Larry Speck

In a time when architects have become stars and their recognizable styles have become personal brands, it is refreshing to see a well-known and respected designer like Carlos Jimenez create a building that is informed more by its clients' needs and the context of its site than by a signature formal gesture. The private library and guest accommodation Jimenez has designed for Melba and Ted Whatley…

Mack Scogin describes his firm's recent dormitory at Tulane University as a project that needed "to come from within itself"-one wherein the designers made no attempt to "bring in external issues" or "burden the design with concerns that might be 'hot' in architecture currently." Their goal was to draw on a difficult site, a tightly defined program, a venerable institution, and a colorful locale…

Architecture swallowed postmodernism whole, gagged violently, and spit it out. In contrast, disciplines as diverse as science, psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy partook of postmodernist thought more moderately, nourishing a generation of creative growth with genuine relevance to contemporary life and values. In architecture, the same seminal ideas that nurtured other fields became too…

CRITIQUE The new Robert C. Byrd United States Courthouse and Federal Building in Beckley, West Virginia, is an unapologetic homage to the architecture of another era. The General Services Administration jury that selected its design in a 1995 limited competition lauded its reference to 1930s WPA style, which they considered to produce "an extremely successful solution to making a public building…

Moshe Safdie is a refugee from the “style wars” that have swept across the international design landscape over the last three decades. Outspoken in his disdain for movements like postmodernism and deconstructivism, he has fled from trendy skirmishes between “hot” and “not” on favor of an independent career, producing work that is difficult to categorize or label. Not a media darling and rarely…

Preservation. In 1959, a decade after Alvar Aalto’s Baker House opened on the MIT campus, Steen Eiler Rasmussen wrote enthusiastically of it in his landmark book, Experiencing Architecture. ”The entire design is based on the functions of the building… For these young people Aalto has created a building which entirely avoids the stereotyped rooms and anthill atmosphere of old-fashioned…

San Antonio, a city created by "act of will."

His work for Trinity University spanned a quarter century.