Chris Bentley

In Boston, a booming job market is drawing people back from far-flung suburbs and remaking the region, but it is also exacerbating a housing-affordability crisis and forcing difficult conversations about the future of the city. Greater Boston is riding a wave of development that is perhaps the largest the…

On June 1, a few dozen Cambridge, Massachusetts, officials, business leaders, and other key figures in the area gathered around a breakfast spread in Parsnip, a tony neighborhood restaurant owned by the billionaire investor Gerald Chan. They were there to glimpse a long-awaited plan for another one of Chan’s…

This article appears in The Architect’s Newspaper’s April 2017 issue, which takes a deep dive into Florida to coincide with the upcoming AIA Conference on Architecture in Orlando (April 27 to 29). We're publishing the issue online as the Conference approaches—click here to see the latest articles to…

In a basement laboratory at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Bradley Cantrell flips a switch, and a river begins to flow. On a table surveilled by movable sensors and a Microsoft Kinect, pulses of water carry bits of colored sand down a model riverbed.

The offices of Landing Studio are cluttered with “industrial fossils,” as principal Marie Law Adams calls them: vials of rock salt, cross-sections of old oak piers, a chunk of slag discovered during the demolition of a jet fuel tank. In between the piles of design books, they form…

On the heels of a new 86-story project by JAHN. Chicago's South Loop neighborhood is also prepping for a 76-story tower designed by Rafael Viñoly. Both projects were unveiled Tuesday and would be among the tallest buildings in the city if built. Viñoly's project,…

JAHN, the Chicago-based firm led by Helmut Jahn and Francisco Gonzalez-Pulido, has unveiled renderings of a long-rumored project in their hometown's South Loop neighborhood. At 1,030 feet, the tower would be Chicago's fifth tallest—or, as Curbed Chicago points out, sixth if Studio…

Art has washed up on the banks of southern Indiana's White River. Converging south of Indianapolis near Columbus, Indiana, the river's two forks draw from a series of small tributaries, which an artist working with grant money from the National Science Foundation has chosen as the setting…

Chicago-based PORT Urbanism will work with the Downtown Cleveland Alliance to turn a forbidding underpass near Cleveland's warehouse district into a vibrant pedestrian space, now that the Chicago-based firm has been selected as the winner of a design competition to revive the Main Avenue Bridge. …

The Detroit Design Festival returns this year with 30 events and exhibits put together with contributions from dozens of architects and designers. The festival, which runs September 22–26, kicks off with “industry day,” featuring 3D printing demonstrations and a lecture by Stephen Hobbs titled “Defensive Architecture.” You…

After nearly a decade in the works, the renovation of Cincinnati's grand Music Hall has a construction timeline. The $129 million construction project crept along for years, the building languishing while preservationists sought to raise funds for its restoration—even as the fortunes of the surrounding neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine surged.…

This Fall, I served as special media correspondent for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat‘s awards ceremony in Chicago. Among the many architects, engineers and other tall building types I interviewed was Douglas Durst, head of The Durst Organization, a family-run real estate empire…