Architecture examines finished buildings and the choices that made them: massing, structure, cladding, glazing and the way rooms take light through a day. Projects are discussed with budgets and maintenance demands attached. Intended for architects, students and homeowners commissioning work who want more than photographs of an empty living room.
Practices, projects and the materials they specify: how a building meets the street, ages in weather, and what its details cost to maintain.
Backyard cottages and garage conversions are having a moment. Here's what an accessory dwelling unit legally is, what it costs to build one, and where the rules trip people up.
Karim Al-Rashid
Two-story living spaces went from Victorian status to modernist cliché to the most requested feature in new apartments — the reasons are physics and psychology.
Rosa Marchetti
Borrowed light without a borrowed view: the century-old masonry of privacy has survived Art Deco, disco, and the 1980s — and it's creeping into new bathrooms again.
Rosa Marchetti
Factory-built homes deliver in days what site builders take months to frame — and the method's history is longer and stranger than the box jokes suggest.
Karim Al-Rashid
Raw concrete, heroic mass, and a reputation problem — Brutalism's residential towers went from feared to fashionable, and the buildings never changed.
Rosa Marchetti
Flat roofs are not actually flat — and the slope, drainage, and maintenance that make them work are the difference between modernism's best idea and its most sued.
Karim Al-Rashid
Stained glass, vaulted ceilings, and shrinking congregations add up to America's most atmospheric adaptive reuse — when the engineering and the tax credits cooperate.
Rosa Marchetti
The wedding-cake shape of American towers is not a style — it is zoning made visible, and it decides how much light reaches your street.
Karim Al-Rashid
CLT — plywood's giant cousin — lets buildings rise in wood instead of concrete, and the first U.S. towers built with it are already housing people.
Karim Al-Rashid
Low-rise buildings wrapped around a shared garden built half of American cities' housing before zoning pushed them out — and they are coming back.
Karim Al-Rashid