• Design Spotlight,  Featured,  Print Edition

    At the exchange of ideas

    The exchange of ideas is a powerful thing. It has driven innovation and disruption, inspired revolution and change, and galvanized communities and movements. It has taken on many forms over the centuries, from spoken and written word to transcontinental rail and digital platform, as time has welcomed new eras in communication and in the movement of people, ideas, and things.…

  • Design Spotlight,  Featured,  Print Edition

    Mill 19

    On a riverfront site along the Monongahela River, located just south of downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as it flows northward to confluence with the Allegheny River into the Ohio River, a multi-phased, comprehensive redevelopment and adaptive reuse project has quietly added a new chapter for both the city and its immediate neighborhood community. What began as an aspirational initiative to transform…

  • Design Spotlight,  Featured,  Print Edition

    Kemba Braynon, AIA, NOMA

    Senior Architect Quinn Evans | Ann Arbor, Michigan   Stories are often a powerful tool and intangible link of past, present, and future. They speak to the collective cultural memory as well as the personal, and the preservation of which can often leave an influential echo in the minds of those who come long after they have been written. In…

  • Design Spotlight,  Featured,  Form,  Print Edition

    Jackie Koo, AIA, IIDA, LEED AP, NOMA

    Founder, Owner, Principal KOO | Chicago, Illinois   In architecture, as in literature, arts, and other social sciences, there is a wealth of traditions, movements, applications, and analyses—avant-garde, thought-provoking, and otherwise—that have shaped their respective fields throughout time and have challenged scholars and practitioners alike to consider the world and communication around them anew. For many, architecture is a form…

  • Featured,  Form

    Inland Seas

    Containing approximately 90 percent of the United States’ freshwater supply, and about 20 percent of the world’s freshwater supply, the Great Lakes—Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario—are a vital natural resource. Aside from providing many Americans and Canadians with clean drinking water, the Great Lakes also contribute to the region’s economy through the creation of jobs, goods, and services. Since…

  • Featured,  Form,  Travel

    Classic reborn

    In a former industrial campus along Massachusetts Avenue in Indianapolis housing one of the largest Coca-Cola bottling factories in the world, a new mixed-use site known as Bottleworks District recently opened and has set down roots as a new hospitality and entertainment epicenter. The district, a nearly $300 million, 12-acre transformative initiative, is the largest private development of its kind…

  • cook county hospital exterior, credit Mike Schwartz Photography
    Featured,  Form

    Cook County Hospital(ity)

    In the Illinois Medical District on Chicago’s West Side, Harrison Square, a new micro-neighborhood is being formed that will add residential, office, and retail and hotel space to the immediate surrounding area. One transformative project in the heart of the development oversaw the restoration of an eight-story iconic building with a distinctive Beaux-Arts façade that led to a 2020 Landmarks…

  • Creative Endeavors,  Featured,  Form

    Preservation by design

    Detroit’s architectural fabric is rich with unique historical structures—some recognizable, others more discreet—that have continually been re-purposed for the modern-day city. They also double as keenly protected sites for historic conservationists, one of which was recently recognized by both the Michigan chapter of the AIA and Michigan Historic Preservation Network for its sensitive design and rehabilitation of two historic buildings…

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    Driving curve

    Hailed as the “Versailles of Industry” during its debut in 1956, the General Motors Design Dome and Auditorium was an unprecedented architectural feat for the automotive industry designed by renowned architect Eero Saarinen, with the collaboration of Harley Earl.  For more than 60 years, the iconic structure on the nearly 710-acre GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan has come to…