The National Building Museum is near (as in, just four Metro stops away) and dear (we’ve hosted birthday parties here and attended countless events, both with and without kids), and I’m always delighted to attend their exhibition openings; I’ve had the good fortune to cover several of these for Architectural Record, and this one, Building Stories, is a lovely survey of the crossover between architecture and publication—two topics also near and dear.

An excerpt from Architectural Record:

Storytelling is an art form that requires continuous refinement, occasional improvisation, and meticulous editing until a final draft emerges, but the finished form tends to elide the process that led to it. At the National Building Museum (NBM)’s new exhibition, Building Stories, which is set to anchor the NBM’s ground floor for the next decade, the often-messy creation process is revealed and celebrated through proud display of maquettes, drafts, and sketches that become memorable stories. Ostensibly an exhibition of children’s books about architecture, Building Stories aims to be for “anyone who is naturally curious and who loves a good story—whether it’s told in words, pictures, or both,” as curator Leonard Marcus puts it.

Entering through a series of cross-laminated timber arches, visitors immediately encounter stories in the form of an eight-channel audio installation of voices reading aloud excerpts from books within the exhibition. This immersion within the realm of storytelling continues spatially through four galleries, each with its own narrative theme, all related to design overtly or otherwise. The first gallery starts with metaphorical building blocks in the form of a wall of alphabet books from around the world, just inside the CLT portal; literal building blocks, including examples of Froebel and unit blocks, also line display cases within the gallery alongside rough models by Tatiana Bilbao, Jennifer Bonner, and Frank Gehry, among others.  

Read the full article at Architectural Record, or keep scrolling here for additional images from the preview.

That’s all, folks! You’ve got roughly ten years to go see it for yourselves.

It is always a thrill to do a site visit to a see a new project, and this one was a delightful opportunity to revisit Charlottesville, a place to which I should go more often. Here’s the new Center of Developing Entrepreneurs—which integrates a stepped building into a challenging, sloping site—which appeared in Architectural Record‘s May issue.

An excerpt from Architectural Record:

Charlottesville’s Center of Developing Entrepreneurs (CODE) is a beguiling chameleon, created to foster the growth of new local businesses while also engaging its community. Designed by the local firm WOLF ACKERMAN and the New Orleans–based EskewDumezRipple (EDR), which has a second office in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., the project was conceived by CSH Development to encourage nearby University of Virginia graduates to remain in the city. The goal: to transform it into a business hub that could compete with the likes of Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas. “The whole idea of the building was, utilizing the concept of a coworking space as an entry point for young people,” says EDR principal José Alvarez. This vision—to attract and nurture talent within a building—he says, inspired a form that steps from level to level to symbolize how one can move up and “grow” a business.

Built on an incline, the structure changes scale at every elevation: On Main Street, the city’s historic pedestrian mall, it is a three-story building, in keeping with the small shops lining this promenade. On Water Street, at its southern edge, the building rises nine stories from the ground to its apex. And, from the top of Vinegar Hill, looking back toward the mall, it takes on another perspective with a four-story band of brick rainscreen, with staggered windows above a ground-level plinth, which grows from single- to double-height as the building moves downhill across an 18-foot change in elevation. It also masks the point where the building steps up, adding another three levels clad in clay-colored metal above the four-story brick band on its Water Street frontage.

Read the full story at Architectural Record: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/16223-eskewdumezripple-and-wolf-ackermans-center-of-developing-entrepreneurs-steps-up-to-history

Last week, I attended the opening of the Rubell Museum in Washington, D.C., and had the good fortune to cover the opening for Architectural Record. It’s an exciting project, one that revitalizes a historic 1906 school building within the District’s Urban Renewal zone of the 1960s. The art collection is astounding, and the architecture makes great use of the existing spaces; it almost feels like being in an art classroom getting tutored by some of the biggest names in contemporary art, and the private ownership of the museum means that shows can be riskier, content edgier, and installations bolder than what the neighboring institutions along the Mall can pull off.

An excerpt from the piece:

On October 29, the Rubell Museum opened its doors to the public in the southwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. It is part of a development more than a decade in the making of an underutilized parcel formerly occupied by the Randall School and rehabilitated by Beyer Blinder Belle (BBB). Situated on the side of the freeway cutting through southwest DC away from the progression of Smithsonian museums that line the National Mall, the Rubell Museum offers a sizable influx of contemporary art that expands the city’s cultural center. The other part of the site’s development is Gallery 64, a 12-story apartment building immediately north of the museum that was designed concurrently by BBB. Museum founders Mera and Don Rubell, along with their son, Jason, had previously opened a Miami museum designed by Selldorf Architects in 2019; the DC location marks the second outpost for an art-collecting family whose collection has grown to nearly 7,500 objects. 

Visitors to the Rubell Museum first encounter it as a row of brick school buildings—the 1906 Cardozo Elementary School and the 1927 additions that would transform it into the Randall Junior High School—along I Street SW, with a glass-and-steel entry pavilion facing an open courtyard between the museum and the neighboring Randall Recreation Center and Pool to the east. The taller apartment building, Gallery 64, serves as a backdrop (and highway noise buffer) for the Rubell Museum, with townhouse-style apartments at ground level surrounding an interior courtyard within the 492-unit mid-rise tower’s U-shaped plan; this courtyard bounces daylight into the museum’s north-facing gallery windows and reserves breathing room for the shorter building in perpetuity. 

Read the full article at Architectural Record: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15934-beyer-blinder-belle-completes-rubell-museum-in-washington-dc

AirBnB Headquarters, San Francisco. Image by Deane Madsen

Midcentury facilities designed for once-humming industries are finding new leases on life through adaptive reuse, as architects reanimate these aging relics into tech offices, loft-style residences, and even art institutions. In San Francisco, the Pinterest headquarters is a striking example of the potential for modernizing a former factory in a post-industrial age. Designed by the team of IwamotoScott Architecture with Brereton Architects, the Pinterest HQ revitalizes a former John Deere factory in the city’s South of Market district—which itself has seen transitions from Gold Rush boomtown to today’s tech hub, and also boasts adaptive reuse offices for companies such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

Pinterest’s mission of connecting people through shared interests is evident in the renovated four-story factory building, whose main feature is a central staircase that ‘knits’ its floors together; knitting is company parlance for the cross-pollination of disciplines that spurs creativity. An atrium in the former factory was expanded through to the ground floor, turning the stairs into a light well that illuminates the once-gloomy first level. For a company that trades in the aesthetic of DIY craft, the architects created a plywood diagrid ceiling in the ground-level lobby to welcome visitors. Matching custom plywood furnishings and plywood-clad conference pods extend the warm, casual feel of the office within to flesh out the factory’s bones with offices that are distinctly Pinterest.

Just a few blocks down the street from Pinterest sits the headquarters of Airbnb, the tech company that connects homeowners with visitors who need to rent a home. Airbnb occupies another former factory that has been converted into tech offices by Gensler, with a subsequent expansion by WRNS Studio. A towering lobby atrium showcases the company’s buzzing activity through windows that offer glimpses of open offices and conference rooms designed to mimic some of Airbnb’s most popular online rental listings. The renovated offices are anticipating LEED Gold certification, in no small part due to the building’s adaptive reuse; by avoiding demolition of the existing structure, the architects reduce the amount of waste generated by the project. In many cases adaptive reuse is also a more time-efficient process than demolition and reconstruction, both in terms of the physical construction and the permitting processes involved.

Read the full story at Topic Architecture.