning — as building blocks, to bring devotees ever closer to enlightenment.

The Serie Architects team describes the facade:

The exterior façade is clad with over half a million hand-cut marble bricks sourced from Makrana, Rajasthan.

The Satsung Hall project was the winner of the Dezeen Magazine, Civic Project of the Year in 2025. The judges commented that:

[It is] a clear winner, this building of substance is contemporary but clearly derived from its locale. It exudes impressive monumentally along with structural strength, while still managing to retain a human scale.

5 Science Park Drive, Singapore - 2019

Principal Christopher Lee described the building:

5 Science Park Drive is designed to ensure that common spaces are visible, accessible and nourished with amenities". The building features a three-storey extended lobby or ‘city room’ that incorporates a series of cascading platforms incorporating a café, break-out spaces and a small auditorium. This space is focused on collaboration, discussion and networking.

Jameel Arts Center, Dubai - 2018

The Jameel Arts Center website described the programming:

The building is comprised of three floors of gallery spaces; an open-access research centre and library; dedicated projects and events spaces; a rooftop terrace designed for installations, film screenings and events; and a restaurant and shop and espresso bar.

Christopher Lee explained a bit of the firm’s process:

We worked very closely with Art Jameel, listening to their needs, responding with architectural ideas, and discursively refining them. The architecture that emerged is one that is able to accommodate a wide range of uses and continues to evolve with the city it serves.

The architecture-focused website, www.re-thinkingthefuture.com, states:

Jameel Arts Centre serves as the best example of what minimalist architecture is, along with the juxtaposition of elements. The art Centre is designed with the purpose of connecting the interior and exterior environment of the building

Jervois Mansion, Singapore

A local Singapore realty firm, www.angelyntanproperty.com, described their view of the project’s architecture :

The architecture of Jervois Mansion draws lessons from Singapore’s Black & White Bungalows that resonates with Singapore’s history.

The firm’s website said this:

Jervois Mansion is the first low-rise residential development to be awarded Singapore's Green Mark for Super Low Energy

School of Design and Environment, Singapore - 2019

The firm, on its website, points out:

East and west elevations are clad in undulating perforated aluminium to moderate solar heat gain.

They also add:

The roof hosts more than 1200 photovoltaic panels while a hybrid cooling system provides a comfortable, energy-efficient working environment. Singapore State Courts Tower, Singapore- 2021

Christopher Lee speaking for the firm:

The relationship between the city and its civic buildings was our primary interest for this project. The new State Courts towers should be a building that is symbolically open and accessible to the public. Its design language is drawn from the city's architecture and is both familiar and surprisingly new to its citizens.

Architect Fiona Nixon, writing for Singapore Architect, had this to offer:

The building’s quality is a testament to a well-run selection process, balancing an architect of international insight with a firm of profound sectoral knowledge and ability to execute. Elaborated by subtle references to context and the traditions of civic architecture, the new State Courts nonetheless signal clarity and simplicity. In form, function and intention, the building achieves equilibrium, bringing calm and harmony to the city’s heart.

Conclusion

Although Serie Architects has been in practice for nearly two decades, the firm retains the aura of being “new and noteworthy.” That impression may be shaped as much by statements from the design principals as by the work itself. Nevertheless, their voice feels seriously different from that of the large corporate firms producing standardized commercial architecture on the global stage.

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Personal background

Adolf Loos was born in Czechoslovakia in 1870, the son of a stonemason, and is, by almost any measure, one of the most influential architects of the 20th Century. However, his greatest lasting influence has probably been his writings rather than his built works.

Philosophy of Architecture

Writing for a paper in the Harvard Library, historian Jimena Canales said:

Adolf Loos’s famous 1908 essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’, decisively linked unornamented architecture with the culture of modernity and, in so doing, became one of the key formulations of modern architecture.

In terms of significant background information, Loos visited the United States after his university studies and fell under the sway of the Chicago School of Architecture, particularly the classic “form follows function" dictum of Louis Sullivan.

Loos proudly contended that he did not design floor plans, facades, or sections … rather, he designed spaces. This speaks to his Raumplan conceptualization, which is described below by the interesting website www.archeyes.com:

[It was a] concept introduced by architect Adolf Loos, refers to the design and organization of interior space based on the specific function of each room. Unlike the traditional approach of aligning rooms on a strict, regular floor plan, Raumplan suggests that spaces within a building should be differentiated in size, height, and character according to their intended use. This creates a more organic and dynamic layout, where rooms and levels interlock in a three-dimensional puzzle. It’s a design philosophy that prioritizes the practical and experiential aspects of architecture, demonstrating Loos’s focus on functionality and efficiency.

It is important to place Loos in the context of his period in architecture. Art Nouveau architecture seemed to rule the architectural roost during an approximate period from 1890 to 1910. Architect and writer, Yasmine Hafza described it this way:

Art Nouveau buildings flow with the curves of vines and flowers. Often, the aesthetic effect seems too absurd to grasp, but upon second look it becomes captivating.

Think of Gaudi’s La Sagrada Família, in Barcelona as an example.

Loos considered this level of ornamentation to be an affront. In 1910 he published the much discussed manifesto, Ornament and Crime beseeching architects to:

abandon ornament and concentrate entirely on the erection of buildings that were finally shaped and charming in their sobriety

Then went so far as to say:

Lack of ornamentation is a sign of spiritual strength

Ok. Perhaps that is a “bridge too far” but you get the point.

Built Designs

Villa Müller, Prague - 1930

The exterior of Villa Müller aligns perfectly with the previously discussed Loos paper, “Ornament and Crime.” The exterior of this work is largely a white, cubic facade. It was important to Loos that there be a clear division between the largely unadorned exterior, visible to the public, and the elegantly adorned private interior spaces. Especially elegant is the relatively rare Cipollino marble, bottom right below.

Steiner House, Vienna - 1910

Designed by Loos in 1910 for a painter and her husband.This project was again in keeping with the Loos philosophy as the exterior is clean and lacking ornamentation it expresses somewhat boxy lines, staying pure in terms of simplicity. As you can see below, the interiors exhibits more sumptuous finishes.

Archweb.com summed it up nicely below:

Today, the Steiner House is considered an architectural landmark and is a popular destination for lovers of modern architecture. Its design has influenced subsequent generations of architects and is a prime example of the transition to modern architecture in the 20th century.

Loos House (Goldman & Salatsch Building) Vienna -1912

As might be expected, given the Loos philosophy, the exterior of this work is not of the riveting, eye-catching variety. But upon closer inspection, the solid Cipolino marble columns (below) add more than a touch of class to the pedestrian level.

Prof. emeritus Dr. Monika Wagner said this about this use of materials to create architectural statements, as indirectly asserted by Loos,:

I do not consider materials to have intrinsic meaning. Rather, every material possesses certain potential, which stems from its properties, hardness or softness, heaviness or lightness, flexibility or rigidity, to name but a few examples

Conclusion

Over two centuries later, the assertions by Loos that architectural design featuring ornamentation is somehow equivalent to moral turpitude seems slightly ridiculous. Placing him within the context of his era is important. That being before two devastating world wars, you may choose to mitigate his hyperbole based on what was culturally significant in the early 20th century versus what is currently important.

The influence of Adolf Loos on the Bauhaus and on twentieth-century modern architecture as a whole is indisputable, particularly in his direct impact on figures such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. He passed away at age 62 in 1933.

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