Architectural Record

07/25/2025

The foundation that operates the Pritzker Prize winner’s first major U.K. project said that the cost of maintaining the building had become unsustainable.

Read more here:

The foundation that operates the Pritzker Prize winner’s first major U.K. project said that the cost of maintaining the building had become unsustainable.

07/25/2025

A longtime presence in the South Lake Union neighborhood, the Seattle Unity / Spiritual Community non-denominational church once occupied an entire city block. Designed by local firm Young, Richardson & Carleton and built in 1960, the Modernist structure consisted of a round sanctuary and larger, two-story rectangular wing. Over the next six decades, as the area—historically a hub for logging and manufacturing—grew and evolved into a hotbed for tech companies, Seattle Unity remained an unwavering neighborhood fixture, welcoming to all. By the mid-2010s, it had become clear that while the organization still served its congregation, the building needed rethinking. With plans to sell part of its large parcel of land and construct a new, multi-story building on a smaller footprint, the church hired Olson Kundig for the design.⁠
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“They came to us with a vision for a building that felt both spiritual and communal, a space that could reflect their mission of openness and community,” says founding principal Tom Kundig. “ While the space needed to support worship, meditation, youth programs, and staff offices, it was just as important that it remain flexible and accessible to the wider community.”⁠
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Read more about Olson Kundig's approach to designing the new Seattle Unity here: https://brnw.ch/21wUqxp
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Words by Rachel Gallaher
Photos © Aaron Leitz

07/25/2025

The Innovation Conference returns this fall with something new: the inaugural Architectural Record Awards. Created to acknowledge the year’s best built and unbuilt projects as well as honor leading and emerging voices in the field. The 2025 conference will be a platform for both learning and recognition. Register:
https://brnw.ch/21wUqfX

Today is the final day for submissions: https://brnw.ch/21wUqfY

07/24/2025

Tomorrow is your last chance to submit into a category in the brand new Architectural Record Awards. What's keeping you from the opportunity to cement your place in history as one of the first ever Architectural Record Award winners, honored at the Record Innovation Conference and featured in RECORD's fall issue?
The countdown is on...enter before it's too late: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/17470-submit-to-the-architectural-record-awards

07/24/2025

Read an excerpt of the introduction to this new anthology, which features essays penned by the British-Italian architect between 1932 to 1965:

Read an excerpt of the introduction to this new anthology, which features essays penned by the British-Italian architect between 1932 to 1965.

07/24/2025

A Brutalist behemoth; a pinkish Postmodern castle; and to the Milanese, “the building with suspenders.” None of these quite fully describe Torre Velasca, one of Italy’s earliest skyscrapers, built between 1956–1958 by the architectural partnership BBPR. Their radical vision placed the 26-story, reinforced concrete building at the center of a modernizing postwar Milan, swapping bombed-out blocks for a vertical, mixed-use scheme of offices and housing.⁠
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BBPR stitched two tower blocks together with a ring of three-story-tall support struts projecting diagonally from the 15th floor of the lower, skinnier volume to support the wider top block cantilevering above. V-shaped horizontal outriggers grip the struts at the 18th floor. Seventy-two apartments populate the top section, crowned with a copper-covered mansard roof. With its veiled references to the Duomo and Sforza Castle’s Filarete Tower, BBPR contested both nostalgic historicism and the minimalist language of the International Style.⁠
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When American real estate giant Hines acquired Velasca in 2020, the plaster facades were shot, the mechanical systems were outdated, and the building’s street-level contribution was an inhospitable, car-choked plaza. A five-year, top-to-bottom refurbishment, led by Milan-based Asti Architetti, in close consultation with the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage, junked ancient mechanicals, stripped and replaced the plaster exterior, polished terrazzo floors and exterior mosaics, and restored the office block and apartment interiors.⁠
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Read more about the revival of Torre Velasca here: https://brnw.ch/21wUoAM⁠
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Words by Nathan Eddy
Photos © Giacomo Albo

07/23/2025

While business conditions remained soft nationwide last month, there was one bright spot as the South saw a slight uptick in billing activity for the first time in nearly a year.

Read more about the latest data here: https://brnw.ch/21wUnjM

07/23/2025

Japanophilia has a long history at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art. In 1954, MoMA had a timber house in Nagoya disassembled, shipped across the Pacific, and installed in its newly built sculpture garden on 54th Street. To accompany the installation, the museum’s longtime architecture curator, Arthur Drexler, published a 250-page treatise entitled The Architecture of Japan, which made the familiar claim that traditional Japanese design prefigured the free-flowing spaces of Modernism.

Seven decades later, a small but forceful MoMA exhibition centers around another dwelling unit that made the trans-Pacific journey: a capsule from the top floor of Kisho Kurokawa’s famed Nakagin Capsule Tower, an icon of Metabolism that was demolished in 2022 after decades of deferred maintenance.

Read more about the new MoMA exhibition, The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, here:
https://brnw.ch/21wUnjm

Words by Izzy Kornblatt
Pictured: Kisho Kurokawa in front of the completed Nakagin Capsule Tower, 1974. Photo by Tomio Ohashi

07/23/2025

Recently, Sylvia Richards Practice for Architecture completed biotech company Adimab's standalone and purpose-built lab facility connected to its original campus and nestled into the woods like a grown-up treehouse. The compact, three-story building, realized in collaboration with Vermont-based project architect Christoper Smith, has a mass-timber frame and non-load-bearing CLT walls; Atlantic cedar boards and bronze screening help to further merge it with its surroundings. And, it too has mirrored panels on the lower level, tricking the eye into imagining a floating form. Large spans of triple-pane glass framed in white oak and aluminum reflect the sky and trees and offer the scientists working inside the gift of daylight and green vistas.⁠
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The 27,000-square-foot building is meant to help attract and retain talent, but it also alleviates Adimab’s previously cramped quarters for its 140 employees. In addition to lab workstations, it provides much-needed conference rooms, open office areas, and flexible lounge spaces.⁠
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Read more about New Hampshire's newest mass-timber building here: https://brnw.ch/21wUmKQ
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Words by Laura Raskin
Photos © Timothy Downing

07/22/2025

Perched high above the River Tarn, the small French city of Albi is famed for its fortified red-brick cathedral and its medieval center, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2010. Included in the UNESCO listing is the 13th-century Pont Vieux, which, until the 1860s, was the only bridge over the river. In 1864, the railroad arrived, carried on a splendid brick viaduct that crosses the Tarn well downstream from the Pont Vieux; and, in 1867, the equally handsome Pont Neuf, a road bridge, opened upstream from the historic crossing. Unlike the Pont Vieux, located at the bottom of the narrow valley, the viaduct traverses at the level of the bluffs on either side, soaring to an impressive 100 feet above the water. In 2013, seeking to reduce traffic on the Pont Neuf and improve connections between the historic center and the suburbs, the city commissioned a new pedestrian and cycle crossing suspended from the rail viaduct.

Under the rules of the design competition, entrants could choose which side of the viaduct to hang this new footbridge. For its winning proposal, Ney & Partners, a Brussels-based firm of engineers and architects, selected the downstream elevation, a choice with several advantages and one significant drawback.

Read more about the new footbridge here: http://brnw.ch/21wUkS3

Words by Andrew Ayers
Photos © Vincent Boutin

07/22/2025

Revisit “the Goldberg Effect,” an article in the July 1976 edition of RECORD, which traced how architect Bertrand Goldberg, who was born this month in 1913, leveraged innovative engineering to rethink what a hospital should be.

Read our latest From the RECORD Archives dispatch here:
https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/17649-from-the-record-archives-the-goldberg-effect

07/21/2025

Architecture goings-on to track this month include a show on Shaker design, an exhibition charting the history of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Florida Southern College campus, and the forthcoming 2025 Exhibit Columbus Exhibition in Indiana.

Read more here: https://brnw.ch/21wUjzF

Pictured: The Vitra Design Museum; photo © Bernhard Strauss