Inform Magazine

Heirloom Farm Studio, designed by Bushman Dreyfus Architects, is a poplar-clad studio outside Charlottesville that lives in the popular imagination, as well as at the center one of architecture’s most fundamental theories about shelter. Virginia Hamrick Photography

03/23/23

Contexts Collide at Heirloom Farm Studio to Create a Familiar Form

Heirloom Farm Studio, designed by Bushman Dreyfus Architects is a poplar-clad studio and an expression of colliding contexts.

The recent retrospective, "Modeling A Vision," chronicled CDR's first two decades and what its organizers called the "cyclic process of searching, teaching, and researching." Pictured: the award-winning LumenHAUS inside and out.

06/10/24

Featured

Celebrating Two Decades of Innovation at Virginia Tech’s Center for Design Research

For over two decades, the Center for Design Research (CDR) has been a beacon of innovation, creativity, and excellence.

05/15/24

Featured

What’s so radical about transparency?

It’s not a new way of pursuing equity in a firm—it’s a proven one, says WPA’s Mel Price, FAIA

05/14/24

Featured

Page + Miller Hull’s gambit for Niger

The U.S. Embassy Campus in Niamey, Niger, was completed in 2022, and designed by Miller Hull and Page Southerland Page. It is a 2023 AIA Virginia Award of Honor recipient.

03/12/24

Featured

Q+A: Alex Shifflett on her first decade of practice

Architect Alex Shifflett, AIA, is an associate principal at KGD Architecture who says good design is not just good for communities, but great as a teaching tool for young designers hoping to make a difference. “I’m lucky enough to work on projects that matter because it suits the way I work and think,” she says.

The Lake|Flato Porch House presents a new way of thinking, designing and building. Learn more about it by attending Design Forum XVI.

02/21/24

Featured

Ted Flato: Exploring smarter, better, easier, cheaper at Design Forum XVI

What is the future of practical technologies that make design easier, as well as the future of how architecture is made? Can large language models (LLMs) transform materials specification for the better? For the greener? Does empathy differentiate humans from machines? Does it matter? How will future technologies change the studio culture of firms? What does craft mean these days, anyway? These and other questions are up for debate this year at Design Forum XVI (Apr. 5-6, in Richmond) under the banner of “[Un]Certainty: Reflections on Craft at the Cyber Frontier.”

To the eyes of mall dwellers in Charlottesville—somewhere between central casting for a Steely Dan song and central Virginia’s Horse & Hound set—CODE is a handsome building that appeals to the eye and seems, inarguably, just right. Photography © Alan Karchmer

02/15/24

Featured

Op-Ed: CODE Charlottesville improves an unloved corner of Halprin’s masterpiece

The LEED Platinum Center of Developing Entrepreneurs, known as the CODE Building, opened in Charlottesville in 2022 to acclaim, both as a work of interdisciplinary design and as a sensitive intervention in the downtown pedestrian mall

The Rotunda at the University of Virginia was designed by Thomas Jefferson as the architectural and academic heart of the University’s community of scholars. It was completed in 1828. Image courtesy of the National Park Service.

02/06/24

Events

Traditional Building Conference focuses on Rotunda restoration, resilience

The Traditional Building Conference, now in its eighth year, rolls into Charlottesville on Mar. 26-27 with a blue-ribbon set of speakers covering a range of topics