Notes on Building

A ceramic block printed from the logic of a termite mound, a Los Angeles courtyard shaded by earth and rope, and the century we spent bolting machines onto buildings that already knew how to keep themselves cool.

A concert hall above Lake Geneva is wrapped in copper that was pre-aged on purpose, so it can keep aging. Most of what we build is designed for its opening-day photograph. This one is designed for the next hundred years.

Snøhetta will turn Alvar and Aino Aalto's Paimio Sanatorium into a hotel and spa. The building was designed to heal people who were actually sick. That is a harder, better idea than wellness.

A Meiji-era prison in Nara has reopened as a hotel. The building was built to hold people. Now it is built to rest them, and the brick does not know the difference.

Snøhetta just put a president's library under a hill of grass and built its walls out of dirt and wood. The sustainability crowd has arrived, sixty years late, at the argument brutalism made all along.

OXMAN is teaching bacteria to grow pigment straight into fabric. It is the oldest idea in modernism, finally arriving at the molecule.

A panel in Milan says the greenest building is the one you don't build. We agree, and we'd like to take the romance out of it.

Meganom is wrapping a skinny Manhattan tower in more than 200,000 aluminium "bricks." They are beautiful, and they are not bricks, and the word is doing work the building should be doing on its own.

House of EM built a whole house out of four materials and then had the discipline to stop. A note on Skylark, brick, and why doing less is the costly version.

A hundred years after his death, the Sagrada Família finally tops out. Good moment to ask which architecture actually descended from him — and why ours didn't.