Architectural Record

09/04/2026

When architect Matthew Griffith started to talk with his clients about building a new house in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, he quickly gleaned a few facts. “They wanted something modern, with a connection to the landscape, but they’re very private people,” says Griffith, principal at the local firm In Situ Studio. This brief seemed straightforward enough.⁠
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As the conversation continued, however, the couple introduced a wrinkle. “What they really wanted was a house that didn’t even look like a building,” Griffith adds. The husband develops video games and spends a lot of time imagining other worlds. The wife is a graphic designer. Both were keenly interested in forms and spaces that were unusual, surprising, and didn’t necessarily evince a conventional single-family dwelling.⁠
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Read more about at this 2026 RECORD house in Raleigh here: https://brnw.ch/21x5rLU⁠
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Words by Vernon Mays⁠
Photos © Cristobal Palm

09/03/2026

As LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries eases into its first few months in operation after its buzzy April debut, Los Angeles’s other hotly anticipated new museum building is gearing up for liftoff—an apt phrase to mark the occasion as not since the heyday of Oscar Niemeyer has a building drawn so many gratuitous spaceship comparisons prior to its opening. More than a decade in development, the MAD Architects (MAD Global) Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open at Exposition Park in Los Angeles on September 22—more than eight years after it broke ground in March 2018 and five years after it was slated for completion.

In its early years, the project was envisioned by its founders, Star Wars impresario George Lucas and the billionaire filmmaker’s wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, for the Chicago lakefront. Dogged by lawsuits and controversy, the planned museum ultimately landed its South L.A. location in 2017. The museum, realized in collaboration with key players such as executive architect Stantec and prolific landscape architecture practice Studio-MLA, is the second completed project in L.A. designed by Beijing-born Ma Yansong and MAD. The firm’s Gardenhouse luxury housing development opened in Beverly Hills in 2020.

Read more about The Lucas Museum here: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/18401-the-lucas-museum-set-for-september-22-opening

Words by Matt Hickman
Photos by Hufton+Crow, courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

09/03/2026

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09/03/2026

The Brick House, by D’Arcy Jones Architects, sits on an odd-shaped scrap of land in Vancouver’s historic Shaughnessy neighborhood, at the intersection of two streets, one curving and the other straight. An obvious response to the roughly triangular plot might have massed allowable square footage along the interior lot line and made a garden of the pointy and exposed remainder. Instead, the architect has collaborated with the awkward site in both plan and section, delivering a more sculptural form and a richer spatial sequence than are typical of an urban lot.

Designed for a couple and their three children, the split-level structure extends 95 feet across the main frontage, close to the limit of required setbacks. On approach, it reads as a horizontal brick-clad volume hovering above a concrete base, with a gap of Douglas fir–framed glazing separating the two, and one corner opened to form an entrance.

Read more about Vancouver's Brick House, one of our 2026 RECORD houses, here: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/18385-in-vancouver-darcy-jones-architects-designs-a-surprising-split-level-residence

Words by Katharine Logan
Photos © James Brittain

09/02/2026

From an open-air subterranean dwelling to art-filled estates, the comforts of home run the gamut in this year's Record Houses.

Read more of our September Editor's Letter here:

From an open-air subterranean dwelling to art-filled estates, the comforts of home run the gamut in this year's Record Houses.

09/02/2026

New York–based architect and urban designer Steven Kent Peterson died August 25 at his home in Manhattan from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 85. The office, Peterson Littenberg Architecture & Urban Design, which Peterson formed with his wife and partner Barbara Littenberg in 1978, received numerous awards for its urban design plans. Regarding the body of work, Jonathan Barnett, emeritus professor of practice in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania comments: “Steven’s intelligent and knowledgeable urban designs and writings with Barbara Littenberg, which explore how to apply traditional design principles in today’s cities, continue to require close attention.”

Read more about Steven Kent Peterson and his legacy here: https://brnw.ch/21x5obu

Words by Suzanne Stephens
Photo by Alan Chimacoff, courtesy Peterson Littenberg

09/02/2026

In his Letters from a Stoic, philosopher Seneca the Younger urged his readers to “set aside now and then a number of days during which you will be content with the plainest of food, and very little of it, and with rough, coarse clothing.” This meditative practice of voluntary hardship was intended to liberate one from the desires and anxieties of Roman life. Seneca, who reportedly amassed a fortune of 300 million sesterces as an advisor to Emperor Nero, is said to have traveled simply, with a single carriage and a handful of attendants rather than the lavish caravan and entourage expected for someone of his social status. “We talked about Seneca,” says Gary Leggett, the founder of Lima, Peru–based Leggett & Cahuas, detailing the collaboration that unfolded over several years with his philanthropist client. “It means a lot to consciously put yourself in a place where it could feel that wealth doesn’t mean much,” he continues. “You have to be able to also live uncomfortably.”⁠

While far from inhospitable, the unusual house Leggett & Cahuas designed for an equally improbable setting strips away many of the conveniences of modern life to question what it means to live comfortably. For several years, the client had spent stretches of the summer camping in abandoned bungalows dating from the 1970s and ’80s at the edge of the Sechura Desert, an arid yet temperate zone wedged between the Andes and the Peruvian coast. The Humboldt Current keeps the Pacific Ocean to the west too cold to allow rain clouds to form, while the mountains to the east block any precipitation from the Amazon jungle. Throughout the winter months, a persistent fog, called garúa, saturates the parched landscape, sustaining isolated pockets of life. The specific site, a few hours’ drive from Lima, receives less than half an inch of rain per year, on par with the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is considered one of the driest places on Earth.⁠
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Read more about this 2026 RECORD house in Lima, Peru here: https://brnw.ch/21x5nTR
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Words by Patrick Templeton
Photos © Gary Leggett

09/01/2026

The Aydelott Program has announced the 2026 recipients—five in total—of its decade-old fellowship that recognizes “excellence in architectural inquiry, travel, and scholarship” among architecture students at four Southern universities: the University of Arkansas; the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Auburn University; and Mississippi State University, which serves as the host institution of the program. The $20,000 Aydelott Travel Awards and the $5,000 Aydelott Prize are among the most generous travel grants available to undergraduate architecture students.

New to the 2026 award cycle is the role of former RECORD editor in chief (1996–2010) Robert Ivy as Aydelott Trust advisor and consultant. Ivy succeeds architect Reb Haizlip in overseeing both award

Read more about the latest round of travel awards here: https://brnw.ch/21x5mxt

Photo of A.L. Aydelott-designed United States Embassy in Manila courtesy Christian Brothers University Archives, Memphis

09/01/2026

Elia Zenghelis, who cofounded Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA ) in 1975 with Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp, and his then wife, painter Zoe Zenghelis, has died. He was 89.

Read our full tribute here: https://brnw.ch/21x5mrT

Photo courtesy OMA. Pictured left to right: Madelon Vriesendorp, Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis in 1978.

09/01/2026

Ascending the steep private road to what architect Neal Schwartz dubs the Meander, in a remote stretch of western Marin County an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, you might anticipate a mountaintop estate with panoramic ocean views. Instead, the destination turns out to be an interlacing weave of forested ridgelines and a house locked into one of these ridges, which, though emphatically contemporary, feels as though it belongs.⁠
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Schwartz, a longtime architecture professor at the soon-to-close California College of the Arts in San Francisco, who also heads Schwartz and Architecture - SaA, an eight-person firm in the city, took his design cues from the intricate topography, shaped over several million years by shifting tectonic plates, storms, and the other natural forces that gradually alter riverways and carve valleys in a process that geologists describe as a meander. “Unlike mountains or a single ridge, you’re really getting the zigzag of the geology,” Schwartz says in describing his reaction to the 40 acres owned by his clients, a family with young children. “We wanted to maintain that energy.”⁠
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Read more about this Marin County, California home here: https://brnw.ch/21x5lYo
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Words by John King⁠
Photos © Bruce Damonte