This article was originally published by Archipreneur as "The 10 Most Important Lessons Learned in 25 Years of Architecture Practice."

The article is an expansion on one part of Archipreneur's interview with Craig Applegath, Founding Principal of DIALOG’s Toronto Studio. The architect spoke from his experience of running a 150-person practice and listed 10 tips for archipreneurs interested in starting their own business. Archipreneur shares that list here.

When I first started my own practice I thought everyone wanted to run their own practice. It turns out not. Most people just want to work in a great practice run by someone else. But for those who are real archipreneurs – and you know who you are – there is nothing so thrilling and fun as starting your own business; and nothing so scary and anxiety producing as starting your own business! They are the flip side of the same coin. But in terms of general advice for people starting their own practice or business here are ten key lessons I have learned over the past twenty-five years of practice:

Designing a museum is always an exciting architectural challenge. Museums often come with their own unique needs and constraints--from the art museum that needs specialist spaces for preserving works, to the huge collection that requires extensive archive space, and even the respected institution whose existing heritage building presents a challenge for any new extension. In honor of International Museum Day, we’ve selected 23 stand-out museums from our database, with each ArchDaily editor explaining what makes these buildings some of the best examples of museum architecture out there.

This article was originally published by Common Edge as "Building Madness: How the Boom and Bust Mentality Distorts Architecture."

Architects are economically bipolar; for us it is either the best or the worst of times. And it’s not just architects. The entire construction industry is tuned to these extremes, but only architects are psychologically validated by booms and crushed by busts. All professions have a larger source of dependency—medicine needs insurance, law needs the justice system—but the construction industry has a starker equation: building requires capital.

Contractors tend to react to market flows in purely transactional ways. Booms mean more work, more workers, more estimates, business expansion. For architects, a boom means life validation. Every architect wants to make a difference, and many want to offer salvation, like the architect Richard Rogers, who once said, “My passion and great enjoyment for architecture, and the reason the older I get the more I enjoy it is because I believe we—architects—can affect the quality of life of the people.” But salvation can only be earned if buildings are created.

Like a reader hooked on a bestselling thriller, the design of libraries has enthralled architects and the general public for centuries. From the classical mahogany grandeur of the world-famous Long Room at Trinity College Dublin to the post-war, brick modernism of the British Library in London, the important role of libraries in our lives has historically demanded a degree of architectural thought and consideration.

In recent times, however, that historic role has changed. With the digital age revolutionizing how we access, research, and communicate information, libraries are no longer reserved exclusively for books. Libraries today must act as ‘information hubs’, with the flexibility to accommodate a diverse range of media and arts. Architects have responded to the challenge of a new era, reimagining how libraries are built, experienced, and utilized, without entirely throwing away the rule book. 

Below, we have rounded-up 12 libraries from around the world, all with architecture from the top shelf.

This article originally appeared on Curbed as "How air conditioning shaped modern architecture—and changed our climate."

During a conversation with the New Yorker, a window washer who worked on the Empire State Building says that some of his toughest moments have been cleaning the trash that tenants toss out the windows. In his many years working on the Depression-era skyscraper, he’s wiped numerous half-empty coffee cups off window panes, and even scraped 20 gallons of strawberry preserves from the building’s facade. Tossed out in the winter, it stubbornly clung to the outside of the skyscraper.

Cracking a window open in a skyscraper seems like a quirk, especially today, when hermetically sealed steel-and-glass giants offer the promise of climate-controlled comfort. But ever since Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, considered one of the first skyscrapers, opened in 1884, the challenge of airflow, ventilation, and keeping tenants cool has been an important engineering consideration shaping modern architecture.

The great commercial buildings of the modern era owe their existence, in many ways, to air conditioning, an invention with a decidedly mixed legacy.

Architecture school is a long haul and we all know it. Whether you get a 5-year professional degree or choose to take on a few years of graduate school (or both), it’s a grueling process. However, most would hopefully agree, it’s worth it for the knowledge you gain throughout those years (not to mention the friendships you form in the close quarters of the studio). Architectural education is about more than learning to design great spaces and whether or not you realize it at the time, architecture school is also a great teacher of other life lessons. All the skills below are those you’ll likely attain incidentally during your tenure in architecture school, but which will be an asset outside of academia as well.

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Few buildings in history can claim as infamous a legacy as that of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project of St. Louis, Missouri. Built during the height of Modernism this nominally innovative collection of residential towers was meant to stand as a triumph of rational architectural design over the ills of poverty and urban blight; instead, two decades of turmoil preceded the final, unceremonious destruction of the entire complex in 1973. The fall of Pruitt-Igoe ultimately came to signify not only the failure of one public housing project, but arguably the death knell of the entire Modernist era of design.

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#officeofadrianphiffer_torontoisland

A post shared by Office Of Adrian Phiffer (@officeofadrianphiffer) on Jan 18, 2017 at 12:39pm PST

Instagram is an app. Instagram shows images. Instagram is a verb. Instagram it! Instagram has 600 million users. Numbers are very important. These days, they are an exact expression of what one is, or isn’t; by the way, how many followers do you have? Instagram is the great equalizer.

I don’t think Instagram is about news. Instagram is about influence. It is that very moment when the old order is changed; the moment when the recent graduate changes the established practice. Instagram is space. Have you seen @archiveofaffinities? It is better than any school library. It is the space to spend your most important time. It is a spa.

Love architectural video games like Minecraft or SimCity? Then it's worth checking out this ecological city simulator, Block'hood, which allows players to build their own arcology-style structures for humans and other species to coexist, all while managing a range of environmental and engineering conditions.

Following our review of the beta version of the game last March, the final edition has now launched on gaming platform Steam. New features include a 5-episode guided story mode, an increased maximum building size, an unlockable "unconstrained" mode, and compatibility in 8 different languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Russian.

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For the past seven years, Hungary-based Hello Wood has been gathering participants from across the globe for its summer camps to engage in a week-long curriculum about creating spaces, networks, and knowledge. However, this year the event has expanded its borders even further; organized with partners MANDARINA and TACADI, Hello Wood Argentina was the first local Hello Wood summer camp, drawing a group of 150 students, architects, and designers. Hello Wood focuses on socially-engaged concepts and turning architectural theory into practice with collaborative week-long design-build projects. As a complement to traditional university education, students get the chance to work and learn alongside famous international architects to bring their concepts to life.

The theme of Hello Wood Argentina’s first summer camp was "Con-Tacto" (Contact), located in Ceibas, Entre Ríos. Curator Jaime Grinberg selected applicants with strong concepts to generate spaces that encouraged connection, whether traditional, functional, utopian, or idealized. Concepts also needed to be simple, natural, and feasible for a team of students to produce in a week. Hello Wood’s educational platform focuses on achieving social benefits and improving the quality of life through architecture and design. See below for photos of the projects built at Hello Wood Argentina.

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NL Architects + XVW architectuur’s “innovative renovation” of the DeFlat Kleiburg apartment complex in Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer neighbourhood has been selected as the winner of the 2017 EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture-Mies van der Rohe Award.

One of the largest residential buildings in the Netherlands, the complex was saved from the wrecking ball through its transformation into a rejuvenated framework called a “Klusflat," within which inhabitants could renovate their apartments by themselves. This is the first time the award has been given to a renovation of an existing building.

DeFlat Kleiburg was selected from a list of 355 works from 36 European countries, including the four other finalist projects: Rudy Ricciotti + Passelac & Roques’ Rivesaltes Memorial; BBGK Architekci’s Katyn Museum; Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects’ Kannikegården; and Alison Brooks Architects’ Ely Court. NL Architects were also awarded the EU Mies Awards’ Emerging Architect Prize in 2005 for their work BasketBar in Utrecht.

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This article was originally published on Monograph's Blog as "Architect's Guide to SEO — Part 1."

More than likely you've heard the term SEO, but, for the uninitiated, SEO literally means Search Engine Optimization— technical jargon for a set of methods used to boost your website's rank in Google's search results.

Now, why should you care? Well, according to this article put out by the SEO gurus at MOZ, the top 3 positions in Google's search results account for a whopping 55% of organic clicks, with the number one spot alone netting over 30%.

Think about that, over one third of visitors click on the first result they see. Naturally, everyone wants to be number one, so we've outlined below 5 steps you can take to help boost your website's ranking.

Architecture is often intertwined with political context. This deep connection is especially evident in Northern Ireland, a place of infamously complex politics. The state came into existence as a consequence of war in 1921, when Ireland was partitioned into an independent Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland) and Northern Ireland, an industrious region still controlled by Britain. Conflict has since ensued in Northern Ireland between a majority pro-British Unionist population, and a minority, though significant, Irish Nationalist community. The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a brutal struggle, with over three thousand people killed, thousands more injured, and harrowing images spread across the world.

The turbulence of Northern Ireland’s conflict is played out in the architectural development of Belfast, its capital city. With thirty years of war from the 1960s to 1990s, the architecture of Belfast embodied a city under siege. When the prospect of peace dawned in the 1990s, an architecture of hope, confidence, and defiance emerged. In the present day, with Northern Ireland firmly on a peaceful path, Belfast has played host to a series of bold architectural ideas and landmark public buildings by award-winning architects. With the rich, bitter, emotive history of Northern Ireland viewed through multiple, often conflicting prisms, the architectural development of Belfast offers a tangible narrative of a city which burned, smoldered, and rose from the ashes.

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The Bailey house—one of Richard Neutra’s four Case Study designs for Arts & Architecture—forms one of five Bluff houses, standing high above the ocean. The brief was to create a low-budget home for a young family, with just two bedrooms, but offering the possibility of expansion as time went by (which did in fact transpire; additional Neutra-designed wings were later built).

Neutra employed the same indoor-outdoor philosophy that can be seen at work in his unbuilt Alpha and Omega houses, using large sliding glass doors to create light and a visual sense of space, as well as ensuring that the house physically opened up to, as he put it, “borrow space from the outdoors.” With this sunny Californian ocean-view setting, it made perfect sense to use the back garden and terrace as living and dining room.

For many observers, Thom Mayne might easily be considered the most unpredictable personality in architecture. Once labeled the “bad boy of architecture” by critics—a moniker which he has, at times, enthusiastically adopted and even encouraged—Mayne's actions in the architecture world can range from something as responsible as designing one of the United States' most sustainable university campuses to something as outrageous as proposing one of the world's tallest towers in a revered Austrian mountain town. In this interview, the latest from Vladimir Belogolovsky's “City of Ideas” series, Mayne discusses his ideas, his past statements on architecture, and where he thinks the profession will go next. The interview was originally published by the Berlin-based SPEECH Magazine.

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“The greatest thing about being an architect,” pronounced Bjarke Ingels, “is that you build buildings.”

What did Pritzker Prize winner Frank Gehry get when he designed the Stata Center, an exuberantly whimsical academic complex for MIT? A very large check, plus a major lawsuit, alleging negligence and breach of contract due to rampant leaks, mold, cracks, drainage problems and sliding ice. Sometimes the most inspired designs can go awry. And when they do, some clients lawyer up. Here are 9 fascinating examples.