Perched on rock outcroppings along the shore of Lake Superior, a Marquette, Michigan residence is a display of harmonies between residential life and a profound natural topography of forest, lichenous bedrock, and freshwater horizon. The single-story home lays about the landscape in an X shape: an architectural strategy to minimize the home’s footprint, while preserving those stony landforms that inspired…
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The dune grass modern
Beyond the St. Joseph North Pier Inner and Outer Lights where the dune unfolds in a rare stretch of broad, flat sandy beach—in contrast to its frequent dramatic bluff-line—a series of vernacular volumes clad in soft weathering materials is nestled amid dune grass and lakeshore. Intimate and sheltered from the street, the cluster of interconnected gabled spaces is intentional in…
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Ford Airport’s operations center
On June 30, 2021, the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan broke ground on a new $7.7 million operations center that will house key teams such as operations and communications, dispatch, and a new emergency operations center, or EOC. The 11,600-square-foot facility will streamline daily activities and day-to-day management at the airport, as well as serve as…
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Made to measure
Theodore Alexander Furniture has become synonymous with widely available, luxury home furnishings for the modern residence, with stockists and showrooms around the world. One of these showrooms is housed in the Michigan Design Center in Troy, Michigan, and together with its series of Ralph Lauren Furniture offerings provides visitors from around the Midwest with the best of the global design…
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Elegant lake charm
A fixture in Traverse City and Northern Michigan’s interior design landscape, Kitchen Choreography LLC is known for its artful orchestrations of a home’s most traveled and functional spaces. The firm offers remodel, restoration, commercial, and new construction services and construction management, transforming numerous residential intangibles into elegant, welcoming spaces for living. For this ability, the team at Kitchen Choreography was…
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Merging of vision
Since their founding in 1991 and 2002, respectively, the firm of KTGY Architecture + Planning and the interior design group of Simeone Deary Design Group have built rich project and service portfolios based on their singular approaches to space and experiential design, and comprehensive work ethics that leave no detail unturned. KTGY is a primarily multi-family residential and mixed-use design…
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The urban home
In downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, the renovation of the third floor of a historic building transforms a vacant, open space into two individual residences for its owners. Featuring a collaborative design-and-build team, which includes two businesses local to Kalamazoo, Intersect Studio and Buday’s Home Electronics Simplified, the project comprises the restoration of the building while maintaining its charm, as well as…
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Ecosystems of design
A current marker of the advancements in sustainability and innovative thinking of modern architecture, the AIA’s COTE® Top Ten program entered its 25th year this year, with a slew of new awards for North America’s most ecologically groundbreaking works of architecture. Projects across typologies, from university libraries and the health sciences to commercial adaptive reuse and deep tech—such as Microsoft’s…
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Empathy in industry
A reusable epinephrine auto-injector; a minimalist household composter; an eco-friendly and contemporary ceramic and glass toaster: there’s no lack of innovation within University of Cincinnati alum Mary Friedl’s expanding portfolio. The industrial designer graduated from the university’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning last May 2020 and promptly won a competition for designing an eco-friendly toaster as a part…
