Ed is an Architectural Design Management Consultant, as well as, a Graphic and Web Designer. Ed combines all of these services to form the firm edESTESdesign which provides a wide variety of design and multimedia solutions for your business.
Architecture has always been a mirror of its moment — a physical record of what a society values, fears, and hopes to become. As we look toward the next decade, that mirror is reflecting something unmistakable: buildings are being asked to do more. They must perform environmentally, adapt technologically, and speak culturally, all while still standing as objects of beauty and permanence. At edESTESdesign, we see this not as a burden on the profession but as an invitation — a chance to design with greater intention than at any point in recent memory.
Emerging Architectural Style
The next decade won’t be defined by a single dominant style so much as by a growing comfort with hybridity. Biophilic forms are merging with parametric geometry. Adaptive reuse is being treated not as a compromise but as a design discipline in its own right, with architects finding poetry in the bones of existing structures rather than starting from a blank site. We’re also seeing a return to regional vernacular — buildings that look like they belong to a specific place, climate, and community, rather than to a global aesthetic that could be dropped anywhere. This isn’t nostalgia; it’s a maturing profession recognizing that context is not a constraint but a design asset.
Contemporary building with hybrid parametric and biophilic architectural design
Sustainable Architecture Innovations
Sustainability is shifting from a checklist to a design language. Mass timber construction is maturing from novelty to mainstream structural option. Net-zero and net-positive energy buildings are becoming realistic benchmarks rather than aspirational outliers. Materials science is opening doors we didn’t have a decade ago — carbon-sequestering concrete, responsive facades that shade themselves, water systems designed into a building’s architecture rather than bolted onto it after the fact. The most exciting shift, though, is philosophical: sustainability is increasingly understood as a design driver from day one, not a certification pursued after the concept is finished.
The Greenwood Biocentre features a lush vertical garden and eco-friendly architecture.
Technology Integration in Architecture
Technology’s role in architecture is moving well past rendering software and into the building’s actual behavior. Digital twins are letting teams simulate a structure’s full lifecycle — energy use, occupant flow, maintenance needs — before a single foundation is poured. AI-assisted generative design is helping architects explore far more spatial and structural options than manual iteration ever allowed, compressing what used to be weeks of study into days. And smart building systems are quietly becoming standard infrastructure rather than a premium add-on, giving occupants buildings that respond to how they’re actually used. The tools are changing fast; what hasn’t changed is the need for a designer’s judgment to shape what those tools produce.
An architect works on a detailed 3D building model at her desk in a busy office.
Cultural Influences on Future Designs
Perhaps the most meaningful shift ahead is architecture’s deepening relationship with culture and community identity. Designers are being asked — rightly — to engage the histories, traditions, and lived experience of the communities they build within, rather than importing a signature style regardless of place. This means more collaborative design processes, more attention to how public and civic spaces reflect the people who use them, and more architecture that tells a specific story instead of a generic one. Buildings that honor cultural memory while still looking forward will define the most resonant work of the next ten years.
Civic building reflecting cultural and regional architectural identity
Designing for What’s Next
The decade ahead will reward architects and clients who treat design as a conversation between innovation and identity — pushing forward technologically and environmentally while staying rooted in place and purpose. That’s the philosophy behind every project we take on at edESTESdesign. Whether you’re exploring a new architectural design concept, thinking through the urban design implications of a site, coordinating program management for a complex build, or shaping the graphics and digital content that tells your project’s story, we’d welcome the conversation.
Our cities are under pressure. The gap between housing demand and supply has become one of the defining challenges of our time — and conventional construction alone cannot close it. Increasingly, architects, urban planners, and housing advocates are turning to prefabricated homes not as a compromise, but as a genuinely compelling alternative. Here’s what’s driving that shift, and what it means for the future of our urban fabric.
What Are Prefabricated Homes?
A prefabricated home — or prefab — is one whose structural components are manufactured off-site in a controlled factory environment, then transported and assembled on location. This is fundamentally different from conventional construction, where virtually all work happens on the building site under variable field conditions. The category is broad: it includes panelized systems (where wall, floor, and roof panels arrive ready to erect), modular construction (where three-dimensional volumetric units are stacked and connected), and fully factory-built homes that arrive nearly complete.
The materials themselves — engineered wood, steel framing, insulated concrete forms, and cross-laminated timber (CLT) — aren’t categorically different from those used in traditional architecture. What changes is the production logic. Factory conditions enable tighter tolerances, continuous quality control, and a dramatic reduction in weather-related delays. The result is a building process that is faster, more consistent, and far more predictable in cost.
“Prefabrication doesn’t constrain design — it shifts where design decisions are made. The factory floor is simply a different kind of construction site, one where precision is a structural feature, not an afterthought.”
Trends Driving the Popularity of Prefabricated Homes
Several converging forces have elevated prefabrication from niche alternative to mainstream housing strategy. The most immediate is affordability. Urban land costs remain persistently high, construction labor is both expensive and increasingly scarce, and traditional timelines add months of carrying costs to every project. Prefab addresses each of these. By moving much of the construction process into a factory, labor efficiency improves dramatically, and compressed on-site schedules reduce the financial exposure of developers and public agencies alike.
Sustainability is an equally powerful driver. Factory production generates significantly less material waste than site-built construction — studies consistently show reductions of 50–80 percent. Precision manufacturing also supports tighter building envelopes, translating directly into lower operational energy use. For cities with aggressive carbon reduction targets, prefabricated housing offers a path to meeting both volume and performance goals simultaneously. This aligns closely with the principles guiding our work in urban design, where environmental performance and density must advance together.
The policy environment is catching up. Jurisdictions from California to Japan to the Netherlands have introduced zoning reforms, expedited permitting pathways, and public procurement programs explicitly designed to accelerate modular and prefab housing at scale. When regulatory friction decreases, the economic and sustainability advantages of prefab become even more compelling.
Benefits of Choosing Prefabricated Homes
The case for prefabricated homes rests on multiple compounding advantages. Cost is the most frequently cited: a modular or panelized home typically delivers 10–20 percent savings over comparable site-built construction, with that margin growing as manufacturers achieve greater production volume. More important for urban markets is schedule certainty — projects that once took eighteen months now complete in nine, which matters enormously for housing agencies and developers managing financing risk.
Design flexibility is a less intuitive but equally important benefit. Early prefab was rightly criticized for its sameness in appearance. Contemporary systems have addressed this directly. Manufacturers now offer extensive finish libraries, façade options, and modular geometries that architects can configure to respond to specific site conditions, cultural contexts, and program requirements. The factory constraint has become a design vocabulary rather than a limitation — something our architectural design practice has found increasingly instructive.
At the urban scale, the implications are significant. Cities facing acute housing shortages need not just more units, but more units faster. Prefab’s compressed timelines create a meaningful increase in the effective production rate of affordable housing. Combined with its suitability for infill sites and its compatibility with accessory dwelling unit (ADU) programs, prefabricated housing is one of the most powerful tools available to urban design and program management teams working on housing equity.
Future Outlook for Prefabricated Homes in Urban Areas
The trajectory is clear. Global prefabricated construction markets are forecast to exceed $250 billion by the early 2030s, with the residential sector — and particularly urban multifamily typologies — driving the bulk of that growth. The demographic pressures are real: urbanization continues, households are smaller and more diverse in their needs, and the climate imperative demands higher-performance buildings at lower embodied carbon costs.
The innovations shaping the next chapter of prefab are substantial. Building Information Modeling (BIM) and mass customization platforms now allow architects to design within factory constraints in real time, dramatically compressing the design-to-production cycle. Robotics and advanced automation are increasing throughput while further reducing per-unit costs. Mass timber — engineered wood products like CLT and glulam — is emerging as a structural system that combines the prefab workflow with dramatically lower embodied carbon and genuine architectural character.
Perhaps most significantly, the industry is developing adaptive and demountable systems — housing designed not just for initial occupancy but for disassembly, reconfiguration, and redeployment as community needs evolve. This lifecycle thinking represents a fundamental shift from housing as a fixed capital investment to housing as a durable, responsive urban resource. Communicating these possibilities clearly — across stakeholders, agencies, and communities — is precisely where graphics and digitalcontent design plays a critical role in the housing conversation.
For architects, urban designers, andprogram managers, this is an inflection point. The firms and agencies that develop expertise in prefabricated systems now — understanding their production logic, their design opportunities, and their integration with urban housing policy — will be positioned to shape the next generation of American cities.
edESTESdesign brings design expertise to every scale of the housing challenge.
From architectural design and urban strategy to program management and community engagement, our integrated approach is built for the complexity of contemporary housing work. Let’s talk about what’s possible for your project or community.
Walk through a neighborhood that works — one where streets feel safe, where public spaces invite you to linger, where the mix of uses makes daily life feel effortless — and you are experiencing the result of intentional urban design. It rarely announces itself. When it is done well, it simply feels right. But behind that feeling is a disciplined body of thinking about how people move through space, how communities form around place, and how the built environment either supports or undermines the quality of everyday life.
Urban design is not city planning, though the two are closely related. It is not architecture, though it depends on it. It occupies the critical space between the two — operating at the scale of blocks, corridors, districts, and waterfronts — and it is one of the most consequential design disciplines practiced today.
Placemaking: The Art of Designing for People First
At the heart of urban design is a deceptively simple idea: places should be designed for the people who use them, not merely for the vehicles that pass through them or the parcels that contain them.
Placemaking is the practice that gives this idea its form. It asks a foundational set of questions before any line is drawn: Who uses this space? At what times of day? For what purposes? What would make them feel safe, welcomed, and inclined to return? The answers shape everything — the width of a sidewalk, the placement of seating, the presence of shade, the relationship between a ground-floor storefront and the street outside it.
The most celebrated urban spaces in the world — from Copenhagen’s harbor front to the High Line in New York to the revitalized waterfront districts of cities across the American South — share a common characteristic. They were designed with the pedestrian experience as the primary brief, and every other consideration was subordinated to that principle.
A bustling urban civic hub featuring public transit, a farmers market, and a community center.
The Public Realm as Civic Infrastructure
Streets, squares, parks, plazas, and waterfronts are not simply leftover space between buildings. They are civic infrastructure — as essential to a functioning community as roads, utilities, and transit systems. The quality of the public realm directly shapes social cohesion, economic vitality, public health, and community identity.
Urban designers understand this in a way that no other discipline is specifically trained to address. The decision to narrow a travel lane and widen a sidewalk is not merely an engineering choice — it is a statement about whose experience the city prioritizes. The decision to activate a ground floor with retail, community uses, or transparent facades rather than blank walls is a decision about how public and private life relate to each other. These are design decisions with long-term civic consequences.
Technological tools have significantly expanded the urban designer’s capacity to make these decisions well. Geographic information systems allow designers to map and analyze the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of a place with precision that was simply unavailable a generation ago. Data-driven pedestrian flow analysis, climate modeling, and community engagement platforms have made it possible to design places that are responsive to real conditions rather than assumed ones.
Aerial view of a suburban neighborhood centered around a lake with residential and commercial buildings
Urban Vision: Thinking at the Scale of Community
Beyond the individual project, urban design requires vision — the capacity to see not just what a place is, but what it could become, and to hold that vision clearly enough to guide decisions across years, sometimes decades, of incremental change.
A master plan is the primary instrument of urban vision. It establishes the framework — land use, street network, open space, building typologies, phasing — within which individual projects accumulate into a coherent whole. A well-crafted master plan is not a rigid blueprint. It is a set of principles and parameters flexible enough to accommodate change while strong enough to preserve design intent over time.
The communities that have transformed most successfully — that have turned disinvested corridors into vibrant districts, or underutilized waterfronts into economic and cultural anchors — have almost always done so with the guidance of a clear urban design vision, executed with patience, consistency, and skilled program management.
That last point matters more than it is often given credit for. Vision without execution is aspiration. The discipline that connects the two is where the real work of urban design lives.
People of all ages enjoy activities and socializing in a lively community plaza
Designing Cities Worth Living In
Urban design is ultimately about human dignity — about whether the places where people live, work, gather, and move through the world support or diminish their experience of it. That is a high standard. It is also the right one.
At edESTESdesign, urban design is practiced with that standard in view — from master planning and corridor studies to placemaking strategy and public realm design. Every engagement begins with the same question: what does this place owe the people who will inhabit it?
If you are working on a project at the neighborhood, district, or city scale and want a design partner who brings both vision and rigor to the table, we would welcome the conversation.
From Hampton Institute to Roy Wilkins Square, this post explores civic architecture, urban design, and the power of public spaces in community development.
by Ed Estes
Architecture is never just about buildings. It is about the people who move through them, around them, and because of them. It shapes how neighborhoods breathe, how communities gather, and whether the built environment invites belonging or enforces exclusion. That conviction has guided my work across more than four decades — from a transit-oriented thesis project on a pivotal Atlanta corridor to the urban design and community-focused practice I sustain today through edESTESdesign.
Understanding Architectural Impact
Most people experience architecture the way they experience weather — constantly, without quite naming it. A well-placed public plaza draws foot traffic and commerce without anyone consciously choosing to be “activated.” A poorly scaled streetwall silences a block without anyone passing an ordinance to do so. The built environment exerts a quiet but persistent force on how communities function.
A lively public square filled with people contrasts with an empty narrow side street in a historic city.
What distinguishes architectural impact from mere construction is intentionality. When design responds to the real patterns of human movement, economic life, and cultural identity in a place, it can do extraordinary work. When it doesn’t — when it is imposed rather than developed — even technically accomplished buildings can hollow out the communities they were meant to serve.
I came to understand this not abstractly, but through the specific landscapes of Atlanta where I grew up — Historic Collier Heights, the Fair Street corridor, the MLK Jr. Drive and Ashby Street intersection that defined the western edge of my professional imagination long before I knew I was an architectural designer. These were places where design decisions, often made by people far removed from the community, had shaped everyday life in ways both enabling and limiting.
That understanding doesn’t leave you. It becomes the lens through which you evaluate every project.
Case Studies of Community Development
n 1982, my senior thesis at Hampton Institute proposed Roy Wilkins Square — an Office and Shopping Park sited along the MLK Jr. Drive and Ashby Street corridor in Atlanta. The design was transit-oriented before that term had wide currency in American planning discourse. It was grounded in linkage — how the project would connect to the surrounding fabric of the Westside rather than standing apart from it.
Roy Wilkins Square wasn’t a building proposal alone. It was an argument: that design along a historically underinvested corridor could be economically viable, community-scaled, and architecturally distinguished at the same time. That you didn’t have to choose between serving the community and making something worth looking at.
That argument still holds. Across American cities, the most durable examples of community development through architecture share a common trait: they were designed with the communities they serve, not for an imagined demographic that doesn’t yet live there. Projects like the redevelopment of Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, the revitalization of Shaw and Columbia Heights in Washington, DC, and the ongoing transformation of Prince George’s County’s urban corridors all illustrate what is possible when investment, design quality, and community voice align.
The lesson isn’t that architecture saves communities. It’s that architecture done right supports what communities are already trying to become.
Public Spaces and Community Interaction
Community members enjoy a lively, accessible urban plaza with a central fountain and ample seating.
Of all the elements of the built environment, public space may carry the most democratic charge. A well-designed plaza, park, or streetscape belongs to everyone — it is the architecture of civic life itself.
The most effective public spaces do several things simultaneously. They provide room for unplanned encounter — the kind of accidental community-building that no program or event can fully replicate. They accommodate multiple scales of use, from the solitary person reading on a bench to the neighborhood festival that fills every square foot. And they signal, through their design quality, that the people who use them matter.
Urban furniture, shade, lighting, accessibility, cultural signage, ground-floor activation — none of these are decorative extras. They are the infrastructure of public life. Get them right, and a space becomes a neighborhood asset. Get them wrong, and the space either empties or gets avoided entirely.
Future Trends in Urban Architecture
The pressures reshaping urban architecture today are not subtle. Climate adaptation, housing affordability, mobility transformation, demographic shift, and the ongoing reckoning with how American cities were shaped by exclusion — these are not trends to track from a distance. They are the conditions under which every serious urban project must now be designed.
People enjoy a sunny day at a lively mixed-use urban community with shops, cafes, and green spaces.
A few directions are particularly significant:
Climate-responsive design is moving from a specialty consideration to a baseline expectation. Buildings and urban spaces that manage heat, water, and energy as part of their fundamental design logic — rather than as add-on systems — will define the next generation of urban architecture. For communities that bear disproportionate climate risk, this isn’t an aesthetic preference. It’s a survival question.
Mixed-use, transit-oriented development continues to demonstrate its value in cities serious about reducing car dependency and expanding affordable access to economic opportunity. The principles my 1982 thesis was built on are, if anything, more urgently relevant now than they were then.
Community co-design is slowly but genuinely gaining ground as a legitimate professional practice rather than a public relations exercise. The difference between consultation and co-design is meaningful: in co-design, the community shapes the program, not just responds to a pre-formed proposal. When architects commit to this approach, the results tend to be more durable, more used, and more valued.
The adaptive reuse of existing building stock — commercial, institutional, and industrial — offers one of the most compelling opportunities for urban community development in the years ahead. Converting underutilized assets into housing, community space, and mixed-use anchors is not only environmentally sound; it is a way of keeping communities rooted in the physical fabric of their own history.
The future of urban architecture will be shaped by whether the profession can hold these technical, social, and environmental imperatives together — and by whether the communities most affected by design decisions have genuine power in making them.
Ed Estes is the founder of edESTESdesign, a multi-disciplinary practice in architectural design, urban design, graphic design, and digital content design based in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He is also the Founder and Executive Director of the Hampton University Architecture Alumni Association (HUAAA) and a Hampton (Institute) University Class of 1982 alumnus.
When we stand before a truly iconic building, the experience is immediate. Before we read a plaque, before we learn its history, the building communicates. It commands space. It holds memory. It means something. But what separates a building that simply exists from one that endures in the cultural imagination? The answer lies in a specific convergence of architectural features, design innovation, and intentional thinking — principles that are as relevant to a neighborhood library as they are to a world-famous concert hall.
The Architectural Features That Recur in Iconic Structures
Iconic buildings are not defined by size or budget. They are defined by the clarity of their design decisions. Across building types, scales, and eras, a handful of features appear consistently in structures that achieve lasting recognition.
Structural expression — the honest display of how a building holds itself up — is among the most powerful. When the structure is also the aesthetic statement, the building communicates confidence and integrity simultaneously. Civic presence is equally important: iconic buildings do not simply occupy a site, they activate it, shaping the experience of arrival and defining the public space around them. Material distinction gives buildings their sensory identity — concrete, glass, timber, and steel each carry meaning beyond their physical properties. And symbolic geometry gives form its voice, making a building legible and memorable before a single word is spoken about it.
These are not qualities reserved for landmark commissions. They are design standards — ones that should inform work at every scale.
Innovation as a Design Instrument
The buildings we recognize as icons of their era are almost always the product of designers who embraced the technological tools and structural innovations available to them — without surrendering their design vision to those tools.
Parametric modeling and digital fabrication have expanded the formal vocabulary of contemporary architecture, enabling geometries and surface behaviors that previous generations could only theorize. Long-span structural systems have redefined interior volumes and spatial freedom. Adaptive building envelopes now allow structures to respond dynamically to climate and use. In urban design, geographic information systems and data-driven planning have transformed how designers understand and respond to place at the neighborhood and city scale.
The lesson is consistent across all of these advances: technology serves design. The designer’s role is to command the tools, not be commanded by them. The most compelling buildings of our time perform beautifully — environmentally, structurally, and culturally — because their designers held those priorities in equal measure.
How Features and Innovation Combine to Create Iconic Status
Iconic status is ultimately a cultural phenomenon, but it is enabled by design. The structures that endure in collective memory are those that resolve a formal challenge memorably — that hold technical mastery and human intention in the same hand.
They are site-specific and universally legible. Technically advanced and experientially immediate. Formally distinctive and deeply purposeful. Fallingwater is cantilever and falling water — and it is also a declaration about the relationship between architecture and the natural world. The Salk Institute is poured concrete and Pacific light — and it is also a meditation on knowledge, community, and the passage of time. These buildings do not simply demonstrate what is possible. They make an argument for how the problem deserved to be solved.
That is the standard that distinguishes good design from great design — and it applies equally to a building, a master plan, and a visual identity system.
Design Thinking Across Every Scale
At edESTESdesign, these principles inform every engagement — whether the work is architectural design, urban design, program management, or graphics and digital content. The vocabulary changes with the discipline, but the underlying commitment does not: every project deserves the same rigor, the same formal intentionality, and the same respect for the people who will ultimately experience it.
If you are working on a project that calls for that level of design thinking, we would welcome the conversation.
The Rise of Mixed-Use Developments: Building Communities, Not Just Buildings
Today’s most vibrant urban spaces aren’t purely residential, commercial, or recreational—they’re purposefully designed as hybrid ecosystems where living, working, shopping, dining, and cultural engagement coexist within walkable districts.
Mixed-use development represents a fundamental shift in how cities are conceived. Rather than the segregated zoning patterns of mid-20th century urban planning, contemporary projects intentionally integrate diverse functions to create economically resilient, socially dynamic neighborhoods that serve residents 24/7.
Why Mixed-Use Works
Mixed-use development addresses several critical urban challenges simultaneously:
Economic vibrancy: Ground-floor retail supports permanent jobs and foot traffic that activates streets at all hours
Walkability: Proximity of housing to employment, services, and entertainment reduces car dependency
Housing affordability: Diverse property types within the same development—penthouses, studios, family units—can create economic diversity
Street safety: Continuous human activity creates natural surveillance and social cohesion
Sustainability: Efficient use of infrastructure, shared parking, and reduced transportation needs lower environmental impact
Contemporary Examples Reshaping Cities
The Vessel sculpture at Hudson Yards surrounded by high-rise buildings and visitors
Hudson Yards, New York City combines 28 million square feet of office space, luxury residential towers, boutique hotels, cultural venues (including the Shed performance space), dining, and retail—all connected by elevated pedestrian walkways. The intentional mix creates a self-contained urban ecosystem while integrating with the broader West Side neighborhood.
People enjoy an evening stroll and dining near the waterfront in a bustling city district
Canary Wharf, London transformed a derelict dockland into a mixed-use development blending finance headquarters, residential apartments, schools, cultural facilities, and extensive public space. The deliberate diversity has shifted London’s economic geography and become a model for post-industrial urban regeneration.
The illuminated Singapore skyline reflects on Marina Bay during twilight.
Singapore’s Marina Bay demonstrates how mixed-use development can anchor entire urban districts. Residential towers, offices, museums, theaters, shopping malls, and parks are integrated within walking distance, creating a 24-hour neighborhood that serves multiple functions simultaneously.
Empowering Communities through Inclusive Design
The most successful mixed-use developments recognize that community needs extend beyond commerce. Affordable housing components, community centers, schools, libraries, and public gathering spaces aren’t afterthoughts—they’re fundamental to the development’s DNA.
Projects like Tysons, Virginia and The Arsenal Yards in Boston demonstrate that truly inclusive mixed-use development requires:
Economic integration: A percentage of units reserved for workforce and affordable housing
Cultural accessibility: Public plazas, parks, and facilities open to all, not just paying customers
Community ownership: Local businesses, not just national chains; support for minority-owned enterprises
Public participation: Meaningful community input during design, not token engagement after decisions are made
The Architecture of Collaboration: Architects, Planners, and Communities Co-Creating Places
The romantic image of the solitary architect sketching a masterpiece is exactly that—romantic fiction. Today’s most transformative urban projects are born from intense, often contentious collaboration between architects, urban planners, engineers, civic leaders, and the communities those projects will serve.
Beyond Top-Down Design
Traditional urban design flowed downward: visionaries proposed, governments approved, and communities adapted. The best contemporary practice inverts this hierarchy. Community input doesn’t arrive after design is complete; it shapes the design from inception.
This collaborative model recognizes a fundamental truth: architects and planners don’t live in the places they design (at least not primarily). Communities do. Their lived experience, cultural values, mobility challenges, and aspirations are irreplaceable design intelligence.
Discovery & Listening: Before sketching, teams conduct extensive community engagement—walking tours, pop-up studios, demographic analysis, and listening sessions that map both assets and pain points. Projects like The 606 in Chicago began with years of listening to residents about what the abandoned elevated rail corridor could become.
Co-Design: Rather than present a finished vision, architects facilitate design thinking workshops where community members participate in envision potential futures. This isn’t tokenism—it’s genuine problem-solving where expertise (professional and experiential) informs decision-making together.
Iteration: Design evolves through feedback loops. Proposals are shared, critiqued, refined, and reshared. Projects like the Huntington Park renovation in Cleveland involved dozens of iterations based on community input.
Stewardship: Collaboration doesn’t end at opening day. Successful projects establish ongoing community governance structures that guide implementation and evolution.
When Collaboration Creates Magic
The Rebuild Foundation’s 69 E69th Street, Chicago transformed a vacant lot through intensive community engagement. Rather than imposing a vision, architects worked with residents to create a flexible community gathering space that evolved with neighborhood needs.
People gather outside a vibrant community center with market and arts spaces
Bryant Park, New York City was radically reimagined through collaboration between landscape architects, business improvement district executives, and neighborhood residents. The result: one of the city’s most beloved public spaces, designed to serve diverse users from workers to tourists.
A vibrant view of Bryant Park surrounded by the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan.
The High Line Elevated Park, New York succeeded not because it was a brilliant architectural concept (though it was), but because community advocates like Friends of the High Line spent years listening to neighbors’ concerns and shaping the design to serve local needs while creating citywide value.
People enjoying a sunny day walking and sitting on the elevated park pathway in the city
Legitimacy: Communities support what they helped create
Context sensitivity: Local knowledge prevents costly missteps
Equity: Diverse voices prevent projects from serving only affluent users
Sustainability: Community-centered design has longer lifespans and deeper social value
Innovation: Cross-disciplinary thinking generates solutions no single expert would devise alone
The best urban designers today aren’t ego-driven visionaries—they’re orchestrators of expertise, facilitators of diverse perspectives, and stewards of democratic participation in shaping public space.
Government Initiatives: Policy and Investment Catalyzing Architectural Innovation
Great architecture rarely emerges from market forces alone. Government policy, zoning reform, and strategic investment are the scaffolding upon which innovative urban places are built.
Policy Frameworks Enabling Innovation
Form-Based Codes replace restrictive zoning that mandates separation of uses with regulations focused on the form buildings take and how they meet streets. This shift—prioritizing walkability and mixed-use integration—has enabled projects like Portland’s Pearl District and Miami’s Wynwood to thrive.
Inclusionary Zoning Policies require or incentivize developers to include affordable housing within market-rate projects. While imperfect, these policies address the housing affordability crisis that plagues American cities. Cities like San Francisco and New York have embedded affordability requirements into development approvals.
Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Policy concentrates zoning density and investment around public transit. Rather than sprawling car-dependent development, TOD policy bundles housing, mixed-use development, and transportation infrastructure to create walkable communities. Arlington, Virginia’s Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor shows how deliberate TOD policy can transform communities.
Adaptive Reuse Incentives through tax credits and streamlined approval processes encourage historic preservation while generating new uses. The federal historic tax credit has catalyzed billions in private investment in adaptive reuse projects.
Government Investment in Public Space
Public space isn’t a market commodity—it’s infrastructure that markets reward but governments must fund.
Placemaking Initiatives like Bloomberg’s Placemaking Program transformed underutilized public spaces by funding temporary installations, events, and programming that demonstrated latent community potential. These investments often catalyzed private development and permanent improvements.
Public Art Integration funded through percent-for-art ordinances embeds cultural value into urban environments. Cities like Seattle have mandated that a percentage of development costs fund public art, resulting in vibrant civic experiences.
Parks and Greenway Investment like Atlanta’s BeltLine, funded through a combination of public bonds and public-private partnerships, catalyzed economic revitalization while improving public health, environmental quality, and equity of access to recreation.
International Models Worth Learning
Copenhagen’s Climate Adaptation Strategies demonstrate government-led innovation. Rather than treating flood management as purely engineering, the city created attractive climate adaptation landscapes—sunken parks and bioswales that manage stormwater while providing recreational amenities.
Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon Restoration involved government-mandated removal of a freeway and restoration of a buried stream. What seemed economically illogical became a transformational public space that generates immense civic value and economic activity.
Barcelona’s Superblocks Initiative reorganizes traffic patterns to prioritize pedestrians and cyclists over vehicles. The government restructured street hierarchies and speed limits to create car-free neighborhoods that increased social interaction and public health.
Singapore’s Housing Development Board demonstrates how government can solve housing affordability through direct provision. Rather than relying on market-rate development, Singapore builds public housing that serves diverse income levels while maintaining quality architecture and community spaces.
The Infrastructure Gap
Despite policy frameworks and demonstrated models, American cities face a critical funding gap. Infrastructure investment remains insufficient for the retrofitting, transit expansion, and public space improvement that cities need. Cities that innovate do so often despite budget constraints, not because of adequate public investment.
The federal infrastructure bills represent a partial correction to decades of underinvestment, but channeling those funds toward innovation—rather than merely maintaining aging systems—requires visionary governance and technical capacity.
What Works: Policy Lessons for Innovative Urban Development
Clear vision: Cities with coherent long-term visions (Vancouver’s EcoDensity Initiative, Portland’s sustainability goals) attract development aligned with community values
Expedited approval: Remove bureaucratic barriers for projects meeting sustainability and equity criteria
Mixed financing: Combine public investment, tax incentives, and private capital rather than relying on any single funding source
Equity as requirement: Make affordability, minority-owned business support, and community benefit non-negotiable components of public investment
Flexibility over prescription: Allow developers and designers freedom to innovate within policy frameworks, rather than mandating specific solutions
Regional coordination: Prevent sprawl and maximize infrastructure investment efficiency through coordinated policy across jurisdictions
The Convergence: When Communities, Professionals, and Governments Align
The transformational urban projects of our era aren’t accidents. They emerge when three forces align:
Community aspiration: Neighborhoods articulate what they need and deserve
Professional expertise: Architects, planners, and engineers synthesize that vision into buildable, beautiful, sustainable form
Government commitment: Policy, zoning, and investment create the conditions where ambitious projects become economically feasible
Projects like Toronto’s St. Lawrence neighborhood (community-driven mixed-use development with government support), Melbourne’s cultural precinct (government investment attracting architectural talent), and Portland’s comprehensive sustainability integration (clear policy enabling private innovation) demonstrate that this alignment is possible.
The trajectory of urban development is shifting away from isolated towers and sprawling suburbs toward denser, more mixed, more collaborative, and more accountable approaches to shaping cities. This shift isn’t driven by single visionaries or pure market forces—it’s driven by communities demanding better, governments investing in shared futures, and architects willing to listen, collaborate, and serve purposes larger than their own creative expression.
That’s where design visioneering becomes design action.
The Opportunity for edESTESdesign
Whether you’re developing mixed-use projects that serve entire neighborhoods, stewarding collaborative design processes that bring diverse perspectives into alignment, or working with government partners to translate policy into transformational built outcomes, the framework is the same: listen deeply, design inclusively, and measure success not by architectural applause but by the quality of lives lived in the spaces you create.
That’s architecture with purpose. That’s design that matters.
HOK’s support of Tuskegee University students continues the practice of empowering aspiring Black architects that began in the late 1800s with Robert R. Taylor.
Few architecture programs have as powerful a story as Tuskegee University.
Robert R. Taylor, often cited as the first accredited Black architect in the U.S., designed much of the school’s eastern Alabama campus. Taylor also developed the school’s architecture program and recruited Tuskegee students to construct buildings. His students even made their own building materials—including bricks and windows—further highlighting the skill and resourcefulness of African Americans in the turn-of-the-century South.
Yet for all its proud history, Tuskegee’s architecture program is often overlooked today. The same might be said for the nation’s seven other historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) with NAAB-accredited architecture schools.Black Architect
“Many people don’t realize HBCUs have architecture programs,” said Amma Asamoah, an assistant professor of architecture at Tuskegee’s Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Sciences. “To me that’s an issue. Our students offer perspectives that are missing in architecture. They come from communities that haven’t had a voice in the planning and design of the built environment.”
Trenton Scott, a fifth-year architecture major at Tuskegee, is such a student. Scott developed a passion for drawing as a child in nearby Birmingham. As a teen, he turned his attention to drawing buildings and imagining how derelict properties in his industrial hometown could be transformed for community use.
“Community engagement is a big reason I wanted to do architecture,” said Scott. “I see the potential for architecture to bring people together.”
Investing in HBCU Design Students
Over the past eight months, Scott has had the opportunity to further his dream of becoming an architect as an HOK Diversity x Design Scholarship recipient. Awarded to nine BIPOC and minority design students, the scholarship includes a $10,000 stipend for school expenses and a paid internship with HOK.
As an intern with HOK’s St. Louis office, Scott has worked on a variety of project types, including developing a conceptual design for a proposed Afghan community center.
“I’ve gained so much from my HOK experience,” said Scott. “It has exposed me to things about design and technical architecture I haven’t experienced in school. I have a list of people at HOK whom I consider mentors.”
For Angelo Arzano, managing principal for HOK in St. Louis, Scott exemplifies the untapped talent that can be found at schools like Tuskegee.
“These are students who might go unnoticed because they’re not from bigger architecture programs,” said Arzano. “Yet in terms of skill and ambition, they’re just as promising.”
Since 2017, HOK’s St. Louis studio has hosted four Tuskegee interns. The studio also sends delegates to Tuskegee several times a year to lead portfolio reviews, do guest lectures and attend career fairs.
“We want to expand the pipeline of minority talent in architecture,” said Arzano. “It’s something we’re passionate about in St. Louis and across HOK.”
Tuskegee Design Team Win
Last November, HOK’s St. Louis studio helped pay for Scott and several of his classmates to travel to Nashville to participate in the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) 2022 conference and design competition. The student portion of the competition challenged teams from 30 schools to envision a cultural center and landmark bridge for north Nashville, a historically Black section of town that has seen a surge of gentrification in the fast-growing city.
Tuskegee’s entry won first place. A team from Ivy League Cornell University placed second.
“That win proves the caliber of our students,” said Tuskegee’s Asamoah. “It shows their ability to understand historically marginalized communities and translate their empathy, awareness and experience into the built environment.”
Asamoah looks forward to Tuskegee students earning more wins in the coming years. She hopes, too, that more design firms will get involved in preserving Robert R. Taylor’s legacy by supporting Tuskegee and other HBCUs.
“HOK’s relationship has been very nourishing for our students and our department,” said Asamoah. “I invite other firms to also come down, visit the campus, learn about our rich history and take a hands-on approach to helping us grow that legacy.”
After $724 million and a decade of battles, the pugnacious David Geffen Galleries reassert the city’s role as a petri dish for experimental design.
Visuals by Jake Michaels
Michael Kimmelman followed the new LACMA project for more than a dozen years and recently toured the building as curators were installing the art.
Forecasts were dire about what’s officially called the David Geffen Galleries, after the donor who gave $150 million.
“The blob that ate Wilshire Boulevard,” announced Architectural Record in 2014. “Suicide by architecture,” lamented The L.A. Review of Books five years later.
The building opens to museum members in the coming weeks and to the general public on May 4. I expect it will be wildly popular.
The new LACMA, which opens on May 4, is a curvaceous concrete sandwich floating 30 feet over Wilshire Boulevard.
By turns uplifting, lyrical and pugnacious, the new Geffen Galleries bid to alter the cultural and civic weather of Los Angeles and reassert the city’s role as an American petri dish for experimental design and derring-do.
The architect is Peter Zumthor, a Swiss winner of the Pritzker Prize who, until now, was known for mostly modest-sized gems, including a spa in the Alps and a tepee-shaped concrete field chapel for a family of farmers outside Cologne, Germany.
When Michael Govan, LACMA’s director, tapped Zumthor for the job, he had never designed in America, much less anything this big. That was nearly 20 years ago.
The project turned out to be the Battle of the Somme. Critics were brutal. Raising money in L.A. was a slog. Govan and Zumthor wrestled over details. But they shared a big vision. I happened to be a fly on the wall when Zumthor made an initial pitch to LACMA trustees, introducing the idea of a museum lofted into the ether by floating the concept of tree houses and footbridges to replace the existing campus.
He sketched the tree houses on a large sheet of drawing paper, stared down at the page, then ripped the page from its pad, tossing it on the floor, as if restlessly searching in real time with his pencil for a better solution. Several trustees had been staring at their phones. They started leaning forward in their chairs.
Govan enlisted Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to partner with Zumthor and help him navigate American building codes and all the structural engineering, seismic requirements and environmental issues.
Efforts were made to mitigate the carbon footprint. The museum’s tens of thousands of cubic yards of concrete were intended to look immovable and eternal like the Pyramids. But the building would also have to be able to slide five feet in any direction atop seismic isolators in the event of an earthquake.
What results is a feat of concrete engineering to go along with the goals that Govan had for displaying LACMA’s collection. It needed to be reimagined and reshuffled, Govan argued, with ancient Greek sculptures, Indonesian batiks, old master paintings and midcentury automobiles presented on equal footing and in fresh combinations across a single stage.
Girdled in wraparound windows, the LACMA building lets in sunlight that slants into the galleries, creating dramatic shadows and leaving darker areas suitable for light-sensitive art.
The approach was something that many art museums have attempted for years, in one version or another; but this was to be an overhaul of an entire institution.
Architecturally, it would require the opposite of the usual orthogonal, white-box galleries. Zumthor devised a labyrinthine arrangement of liminal spaces — like a village with squares, lanes and back alleys — that encourages serendipity and in which it’s easy and useful to get lost.
The shape of the building ended up an amorphous multilegged beast, with up to 80-foot cantilevers. To a passing driver on Wilshire, it can appear to have emerged from the La Brea Tar Pits next door.
Its sleek, slithering single floor of galleries is lofted 30 feet into the air on seven humongous piers and sandwiched between two slabs of concrete supported by post-tension cables. Zumthor decided he wouldn’t try to make the concrete look immaculate, and it doesn’t.
It is streaked, pocked and stained. In Europe, his Swiss crews can make concrete resemble silk. He worked with American crews on LACMA, with different skills and “designed to their craft,” is how Eric Long, a structural engineer at SOM, put it to me. It was a pragmatic, old-school Romantic approach, touting virtue in rough edges.
I spoke with a few of the workers, who said they had never been asked to do anything so difficult or creative.
Early reactions to the building, when the still-drying concrete galleries were unveiled last year without any art on the walls, focused on the splotches and water stains. Give the concrete time, Zumthor responded. It will age and mellow.
Those stains and fissures have now started to morph into spidery patterns and delicate veils. In rooms that previously looked like bunkers, the walls are painted in colored pigments mixed with chemicals that bond with the concrete to transfigure the irregularities. The colors are deep and rich. The effect is akin to textured fabric.
Govan and Zumthor often talked over the years about the architecture’s emotional impact, and the feelings that the building ought to provoke when people interact with art. That experiential talk sounded glib to skeptics — shorthand for Barnum & Bailey. It’s not how curators traditionally describe the purpose of a museum.
Some curators were unhappy and left. I interviewed a few of the ones who remained. They described how the building has required them to think outside their silos in sometimes uncomfortable ways, across departments, organizing themed, not chronological or nationalist, displays.
But they said that the building’s layout also feels openhearted and has given them and LACMA’s collection a new lease on life.
Two L.A. titans back then — the financier Howard F. Ahmanson and industrialist Norton Simon — led the museum’s board. Ahmanson favored the architect Edward Durell Stone to design the new museum. Simon backed Mies van der Rohe.
They settled on William Pereira, an affable Oscar winner for special effects who became the architect of midcentury L.A. icons like the Theme Building, at LAX. For LACMA, he came up with a trio of lightly decorative modernist pavilions organized around leaky fountains whose pools blackened when oil leached out of the tar pits.
The collection outgrew Pereira’s buildings by the 1980s, when LACMA built an addition by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates and a wing by the architect Bruce Goff to house a private collection of Japanese art.
Goff was a kind of genius. But the campus was a hodgepodge. More glamorous art museums like MOCA and the Getty were stealing the spotlight in L.A.
Govan arrived in 2006. He oversaw the completion of two more wings, undistinguished buildings by Renzo Piano, that doubled LACMA’s display space. Piano also made some improvements to the layout of the campus. But Govan had plans of his own.
Salvaging Pereira’s architecture and the Hardy Holzman building were fool’s errands, he announced. That infuriated Angelenos nostalgic for Pereira, who favored preservation over demolition, but Govan sold county officials on his plan.
He would need $125 million in public funds, he told them, to build Zumthor’s project. Fixing Pereira would cost taxpayers some multiple of that. He would get the rest from private donors, he promised.
And astonishingly, he did.
That the Geffen Galleries end up with 110,000 square feet of display space, 10,000 fewer than the Pereira buildings had totaled, became a particular fixation of some detractors. What sane, responsible public museum, they asked, spends hundreds of millions of dollars to shrink its institution?
Govan pointed to those wings by Piano, which had doubled LACMA’s display area.
But Zumthor’s building turns out to be its own best response. It’s hard to imagine visitors wishing it were any larger. Wending through the Geffen Galleries is intense. Views of the city provide distraction and joy. The new building romances Los Angeles. Where it curls over the street, spreading an arm across Wilshire, it suggests a civic embrace. Wraparound windows offer killer views over the city.
The sun sifts through curtains made of sputtered chrome that Govan commissioned from Reiko Sudo, a textile artist. The curtains cast shadows across walls and floors that shift over the course of the day, making the galleries seem alive. L.A. twinkles and beckons through the fabric.
Chrome curtains by the textile artist Reiko Sudo diffuse light into the galleries while creating gauzy, glittery views of the surrounding city.
Where the new museum meets the street, it’s less seductive. Landscaping remains sketchy. Stairs are steep and forbidding. The splotchiness of the concrete on the exterior will mellow, too, but it’s still distracting.
It hasn’t helped that the county insists on a fence, separating the museum from the sidewalk. The new LACMA presents a singular opportunity to expand the public square at the geographic heart of the city into a magnetic urban center, alongside the tar pits, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a new metro station. Visitors are going to expect more than jumbo sculptures, cafe chairs and a few palm trees in the hardscaped plazas.
When I visited the museum the other day, curators were finishing up art installations in the painted rooms, which looked sumptuous yet felt monastic. I was reminded of the chapel Zumthor designed for the farmers outside Cologne. It involved the construction of a tepee made from spruce trees, encased in framed concrete.
Zumthor instructed the farmers to burn the logs.
What remained was a cone-shaped void, large enough to accommodate a few worshipers, with an oculus where the logs had been tethered, open to the sky. A single door led through a tunnel into the chapel.
The concrete bore the blackened impressions of the burned wood and retained some of its smell. A number of winters ago I found myself alone in the chapel. The light was blue and soft. Snow drifted through the oculus. The silence felt visceral. It seemed to vibrate.
I hadn’t quite felt that same rush again, until now.
Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic.
A version of this article appears in print on April 15, 2026, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Suddenly Los Angeles Is Ahead of the Curve.
Michael Kimmelman followed the new LACMA project for more than a dozen years and recently toured the building as curators were installing the art.
Forecasts were dire about what’s officially called the David Geffen Galleries, after the donor who gave $150 million.
“The blob that ate Wilshire Boulevard,” announced Architectural Record in 2014. “Suicide by architecture,” lamented The L.A. Review of Books five years later.
The building opens to museum members in the coming weeks and to the general public on May 4. I expect it will be wildly popular.
The new LACMA, which opens on May 4, is a curvaceous concrete sandwich floating 30 feet over Wilshire Boulevard.
By turns uplifting, lyrical and pugnacious, the new Geffen Galleries bid to alter the cultural and civic weather of Los Angeles and reassert the city’s role as an American petri dish for experimental design and derring-do.
The architect is Peter Zumthor, a Swiss winner of the Pritzker Prize who, until now, was known for mostly modest-sized gems, including a spa in the Alps and a tepee-shaped concrete field chapel for a family of farmers outside Cologne, Germany.
When Michael Govan, LACMA’s director, tapped Zumthor for the job, he had never designed in America, much less anything this big. That was nearly 20 years ago.
The project turned out to be the Battle of the Somme. Critics were brutal. Raising money in L.A. was a slog. Govan and Zumthor wrestled over details. But they shared a big vision. I happened to be a fly on the wall when Zumthor made an initial pitch to LACMA trustees, introducing the idea of a museum lofted into the ether by floating the concept of tree houses and footbridges to replace the existing campus.
He sketched the tree houses on a large sheet of drawing paper, stared down at the page, then ripped the page from its pad, tossing it on the floor, as if restlessly searching in real time with his pencil for a better solution. Several trustees had been staring at their phones. They started leaning forward in their chairs.
Govan enlisted Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to partner with Zumthor and help him navigate American building codes and all the structural engineering, seismic requirements and environmental issues.
Efforts were made to mitigate the carbon footprint. The museum’s tens of thousands of cubic yards of concrete were intended to look immovable and eternal like the Pyramids. But the building would also have to be able to slide five feet in any direction atop seismic isolators in the event of an earthquake.
What results is a feat of concrete engineering to go along with the goals that Govan had for displaying LACMA’s collection. It needed to be reimagined and reshuffled, Govan argued, with ancient Greek sculptures, Indonesian batiks, old master paintings and midcentury automobiles presented on equal footing and in fresh combinations across a single stage.
Girdled in wraparound windows, the LACMA building lets in sunlight that slants into the galleries, creating dramatic shadows and leaving darker areas suitable for light-sensitive art.
The approach was something that many art museums have attempted for years, in one version or another; but this was to be an overhaul of an entire institution.
Architecturally, it would require the opposite of the usual orthogonal, white-box galleries. Zumthor devised a labyrinthine arrangement of liminal spaces — like a village with squares, lanes and back alleys — that encourages serendipity and in which it’s easy and useful to get lost.
The shape of the building ended up an amorphous multilegged beast, with up to 80-foot cantilevers. To a passing driver on Wilshire, it can appear to have emerged from the La Brea Tar Pits next door.
Its sleek, slithering single floor of galleries is lofted 30 feet into the air on seven humongous piers and sandwiched between two slabs of concrete supported by post-tension cables. Zumthor decided he wouldn’t try to make the concrete look immaculate, and it doesn’t.
Tony Smith Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
It is streaked, pocked and stained. In Europe, his Swiss crews can make concrete resemble silk. He worked with American crews on LACMA, with different skills and “designed to their craft,” is how Eric Long, a structural engineer at SOM, put it to me. It was a pragmatic, old-school Romantic approach, touting virtue in rough edges.
I spoke with a few of the workers, who said they had never been asked to do anything so difficult or creative.
Early reactions to the building, when the still-drying concrete galleries were unveiled last year without any art on the walls, focused on the splotches and water stains. Give the concrete time, Zumthor responded. It will age and mellow.
Those stains and fissures have now started to morph into spidery patterns and delicate veils. In rooms that previously looked like bunkers, the walls are painted in colored pigments mixed with chemicals that bond with the concrete to transfigure the irregularities. The colors are deep and rich. The effect is akin to textured fabric.
Rooms in the new galleries are painted in lush pigments that create chapel-like spaces for such works as Craig Kauffman’s “Untitled (Wall Relief),” center, from 1967.Estate of Craig Kauffman/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York
Govan and Zumthor often talked over the years about the architecture’s emotional impact, and the feelings that the building ought to provoke when people interact with art. That experiential talk sounded glib to skeptics — shorthand for Barnum & Bailey. It’s not how curators traditionally describe the purpose of a museum.
Some curators were unhappy and left. I interviewed a few of the ones who remained. They described how the building has required them to think outside their silos in sometimes uncomfortable ways, across departments, organizing themed, not chronological or nationalist, displays.
But they said that the building’s layout also feels openhearted and has given them and LACMA’s collection a new lease on life.
Two L.A. titans back then — the financier Howard F. Ahmanson and industrialist Norton Simon — led the museum’s board. Ahmanson favored the architect Edward Durell Stone to design the new museum. Simon backed Mies van der Rohe.
They settled on William Pereira, an affable Oscar winner for special effects who became the architect of midcentury L.A. icons like the Theme Building, at LAX. For LACMA, he came up with a trio of lightly decorative modernist pavilions organized around leaky fountains whose pools blackened when oil leached out of the tar pits.
In the 1960s, William Pereira designed a trio of modernist pavilions organized around pools with fountains.Julius Shulman; via J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute
The collection outgrew Pereira’s buildings by the 1980s, when LACMA built an addition by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates and a wing by the architect Bruce Goff to house a private collection of Japanese art.
Goff was a kind of genius. But the campus was a hodgepodge. More glamorous art museums like MOCA and the Getty were stealing the spotlight in L.A.
LACMA built a wing by the architect Bruce Goff in the 1980s to house a private collection of Japanese art.Tag Christof for The New York Times
Govan arrived in 2006. He oversaw the completion of two more wings, undistinguished buildings by Renzo Piano, that doubled LACMA’s display space. Piano also made some improvements to the layout of the campus. But Govan had plans of his own.
Salvaging Pereira’s architecture and the Hardy Holzman building were fool’s errands, he announced. That infuriated Angelenos nostalgic for Pereira, who favored preservation over demolition, but Govan sold county officials on his plan.
He would need $125 million in public funds, he told them, to build Zumthor’s project. Fixing Pereira would cost taxpayers some multiple of that. He would get the rest from private donors, he promised.
And astonishingly, he did.
That the Geffen Galleries end up with 110,000 square feet of display space, 10,000 fewer than the Pereira buildings had totaled, became a particular fixation of some detractors. What sane, responsible public museum, they asked, spends hundreds of millions of dollars to shrink its institution?
Govan pointed to those wings by Piano, which had doubled LACMA’s display area.
But Zumthor’s building turns out to be its own best response. It’s hard to imagine visitors wishing it were any larger. Wending through the Geffen Galleries is intense. Views of the city provide distraction and joy. The new building romances Los Angeles. Where it curls over the street, spreading an arm across Wilshire, it suggests a civic embrace. Wraparound windows offer killer views over the city.
The sun sifts through curtains made of sputtered chrome that Govan commissioned from Reiko Sudo, a textile artist. The curtains cast shadows across walls and floors that shift over the course of the day, making the galleries seem alive. L.A. twinkles and beckons through the fabric.
Chrome curtains by the textile artist Reiko Sudo diffuse light into the galleries while creating gauzy, glittery views of the surrounding city.
Where the new museum meets the street, it’s less seductive. Landscaping remains sketchy. Stairs are steep and forbidding. The splotchiness of the concrete on the exterior will mellow, too, but it’s still distracting.
It hasn’t helped that the county insists on a fence, separating the museum from the sidewalk. The new LACMA presents a singular opportunity to expand the public square at the geographic heart of the city into a magnetic urban center, alongside the tar pits, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a new metro station. Visitors are going to expect more than jumbo sculptures, cafe chairs and a few palm trees in the hardscaped plazas.
When I visited the museum the other day, curators were finishing up art installations in the painted rooms, which looked sumptuous yet felt monastic. I was reminded of the chapel Zumthor designed for the farmers outside Cologne. It involved the construction of a tepee made from spruce trees, encased in framed concrete.
Zumthor instructed the farmers to burn the logs.
What remained was a cone-shaped void, large enough to accommodate a few worshipers, with an oculus where the logs had been tethered, open to the sky. A single door led through a tunnel into the chapel.
The concrete bore the blackened impressions of the burned wood and retained some of its smell. A number of winters ago I found myself alone in the chapel. The light was blue and soft. Snow drifted through the oculus. The silence felt visceral. It seemed to vibrate.
I hadn’t quite felt that same rush again, until now.
Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic.
A version of this article appears in print on April 15, 2026, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Suddenly Los Angeles Is Ahead of the Curve.
Despite wide diversity, city-states in Ancient Greece were united by a common design system that structured their architectural landscape.
Cities occupied a special place in ancient culture in Greece since they were relatively independent units not only economically but also militarily and politically.
Initially, settlements grew organically without a common design idea. However, later, ancient Greeks began to rebuild their towns and plan public areas according to certain universal rules.
The city layout usually had a rectangular structure. Streets and houses were arranged in such a way that their inhabitants could access water, have a lot of sunlight, and be surrounded by bountiful landscapes.
Inventor of urban design
Hippodamus, an ancient Greek architect and urban planner, is considered to be the founder of this system.
He introduced a new principle of city planning, which was characterized by geometric shapes and straight wide streets intersecting at right angles.
Commissioned by Pericles around the middle of the 5th century BC, Hippodamus developed a plan for Piraeus, the port of Athens. He is also credited as the one who designed Ancient Rhodes, which is now roughly under the entire modern city.
Thus, the settlements were built and designed according to certain beliefs and had much in common.
Ancient agora
Thessaloniki ancient roman Agora. Credit: Marco Verch / Flickr CC BY 2.0
The agora was the heart and center of the hectic life of any city in Ancient Greece. It was a large open space where people met, socialized, traded, discussed political issues, and gave lectures.
They were shaped as squares or rectangles and spacious enough to host plenty of shops and markets. Those squares were located close to the center and all main city roads led to them.
Temples in ancient cities
The 🏛Temple of Artemis, also known as the Temple of Diana, was a monumental ancient Greek temple located in the city of Ephesus, which is in present-day Turkey. It was dedicated to the goddess Artemis (known as Diana in Roman mythology), who was the Greek goddess of hunting,… pic.twitter.com/hDgBKRPp7m
Ancient Greek temples positioned around the Agora were dedicated to patron gods like Athena for Athens and Zeus for Olympia. These sanctuaries were designed with luxury in mind and decorated with frescoes and precious statues. A distinctive feature was the outer colonnade encircling the temple.
The towering sculptures of deities stood tall in the center for attention. Constructed from materials such as marble and bronze, these figures depicted gods standing or seated on lavish thrones.
Temples were part of sacred complexes, often featuring gardens and fountains. Entry was reserved for priests, while citizens participated in religious life through festive processions and offerings at altars outside.
A stoa, or covered walkway, lined the streets and provided shelter for pedestrians. These spaces encouraged people to gather, converse, and share news.
These structures looked like free-standing walkways with a long wall and a row of columns in front of it.
Frequently, they served to mark the agora’s borders, while the rear wall had special openings to shops where merchants sold their wares.
Theaters in Ancient Greek cities
Ancient Theater of Epidaurus. Credit: Carole Raddato / CC-BY-SA-2.0 / Wikimedia Commons
Theaters, alongside agoras, held significance in ancient Greek urban landscapes. These open-air structures were predominantly semicircular, utilizing the natural slope of hills to create amphitheater-like arrangements.
The tiered steps were segmented into wedges by stairs extending from lower to upper seats. Low railings enclosed the edge seats, while the first row featured stone backs reserved for dignitaries, priests, and esteemed guests.
Typically, a theater featured a circular and level space called the orchestra, which was separated from the front row by a low barrier.
Initially covered with sand and later paved with stone slabs, theaters could typically accommodate crowds of ten to twenty thousand people.
Residential areas
The dwelling homes of the ancient Greeks were quite different from the richly decorated buildings of public significance. As for their own residences, they preferred simplicity and conciseness.
Here is how would be a house look like in Ancient Greece. You can see that the rooms are around an open-air courtyard that might have a well and a small altar, the andron (mens' room) and gynaeceum (women's room) since normally men and women ate and worked apart. pic.twitter.com/M9Wru7r1ym
The houses of upper class families have been studied most extensively. As a rule, they were quite low and consisted of one or two floors. The premises faced the street with blank walls, and all life was concentrated in the courtyard. This open area was the main source of natural light, and the inhabitants used it for cooking, raising animals, and building religious shrines. There was also a place for heating in winter and a well with fresh water.
According to the general design plan, there were covered passages along the perimeter of the courtyard, which eventually turned into a colonnade. This type of Greek interior later became known as the peristyle.
The houses consisted of two or three rooms, the floors of which were adobe or stone. Wealthy people often chose more expensive marble tiles for flooring.
In ancient times, homes innovatively featured bathrooms supplied with water through pipes. The air in the room was at a comfortable temperature due to wind heating from the hearth of the next room. As for lighting, the owners of ancient Greek houses used resin torches.
Sectors for men and women
Within many households, a distinct feature emerged in the form of a designated men’s chamber, known as the andron. These rooms were typically elevated on platforms, representing the main and most decorative space in the house. The andron served as the epicenter of social activities, hosting guests and celebrations. A prevailing notion suggests these spaces were solely utilized by men.
In parallel, the women’s space, known as gynaeceum, found their place either on the second floors or secluded private sections towards the back parts of the building.
Defensive walls in city design
Defensive walls were most often erected from stones and bricks. Credit: Jorge-Lascar / CC-BY-2.0 / Wikimedia Commons
Massive walls around cities were a necessary and indispensable element of the urban structure to protect against raids from neighboring enemies.
Stones and bricks were the most commonly used materials for building defensive walls. Such structures also often included towers and gates for observation and repelling hostile attacks. Sometimes walls extended all the way to the city’s seaport so that new supplies could flow into the city during a siege.
The only ancient Greek city that did not have defensive walls was Sparta. The legendary legislator Lycurgus said that a well-fortified city is one surrounded by a wall of men rather than a wall of bricks. The ancient Spartans considered themselves invincible warriors, so they were proud of having no special urban constructions for protection.
The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has announced the completion of a three-year Fallingwater conservancy plan led by New York-based Architectural Preservation Studio.
The house American architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed in the mid-1930s for Pittsburgh-area retail magnate Edgar J Kaufmann was beset by water damage and other problems.
Despite several previous conservation campaigns, a carefully executed programme of works targeting its roofing, glazing systems, and masonry envelope was necessary.
Architectural Preservation Studio has led a conservancy project at Fallingwater
Located in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, Fallingwater’s well-known flaws included recurring leaks, material degradation, failures in the building envelope, and moisture-sensitive original interior finishes.
“One of the biggest challenges was Wright’s decision not to install through-wall flashing,” Architectural Preservation Studio president Pamela Jerome told Dezeen.
“Another issue was Wright’s use of river pebbles instead of broken stone for concrete aggregate.”
It took three years to fix water damage and structural problems at the famed house
“This choice caused debonding,” continued Jerome, referring to the lessening of bonding cement to round aggregate, “and led to alkali-silica reaction (or ASR).”
Now a popular tourist attraction, Fallingwater was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2019, joining the Guggenheim Museum in a selection of eight total Wright designs completed before his death in April 1959.
The project has had well-known flaws throughout its eight-decade history
“Leaks were mostly coming through the stone walls, as there is no through-wall flashing wherever a stone wall meets a roof or terrace,” Jerome said.
Preservation teams repaired leaks and gaps in the stone walls
“Some of the original structural engineering design was also problematic and required remedial intervention. The roofs and terraces were also re-waterproofed during this campaign.”
In response to these conditions, Jerome’s team filled gaps in the stone walls, repaired and sealed vulnerable joints, fixed and replaced windows and doors, and upgraded the roofs and terraces to finally remove leaks as an existential threat to the architectural treasure.
The team had updated the site previously, so it was familiar with some of the ongoing issues
“Some of the leaks were being caused by waterproofing membranes having reached the end of their service life, having been compromised by leaks from the stone walls,” said Jerome.
“Since through-wall flashing could not be remedially inserted, the stone walls were instead grouted wherever known leaks were occurring, as well as repointed. At the top of the stone walls, coping stones were lifted and through-wall flashing inserted below.”
The $7 million conservation program was considered vital to its continuance, as the remote attraction routinely draws nearly 150,000 visitors a year, according to its stewards.
“The team was already familiar with the history of the house and its interventions,” said Jerome, citing a previous effort from the office that was completed in 2004.
The roof was also updated to prevent leaks
“Not only was there the institutional knowledge from previous projects, but also the ability to evaluate what worked and what didn’t from earlier work and refine the interventions accordingly.”
Final touches on Fallingwater’s main facility will be completed next month in unison with its 90th anniversary, as the scaffolding continues to be removed. Documentation of the completed work is forthcoming.
A renovation and the introduction of ancillary structures at Fallingwater were carried out by the American studio Bohlin Cywinski Jackson in 2017 and 2019.
Much of the scaffolding has now been removed
The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy recently updated its visual identity to symbolically reflect the loss of heritage.
Elsewhere, the architect was named as one of the 15 most influential design minds in America’s 250-year lifespan by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
The photography is courtesy of Western Pennsylvania Conservancy
