Jaime Gross

A Bay Area landscape designer works her yard like a jigsaw puzzle, packing a bevy of distinctive destinations into a steep and diminutive plot.

Until a few years ago, Loretta Gargan had spent her entire career as a landscape designer creating outdoor havens for other people, without a proper yard to call her own. But don’t feel sorry for her: She never felt deprived. “I’ve always interpreted a feeling of nature wherever I am, no matter the context,” she says. “Even putting big branches in a vase or arranging rocks—that’s enough to make me happy. It’s not about the space; it’s about envisioning what you can do with what you have.” (Read More…)

Seeking a way to blend architecture into the natural environment, a pair of Ecuador-based designers invents a new modular building system.

Prefab construction is often compared to building with Legos. In the case of the Pentimento House, located on the outskirts of Quito, the metaphor is unusually apt. Overlooking the Ilaló volcano and Andes mountain range, Pentimento comprises hundreds of identical stacked concrete modules. As in a Lego model, the blocks simultaneously form “the structural and formal systems of the house,” as architect Jose María Sáez puts it, as well as both the interior and exterior walls. Thanks to the region’s mild climate, there’s no need for insulation, and “you don’t have to build in a perfect way,” says Sáez. “It’s like Adam and Eve, working in paradise. (Read More…)

Edmonton architect Vivian Manasc’s 19th-story rooftop penthouse is a bright spot—and a model green building—in a city where downtown living is rare.

A 2011 visit to the New Cambridge Lofts building in Edmonton, Alberta, started out as purely business for architect Vivian Manasc. Her firm, Manasc Isaac Architects, had been hired to do a technical evaluation of the former office building–turned–condo complex. But while looking for heat leaks on the roof, things (Read More…)

A Marmol Radziner–designed prefab house, trucked onto a remote Northern California site, takes the pain out of the construction process.

Bill and Abbie Burton have experienced their share of construction drama. The Solana Beach, California– based landscape architects have been working together for 25 years, overhauling landscapes and buildings alike. So when the time came to build a vacation house on the 330-acre oak-speckled woodland they purchased in Mendocino County (Read More…)