A building is to an architect what an album is to a musician or band. Now, excuse us for extending the analogy when we say that the façade of a building is like the sleeve cover of an album — it is (kinda). A sleek façade is integral to the experience of moving through a building just as an album’s artwork — yes, even now in the digital age — changes how you hear a record, at least for the first few times.

South by Southwest kicks off today in Austin, Texas, and to console ourselves for being stuck in wintry New York, we’ve combined our two loves of music and architecture. (No, not this.) Here are 20 album covers whose jewel-cases prominently feature architecture. From world-famous landmarks to surreal, fantasy structures, these cardboard buildings are candy for your eyes (and ears!). Click through! 

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Flooding in Atlantic City. Photo: Stan Honda, AFP/Getty Images

Today we here at Architizer, along with millions of our fellow residents in NYC and beyond, are dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. So far, the superstorm is responsible for the deaths of at least 11 people, seven of them in NYC. Roughly six million people are without power. Atlantic City is heavily flooded. The NYC public transportation system remains shut down, as do numerous bridges and tunnels. Schools and businesses are shuttered, and several hospitals have been evacuated due to power outages. More than 13,000 airline flights have been canceled. Even the Erie Canal is closed. “We expected an unprecedented storm here in New York City, and that’s what we got,” said Mayor Bloomberg today during an 11 a.m. press conference.

We’re grateful that Architizer is still up and running. Many of our homebound employees are without internet access, but we’ll do our best to continue delivering updates throughout the day. Click through to see photos that show the impact of this wicked storm.

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Bucky had his weather-regulating glass dome over midtown. Superstudio plopped their continuous monument clear across the Big Apple. Paul Rudolph’s LOMEX severed the lower half of the island from the urban fabric. Now, Tiago Barros has a new but equally thrilling vision for a speculative Manhattan that matches its predecessors in sheer zaniness. The architect, who garnered much press for his “Passing Cloud” project from last year, here envisions hovering donut structures that loop, overlap, and interlock in the air above the city’s gridded streets, at time brushing up and encompassing some of New York’s long-standing icons. Empire State Building, watch your back. Read More.

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It’s been a sober and tense morning here at Architizer. Our office, on 5th Avenue and 30th Street, is just a few blocks from the Empire State Building, where people were shot this morning by a distraught man. We have a clear view of the iconic skyscraper from our desks, and many of us pass by it each morning on our way to work. Read more.

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“The Chrysler Building (New York)”

“Gray/Grey deals with two seemingly unrelated subjects: skyscrapers and colorblindness.” That’s how photographer (and Architizer friend) Chris Mottalini describes his latest work, currently on display at the Jack Shainman Gallery as part of the “HiJack!” exhibition that runs through September 1. The series of black-and-white photographs depict paper models of the world’s most iconic towers, from erstwhile pioneers-turned-heritage relics like the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings to contemporary stratospheric monuments that chart the rise, import, and wealth of Asian and Gulf powers.

The work represents a personal project for Mottalini, who is partially color-blind. He decided to set everything–both the subjects and the background–in gray, so as to avoid colors he cannot wholly detect or easily manipulate. He lovingly crafted the scaled creations himself in his Brooklyn apartment and painted every one of them a shade darker than the last. He then photographed each model in his living room, placing the diminutive structures before various backgrounds of different material and texture–a piece of plywood, matte board, plaster wall–but all of the same color. The resultant images are quiet, melancholic, and, at times, menacing. But mostly, the towers appear forlorn, even timid, as they are removed from their native cities and cast adrift in the photographer’s “monochromatic vacuums”, damned to forever abide alone in the nauseating abyss of their arrogance.

Gray/Grey will be exhibited at the Jack Shainman Gallery through September 1.

“The Sears Tower (Chicago)”, part of ‘Gray/Grey’; All photos: Chris Mottalini

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Deck Two’s Global City is a towering mural that, as its name suggests, aims to encompass the world, or at least, its architecture. The work, entirely hand drawn and spanning full height studio walls and kitchen cabinets,  collects architectural (and infrastructural) landmarks from around the globe and sets them in a vaguely urban configuration. The Eiffel Tower is a stone’s throw away from both Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia and the Empire State Building, while the Taj Mahal and the Colosseum occupy prime riverside real estate. In the distance stand a dense group of mostly contemporary Asian skyscrapers, with the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Oriental Pearl Tower to the south (left), the Jin Mao Tower and Tokyo Tower to the north (right). Industrial frigates pass under the Brooklyn and Tower bridges, abutting large winding, high-way bearing infrastructures.

The mural bears some conceptual resemblance to OMA’s “skyscraper city” in the UAE, which similarly amasses a (desert) metropolis entirely composed of the last decade’s worth of skyscraper designs, both unbuilt and built alike, and in so doing, illustrates the fatuous and doomed “race to the top” and the very ugly, even destructive, work it engenders. Deck Two’s city isn’t as pointedly critical, nor is it supposed to be. It’s more a fun formal exercise, something to liven up a depressing office kitchen and offer a visual respite from the backlit laptop screen.

Global City making of from Thomas Dartigues on Vimeo.

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Image: The Associated Press, via the Daily

This afternoon, One World Trade Center will pass the Empire State Building as New York’s tallest skyscraper, reclaiming the city’s skyline and reviving the race for height that originated in Manhattan but which was resolved with the building of the World Trade Centerover 40 years ago. In just a few hours, workers are scheduled to install the first column of the 100th floor of the tower’s steel frame, which will rise 1,250 feet in the air, peaking just 21 feet over the crest of the Empire State Building’s observation deck.

Upon its expected completion in 2014, One World Trade Center will stand 1,776 feet and will become the country’s tallest structure, a title which currently belongs to Chicago’s 1,450 foot-tall Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower). Much jubilation greeted the announcement for many reasons–the director of the Port Authority giddily anticipated the views from the tower’s future observation platform, while architect David Childs welcomed the progression of construction as a sign towards the eventual rehabilitation of Lower Manhattan’s urban life. Yet, today’s events can hardly be seen as a milestone, says author and chronicler of New York’s skyscrapers Neal Bascomb, who told the NYTimes that the construction is “kind of like competing against a ghost.”

Photo: Michael Nagle, via NYTimes

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Atmos Studio’s “Meltingwater”

Many an architect has been fashioned as such since infancy, molded by design-conscientious parents who mistake their child’s first scribbles for a perceptive creativity to be encouraged with sets of crayons, smart clothes, and, above all, geometric toys. Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier both had their Froebel blocks, and, since the 70s, when they made the material change from wood to plastic, Legos have been the young architect’s favorite mode of play. Let’s not lie, we still play around with them.  Last month, ICON Eye asked several architecture firms, including Foster + Partners and Adjaye Associates, to reinterpret Lego incarnations of canonical architectural works. More fun after the jump!

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The Empire State Building in 1931. Did you know the spire was originally designed as a dock for zeppelins?

Today, we came across some great images of New York buildings under construction. Now ubiquitous, these mammoth landmarks must have seemed alien to New Yorkers of the time.

A few of our favorites, after the jump. Enjoy.

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Office, window, Empire State Building. Image: photo by Andrew Hetherington for Newsweek with original artwork by Architizer.

Former President Bill Clinto appears in Newsweek this week touting twelve ideas to jumpstart the economy and get Americans back to work. In typical Clinton fashion, the ideas are pretty innovative yet reasonable and fit into the Roosevelt-approved WPA mold: new jobs in the energy sector, government-supported startups, guaranteeing loans, and so on.

He also proposes two building initiatives: one, painting roofs whites to reduce energy usage in hot, sunny months; two, following the lead of the Empire State Building and retrofitting old buildings for energy efficiency. Clinton says:

:Just look at the Empire State Building—I can see it from my office window. Our climate-change people worked on their retrofit project. They cleared off a whole floor for a small factory to change the heating and air conditioning, put in new lighting and insulation, and cut energy-efficient glass for the windows. Johnson Controls, the energy-service company overseeing the project, guaranteed the building owners their electricity usage would go down 38 percent—a massive saving, which will enable the costs of the retrofits to be recovered through lower utility bills in less than five years. Meanwhile, the project created hundreds of jobs and cut greenhouse-gas emissions substantially. We could put a million people to work retrofitting buildings all over America.”

And he knows of what he speaks. Back in ’09 Clinton started the Clinton Climate Initiative — watch a video on that very project to retrofit the Empire State Building right here.

Full story at Newsweek.

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