'Norman said the president wants a pyramid': how starchitects built Astana

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If you could see through the forest of selfie-sticks, the view from the top of the central pavilion of the Astana Expo was a prospect like no other. It was strange enough to be standing on a glass footbridge at the summit of the tallest spherical building in the world – nicknamed the Death Star – with glass bubble elevators zooming up a central neon-lit atrium behind you and a precipitous void plunging beneath your feet. All that was missing was Luke Skywalker dangling from the bridge.

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Landscape architects now design for mass shootings

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With mass shootings on the rise, an unexpected group of professionals is trying to make it easier for people to avoid getting killed in the melee: landscape architects. These are the people who place just so many oversized planters on a pedestrian thoroughfare to prevent an attack by car bomb from hitting the crowd or the buildings behind the barricades.

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Once a geodesic dome advocate, Lloyd Kahn now favours hand-built, simple homes

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Since quitting an office job to become a carpenter in 1960, Lloyd Kahn has developed a very keen sense of the artistry and craftsmanship of home building. Once a leading expert on geodesic dome houses, Kahn now favours smaller, simpler wooden homes, his own hand-built abode in California being a welcoming example.

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'The architecture degree will be the law degree of the 21st century': A conversation with Woodbury's Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter

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So far this year in Building Type we’ve interviewed the outgoing heads of the architecture programs at UCLA (Hitoshi Abe) and USC (Qinyun Ma) and the incoming dean at USC (Milton Curry). This week we sit down with Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter, an architect who was named dean of the School of Architecture at Woodbury University earlier this year. What follows has been edited and condensed.

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How to Sell a Frank Lloyd Wright House

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In mid-September, Frank Lloyd Wright aficionados are expected by the busload in New Canaan, Conn., passing through a gate with the name “Tirranna” carved into the metalwork, to tour a 6,917-square-foot hemicycle house largely designed by America’s master architect.

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How to Grow a Chair: An Interview with Richard Reames

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Using ancient grafting techniques and a few basic tools, Richard Reames shapes living trees into furniture and sculpture near his ho­me in Oregon for clients worldwide.

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Bring me sunshine: the designers being briefed to create a happier planet

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This week saw the publication of the 2017 Global Emotions Report, an ambitious survey of the global mood. To compile it, Gallup conducted in-depth interviews with nearly 150,000 people in 142 countries. The report seeks to measure positive and negative daily experiences by asking people to rate their previous day. “Did you feel well rested yesterday? Were you treated with respect all day?

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Twelve Ways of Looking at Frank Lloyd Wright

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Few things are more satisfying in the arts than unjustly forgotten figures at last accorded a rightful place in the canon, as has happened in recent decades with such neglected but worthy twentieth-century architects as the Slovenian Jože Plečnik, the Austrian Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the Austrian-Swedish Josef Frank, and the Italian-Brazilian Lina Bo Bardi, among others.

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They command spectacular prices – but is a chair designed by an architect really any better than one by a furniture designer?

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ALEX MICHAELIS IS an archetypal London architect. Linen shirt, strong hands, zipping from desk to desk in his former-church-hall office with its industrial lighting, white desks and parquet flooring.

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More than 150 years ago, Frederick Law Olmsted changed how Americans think about public space.

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A century and a half ago, city dwellers in search of fresh air and rural pastures visited graveyards. It was a bad arrangement. The processions of tombstones interfered with athletic activity, the gloom with carefree frolicking. Nor did mourners relish having to contend with the crowds of pleasure-seekers. The phenomenon particularly maddened Frederick Law Olmsted.

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The billion-dollar palaces of Apple, Facebook and Google

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We know by now that the internet is a giant playpen, a landscape of toys, distractions and instant gratification, of chirps and squeaks and bright, shiny things – plus, to be sure, ugly, horrid beasties lurking in all the softness – apparently without horizon.

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This Is Your Brain on Architecture

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Sarah Williams Goldhagen was the architecture critic for The New Republic for many years, a role she combined with teaching at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and elsewhere.

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China breaks ground on first “Forest City” that fights air pollution

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A pollution-fighting green city unlike any before is springing to life in China. Designed by Stefano Boeri Architetti, the first “Forest City” is now under construction Liuzhou, Guangxi Province. The futuristic city will use renewable energy for self sufficiency and be blanketed in almost 1 million plants and 40,000 trees—a sea of greenery capable of absorbing nearly 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 57 tons of pollutants annually.

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Frank Lloyd Wright Credited Japan for His All-American Aesthetic

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To mark Frank Lloyd Wright’s 150th birthday, many will pay tribute to the architect’s unique gifts and contributions to the field.

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"The Best for the Most for the Least" By Sarah Cowan

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Though best known for their furniture designs, Charles and Ray Eames made more than 125 films—striking attempts “to get across an idea.”

The movie theater is a gauge for datedness. From the darkened seats, insurrectionary giggles further distance the audience from the screen, which plays on foolishly. Last month, when Metrograph screened a selection of films by the designers Charles and Ray Eames, the image of a white woman in a starched A-line dress, batting her eyelashes while caressing a S-73 Sofa Compact, hit a ten on the theater’s laugh-o-meter; it hadn’t aged well since 1954.

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