Architecture

Architect John Portman was famous for building modern skyscrapers with soaring atriums, including Detroit's Renaissance Center and Atlanta's Peachtree Center. The structures were often built as part of urban renewal efforts, but many critics say they did little to draw people to struggling downtowns. Portman died Friday at age 93.

A stunning display of color and technology illuminates the medieval cathedral's facade and tells a story about history, war and survival.

Artists Dre Urhahn and Jeroen Koolhaas strive to change perceptions of "bad neighborhoods" by arming locals with paintbrushes and a vision: to turn their neighborhoods into open-air art galleries.

This week's terror attack in Manhattan prompts a question: Can a city do anything to stop a truck attack? NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with architect Thomas Vonier about how we can better design big cities to make it harder for terrorists to harm people.

NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with Mary Jo Bowling from Curbed on why Victorian architecture came to be associated with everything spooky and scary.

NPR's Melissa Block talks with Leonard Pickel, who is a haunted house architect. For more than 40 years he's designed and worked on these fear factories.

"The big one" is practically inevitable — and so is the one after that.

Founded in 1855, St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., grew from 250 patients to 8,000. A new exhibit at the National Building Museum explores the links between architecture and mental health.

Krisel is particularly known for the scores of tract homes he designed in Palm Springs, which featured open floor plans, "butterfly" roofs and enough variation so they didn't look cookie-cutter.

The Center will be located in the Jackson Park neighborhood of Chicago's South side and it will include three buildings — a museum, forum and library that surround a public plaza.

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has acquired a major collection of work by the architect Frank Gehry. It includes more than three decades of Gehry's drawings, photos, models and ephemera.