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Brad Cloepfil: The Elementalist (Metropolis)

Brad Cloepfil’s emerging body of work may symbolize a shift away from glib shape-making toward a more timeless and lasting architecture. (link)

On a rainless Portland day Brad Cloepfil and I walked the seven short blocks from his studio to the massive former cold-storage warehouse that houses the offices of Wieden + Kennedy, the advertising agency that coined “Just Do It.” The building opened seven years ago, but the receptionist still greets the architect by name. Ours is a well-worn path. Every commission of Cloepfil’s since—a formidable and growing list, including five art museums and an office building for Disney—was sealed upon crossing the threshold to Wieden + Kennedy’s central space. It’s easy to see why. In photographs the big central atrium, wrought in concrete and wood, looks intimate and cool. In person it opens up in a way no lens has captured—a visceral neck-snapping surprise that combines the tectonic power of Kahn with the odd wonder of Piranesi. It has been a reputation maker, and justifiably so.

Cloepfil climbed the bleacher seats and paused for a moment on one of the catwalks that cross the main void. An ad guy zipped by on a scooter, and Cloepfil giggled—a high-pitched little sound that came unexpectedly from his big body but seemed to define his attitude toward this and all his work: boyishly bemused at his own good luck on the surface, but in full control to the core. “Whatever it is that you sensed when you walked into the room, that you couldn’t see from a photograph, makes me believe in architecture,” he says.

Cloepfil is an elementalist in an architecture culture in which image is king. With the opening of the Seattle Art Museum in May; the Museum of Arts & Design, on Columbus Circle in New York, next year; and ambitious projects in Michigan, Denver, Dallas, and Glendale, California, coming down the pike, Cloepfil is emerging as a leading American architect of a new type: not a showman or a theorist, not a regionalist or a corporate architect at the helm of a large firm, but a sort of high-art boutique practitioner (meaning he chooses projects carefully) with a burgeoning reputation for powerful, if subtle, buildings.

Sometimes very subtle. Now that the term starchitecture has settled in (as both compliment and swipe) to describe a certain ambition, it remains to be seen whether clients and critics have the stomach for showpiece buildings that don’t fully show up in photographs—for Cloepfil’s kind of build ings. But he doesn’t pretend to care. His inventiveness is never about reinvention. Instead, he draws on a deeper font. “One of the things architecture does is communicate in an iconic way,” he explained, back at his studio. “That’s where architecture begins. It just picks up the conversation that’s been going on forever. And that gives me strength because I don’t have to make the new icon. All I’ve got to do is serve architecture.”

Made in the Shade (Wired)

Jeanne Gang Angles for Energy Savings With Tilted-Window Design (link)

Look up at the sun. (Ouch!) Now look down at the ground. (Ahhh.) That pretty much sums up architect Jeanne Gang's breathtakingly simple approach to reducing energy use in Windermere West, a 26-story condominium destined for Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. She tilted two-thirds of the south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows away from the sun, letting the structure make its own shade — no duckbill protrusions required. It's mainly a summertime strategy: The hottest sun of the year is also the highest in the sky — and typically coincides with the most expensive electricity. The sawtooth design creates balconies that block direct midday sun, decreasing the need for power-hungry air-conditioning. In winter, when the sun is lower, rays pass through the windows to warm the interior. Gang worked with engineering powerhouse Arup to calibrate the facade. Using a computer model, they gradually angled the glass until they hit the sweet spot — skewed enough to keep living rooms from baking, but not so much that they feel like the inside of a boat. The magic number for Chicago's latitude? Exactly 71 degrees. Which should also be the temperature inside.

The Times goes digital (again) - (Print Magazine)

[link] Among the legends of computer typography, two stand out. There’s an 18-year-old Steve Jobs stumbling into a calligraphy class at Reed College and learning about serifs and spacing—useless stuff, he thought, until it came time to design the first Mac. Then there’s Bill Hill and the coyote. An eccentric Glaswegian who sometimes still wears a kilt to his job as director of advanced reading technologies at Microsoft, Hill was tracking animals near his home when he had an epiphany: He was reading the tracks as if they were letters. Based on that notion, he wrote a treatise on pattern recognition, typography, and electronic reading. From the moment Bill Gates saw it, Microsoft got serious about e-reading.

Nick Bilton thinks about this often, sitting in the offices of The New York Times’ digital research and development lab. Bilton, who holds the dual title of art director and user-interface specialist, is the point person for Times Reader, one of the first of a new genre of Microsoft-developed digital publications that combine polished typography, tighter page design, and improved interfaces to take online reading beyond the browser.