Aric Chen

2 months ago | architecturalrecord.com | Joann Gonchar |Aric Chen

New York–based nonprofit The World Around (TWA) has announced the recipients of its 2025 Young Climate Prize. The award shines a light on designers and activists tackling pressing social and environmental problems.

2 months ago | architecturalrecord.com | Dante Ciampaglia |Aric Chen

The Obel Award announced its jury has set Ready Made as its 2025 focus to explore how to prioritize “what already exists” in the built environment and “how we can rethink, reinterpret, and repurpose” those resources.” In choosing Ready Made, the jury, chaired by Snøhetta founder Kjetil Thorsen, aims to bring the issue of resource use and scarcity to the center of the conversation about architecture’s impact on a world increasingly shaped by climate change.

Jul 23, 2024 | architecturalrecord.com | Josephine Minutillo |Aric Chen

This may sound odd coming from someone who grew up in New York City, but my first immersive experience with modern architecture came when I moved to Ithaca. For three of the four years I spent in that isolated upstate New York town as a student at Cornell University, I was a docent at the school’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

Jun 19, 2024 | architecturalrecord.com | Aric Chen

In a former Rotterdam shipyard now rebranded an “innovation dock”—next to the wave generator of a maritime testing facility, and around the corner from a drone startup housed beneath a robotically fabricated canopy—a stack of shipping containers within an expansive machine hall delineates the 5,400-square-foot workshop of Studio RAP.

Aug 8, 2023 | architectural-review.com | Aric Chen |Florence Wright

Aric Chen sends a postcard to the iconic metabolist architecture of Tokyo’s Ginza districtAnyone marvelling at Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in the last 15 years or so would have seen that this most iconic, singular example of metabolist architecture, completed in Tokyo’s Ginza district in 1972, was existing on borrowed time. Its 140 self‑contained living units hung off concrete cores with rusting bolts that had become seismically unsafe.