The prefab house arrives in pieces on purpose
Factory-built homes deliver in days what site builders take months to frame — and the method's history is longer and stranger than the box jokes suggest.
Karim Al-RashidArchitecture
Practices, projects and the materials they specify: how a building meets the street, ages in weather, and what its details cost to maintain.
What makes a building Brutalist, and why people pay to live in them
Raw concrete, heroic mass, and a reputation problem — Brutalism's residential towers went from feared to fashionable, and the buildings never changed.
Rosa Marchetti
Why flat roofs leak, and architects use them anyway
Flat roofs are not actually flat — and the slope, drainage, and maintenance that make them work are the difference between modernism's best idea and its most sued.
Karim Al-Rashid
How a church becomes apartments
Stained glass, vaulted ceilings, and shrinking congregations add up to America's most atmospheric adaptive reuse — when the engineering and the tax credits cooperate.
Rosa Marchetti
What a setback does to a city skyline
The wedding-cake shape of American towers is not a style — it is zoning made visible, and it decides how much light reaches your street.
Karim Al-Rashid