Articles by Olivia Poston

Postmodernism in the United States turned architecture into a stage for cultural memory, irony, and heritage at a moment when the built environment was becoming less civic and more commercial and curated. By the late twentieth century, architectural investment no longer centered on monumental public institutions or shared federal commitment to civic space. Private development, corporate expansion, and consumer environments increasingly shaped cities across the country. Buildings took on a new role as cultural images, expected to communicate identity and meaning as much as they provided function.

Postmodernism in the United States turned architecture into a stage for cultural memory, irony, and heritage at a moment when the built environment was becoming less civic and more commercial and curated. By the late twentieth century, architectural investment no longer centered on monumental public institutions or shared federal commitment to civic space. Private development, corporate expansion, and consumer environments increasingly shaped cities across the country. Buildings took on a new role as cultural images, expected to communicate identity and meaning as much as they provided function.

Cities around the world share a common goal: to become healthier and greener, supported by civic infrastructure that restores ecosystems and strengthens public life. The question is how to reach this. Global climate targets, local building codes, and municipal standards increasingly guide designers and planners toward better choices. Still, many cities struggle to translate these frameworks into everyday, street-level comfort and long-term ecological protection. What happens if the city is no longer treated as a traditional city, but as a national park?

Cities are warming at roughly twice the global rate, a trend accelerated by rapid urbanization. While rising temperatures are reshaping daily life worldwide, some towns and neighborhoods, often the most vulnerable and least resourced, are warming more than others. The reason comes down to the urban environment. Built infrastructure, such as roads, buildings, sidewalks, and public spaces, determines how heat moves through a city, where it accumulates, and how long it remains trapped. No matter the climate zone or geographical location, shade remains the most effective and immediate way to cool pedestrians and relieve the built environment.

What does it mean to practice ecological responsibility beyond performance metrics or carbon calculations? How can fabrication become a design method rather than a final outcome? Founded in Seoul, Yong Ju Lee Architecture is a practice led by architect and researcher Yong Ju Lee. Across installations, research-driven proposals, and cultural projects, the studio positions architecture as an experimental discipline rooted in making: a process in which design emerges from material behavior, prototyping, and fabrication logic as much as from drawing or representation. Bridging professional practice and academia, his work consistently expands the architectural toolkit through computational design, experimental material research, and an evolving commitment to ecology as a responsibility and a design driver. In 2025, the studio was selected as a winner of the ArchDaily Next Practices Awards.

Breakfast nooks emerged in the early twentieth century in response to increasing domestic density and shifting ideas about everyday life. Rooted in the American Arts and Crafts movement and popularized through bungalow housing of the 1910s and 1920s, they evolved from the more formal Victorian breakfast room into compact, built-in spaces embedded within the kitchen. As houses grew smaller and more economical, architects and millwork companies used fixed benches and tables to occupy corners, alcoves, and bay windows that might otherwise be inefficient. These light-filled enclosures provided an affordable means of concentrating daily activities while preserving comfort and spatial clarity.

What does optimism feel like in cities that can no longer rely on perfection as their ultimate ambition? Across the world, urban environments bear the weight of overlapping pressures: climate volatility, spatial inequality, political fragmentation, public distrust, and chronic infrastructural disinvestment. These realities render the idea of an ideal city increasingly detached from lived experience. Yet the hope for building better systems persists. While utopian visions may seem like an escape from the growing complexities of the modern world, the greater challenge for contemporary city-making is to confront those complexities rather than avoid them.

Adaptive reuse allows architects to conserve resources, reduce waste, and extend the life of existing structures. By working with what already exists, architects lessen the need for new materials, lower energy consumption, and limit demolition debris. This approach protects natural habitats and green spaces by reducing the demand for new land development. Through reuse, cities become more sustainable and less carbon-intensive while preserving the material and cultural value of the built environment.

Chimneys are among the most quietly persistent elements in architectural history. Yet their presence persists in nearly every cultural and climatic context, serving as a technical feature and a spatial, atmospheric, and symbolic device. It populates dense city skylines and anchors rural horizons alike, its vertical silhouette as ordinary as a window or a doorframe. This apparent ordinariness is deceptive. The chimney is one of the few architectural components that links the intimate scale of interior life with the expansive forces of the environment. For architects and designers, the necessity of the chimney presents a choice: to let it recede quietly into the building’s functional fabric or to amplify it as a central, expressive element that shapes a project’s identity.

Chimneys are among the most quietly persistent elements in architectural history. Yet their presence persists in nearly every cultural and climatic context, serving as a technical feature and a spatial, atmospheric, and symbolic device. It populates dense city skylines and anchors rural horizons alike, its vertical silhouette as ordinary as a window or a doorframe. This apparent ordinariness is deceptive. The chimney is one of the few architectural components that links the intimate scale of interior life with the expansive forces of the environment. For architects and designers, the necessity of the chimney presents a choice: to let it recede quietly into the building’s functional fabric or to amplify it as a central, expressive element that shapes a project’s identity.