Announcements

Like many architects, this year has been quite a doosey for me, up and down...and down. Thankfully things are up this autumn. After dozens of resumes sent in response to job ads went unanswered the first half of the year, I decided to see if my previously extra-curricular activities (my web pages) could somehow lead to opportunities related to architecture but outside architectural production. This experiment of sorts yielded some freelance writing gigs, which continue to this day, but a couple recent developments are more exciting, announced in some detail below.



Near the end of summer I started as the Representative for american-architects.com, part of the world-architects.com platform that features profiles of selected archtitects. The U.S. sites also include newyork-architects.com and california-architects.com, the two areas that predominate in the sum total of the American profiles of architects, landscape architects, engineers and photographers. As well, the agenda and job posting reflect this coastal bias. One of the goals in my new role at world-architects is to make the site more representative of the United States, reflective of the diversity found between NY and CA. A large part of achieving this goal is adding more firms to the listings, so if you're interested in being considered for a profile on american-architects please drop me a line at jh[at]world-architects[dot]com. My contact information can be found here.



The second bit of good news is that I just signed a contract with W. W. Norton for my first book, tentatively titled A Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture. Most likely the name will change to something like the mock-up above that reflects the book's focus on 21st-century architecture, featuring notable buildings in New York City from the building boom that occurred in the first decade of the new century. Look for the book to publish sometime in the winter of 2011. The guide will cover all five boroughs, featuring some obvious buildings like SANAA's New Museum above but also lesser-known gems by local and not-yet-name-brand architects. Like my approach to american-architects.com, in this guide I'm trying to present a diverse array of the city's new architecture, not just attention-getting designs by well-known architects in Manhattan.

My job at world-architects.com and book deal with Norton are both suitable extensions of my daily, weekly and archi-tourist web pages, which over the years have allowed me to keep abreast of new architecture and selectively present buildings, architects and books I appreciate. I'm excited about both and am optimistic as I move forward with each. You'll hear more about these undertakings off and on in the months and years to come, particularly for the latter, when in a forthcoming post I'll ask for your assistance in finding buildings for inclusion in the book.