Architecture Office: The Latest Architecture and News

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The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.

A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

This week David and Marina of FAME Architecture & Design discuss architecture concepts in the office. The two cover the importance of conceptual thinking, the lack of concepts in architecture offices, projects in architecture school vs in practice, the challenges of merging conceptual thinking and technical aspects in practice, and more. Enjoy!

The importance of lighting in interior design cannot be overstated: done right, it not only accentuates a space's architectural features but also makes inhabitants feel at ease. As Carmelo Zappulla of Lighting Studio External Reference explains in an interview with Architonic, light is a crucial tool to add an emotional element and 'animate a space.'

There are a plethora of artificial lighting options to choose from. Which works best is usually determined by the nature of the interior they're in and the desired spatial effect. One of the most common is indirect lighting. This technique uses fixtures to aim light onto surfaces that act as reflectors, softening the emitted rays to prevent pillar-like, bulky beams in favor of a more evenly distributed glow.

Architect William (Bill) Hellmuth, the chairman and CEO of HOK, passed away on April 6, 2023, after a long illness. Hellmuth was elected president of HOK in 2005, then CEO in 2016. He accepted the new role on the condition of remaining design principal for HOK’s Washington D.C. studio, as he enjoyed having a hands-on approach and working directly with clients and HOK project teams. One year later he was also named chairman of the firm, helping the office to raise its profile as an innovative and influential company within the design community.

Shawn Basler, a New York-based architect, founded his firm Basler Mosa Design Group in 2000; seven years later he merged with Perkins Eastman, one of the world’s biggest and most dynamically growing architectural practices. He is now co-CEO/Executive Director—with Nick Leahy and Andrew J. Adelhardt III—of this 1,100-strong global force headquartered in New York City and operating a total of 24 offices, seven of which are outside of the U.S., namely in Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, Singapore, Vancouver, Toronto, and Guayaquil in Ecuador. In addition to designing many international projects, Basler shares the responsibility for fostering the firm’s growth around the world.

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Every new generation enters the workplace with its own communication style. From viral TikToks to provocative statements like “We rarely use email,” Gen Z’s entrée into the workforce will certainly make its own waves. But what do we need to consider as we recruit, try to retain, and sell to this next generation of designers?

The Architects Registration Board, which is responsible for the licensing and registration of architects in the United Kingdom, has announced that UK architects no longer have an automatic recognition of their qualifications in EU countries following the country’s exit from the Union. This decision signifies that architects who wish to pursue their career in the Union’s 27 countries, are obliged to present compliance certificates and specific documentation to relevant authorities in each country.

Seeking to give insights into the architectural creative centers of the world, Rainer Taepper created an architectural book that doesn’t feature buildings and plans. Looking behind the scenes, the architecture photographer highlighted both the working spaces of international design firms and the creative people, who contribute to the conception of a building.

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Olson Kundig is one of the quintessential Seattle-based architectural practices, with a focus on creativity, experimentation, and craftsmanship that has allowed them to expand on a global scale over the past few decades. This expansion has necessitated office improvements and renovations throughout the years, the most recent of which occurred in 2018. As explored in a recent article by Metropolis Magazine, this 2018 expansion reflected key values of collaboration and flexibility, expressed through the firm's unique visual and kinetic language.

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James Stirling (1926-1992) was a British architect who is considered by many as the premier architect of his generation and an innovator in postwar architecture. Some of his most famous projects include the Sackler Museum, No 1 Poultry, and the Neue Staatsgalerie. Through the influence of his teacher Colin Rowe, Stirling had a deep understanding of architectural history, yet never adopted a singular doctrine. His career began with designs that were more aligned with what would later be labeled as the high-tech style, but evolved into buildings that were a series of dynamic and often colorful arrangements. Stirling’s aesthetic tropes ultimately gave the final push that broke architecture free from the clutch of post-war European Modernism as he turned the Modernist canon of “form follows function” into a hyperbole by celebrating the expression of a building’s program with his over-the-top details. Stirling’s work is still largely influential, and the recursive wave of history has shown that the underlying implications of his oeuvre remains somewhere in all architectural practice of the present day.

This article was originally published on Archipreneur by architect Chris Barnes who, with his wife Bonnie Robin, runs the practice Field Office Architecture.

There aren’t many architects I know who do not love to travel, and I’ve always felt the two things are intrinsically linked. Maybe it’s our constant quest for visual inspiration and new ideas, or perhaps our fascination for how people live their lives and how wildly that varies from border to border, and the impact that has on our physical environments.

Either way, in the age of Instagram and unavoidable envy at the seemingly constant stream of images of laptops by the beach, cocktail in hand my wife and business partner Bonnie Robin, and I were keen to try this thing called digital nomadism for ourselves.

The guiding principles and priorities that drive the professional practice of architecture are the subject of abundant philosophical ideas and entrenched opinions—but how can we understand the current state of the profession without sweeping generalizations? Towards that goal, OfficeUS (the experimental institution born from the US Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale) has published a book examining the realities of today’s architectural workplace culture based, like countless works of cultural studies across many academic disciplines, on the documents produced by that culture. Specifically, the OfficeUS publication compiles information from office manuals and workplace handbooks spanning the last century of architectural practice to offer a practical but insightful portrait of how architects organize, run, and view their own profession.

In a new interview with Metropolis Magazine, OfficeUS Manual editors Eva Franch i Gilabert, Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, and Jacob Reidel explain their motivations for the project as well as their perspective on what this unique approach reveals about the culture of today’s architectural practice.