Explore - Essay

Founding Dwell editor-in-chief Karrie Jacobs visited MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition and finds that prefab might not change our homes, but it could change our architects.

At least 19 unfinished renovation projects currently reside within the crotchety old puzzle box of a house that I share with my wife, Keri. Together, the 21 of us live in a spirit of communal...

So this is what city life boils down to: flat roofs, right angles, and steel-mesh awnings for industrial spice.  

In the late winter of 2003, I watched out my window as a fuel truck idled below, belching black smoke. A hose, snaking through the frozen grass, stretched from the back of the truck to the side of...

Davy Rothbart is the editor of Found magazine, a frequent contributor to public radio’s This American Life, and author of the story collection The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. His...

The land we purchased—a little less than 40 acres in the Floyd County foothills of southwestern Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains—is the hilly, unfarmable center of several large...

Energy-monitoring and smart technologies have set up shop in the home, transforming machines for living into veritable living things—with all the bells, whistles, frills, and failures.

Welcome to the era of the megacity. The world has more big cities than at any time in history, and those cities are larger than they have ever been. There are now more than 30 urban centers with...

The impending demolition of Kisho Kurokawa’s Capsule Tower strikes a nostalgic nerve in writer Tom Vanderbilt, who travels to Tokyo for a look at a future that never was.

Many architects and designers, when talked down from the theoretical towers of “sculptural forms” and “floating volumes” and made to speak of their craft in humbler terms,...

An Architectural Drama in Five Parts

Richard Neutra's son Raymond examines the internal architecture of his legendary father through a 1958 Berkeley psychological study.

Sixty years ago it was Mies, Alvar, and Lou. Today it’s Zaha, Rem, and Renzo.

William McDonough + Partners’ design for a small village in northeastern China was meant to stand as a model for sustainable development. Instead, it proves that the pursuit of better design...

My father’s prefabricated housing project, Habitat ’67, broke ground in April of 1965. The building, which grew out of his bachelor’s thesis, came to be regarded as one of the...

As the war-torn city of Kabul, Afghanistan, is transformed into a maze of blast walls, military checkpoints, and foreign bases, how might security architecture be changed to foster psychological...

I am looking at my favorite photograph of my summer house in Nantucket. It is not a particularly pretty picture. It was taken on a cloudy and gray day. You cannot see the beach, or the moors, or...

Years ago, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas won a design competition for an addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) by suggesting the entire museum be torn down and replaced. There...