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SInce the first Portuguese trading and missionary outposts sprang up there in the late 1500’s, Macau has been known for it’s church architecture. On every postcard, every travel guide, every map, there’s the famed facade of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Actually, the flamed facade is probably a more apt description as it seems this edifice is all that remains after a devastatingly spectacular fire in 1835 .

The Ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral 1854 by Wilhelm Heine

More recently, Macau’s other houses of worship have undergone their own transformation creating a new explosion of coloured lights across the night sky. Huge casino franchises from Las Vegas and Australia have built enormous gambling palaces which since 2007, have raked in more revenue annually than the entire Las Vegas Strip.

Literally standing out from the crowd, not only because it doesn’t have a casino, is the newly opened Mandarin Oriental Macau, part of the One Central mixed use development designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox.

With subtly angled bay windows scattered across the facade, the passing clouds emulate the broken reflections dancing on the rippled  lake, set in motion by the wakes of a dozen distant dragon boats warming up for the afternoon’s tournament.

Usually wishing for less clouds in the Asian skies, I found myself that evening in the the perplexing position of wanting just a few more to bring a certain spontaneity to the unfolding scene. Evidently, the local deities were all too busy with requests for guidance from the blackjack tables to intervene on my behalf. The wind dropped, the surface of the lake turned to glass and well, I guess I can live with that….

If the notion of a civilized society is one that seeks to provide an esoteric platform, intellectual or otherwise, from which one can clearly view and appreciate the world at large, then the appearance of yet another window cleaning rig must surely be the portent for a brighter future.

Photographs from our work with the California Academy of Sciences are still in steady rotation around the world. This latest appearance accompanied an article in the Los Angeles Times by architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne.

An early call time in Houston required a certain energy boost that even the biggest LEED Platinum rated building in the nation couldn’t supply.

But we’d found just the thing…  and having spied this place the previous evening, we were keen to return and start the day right.

Sadly for y’all, it was not to be.

The July /August 2010 issue of Metropolis magazine features the cover and an eight page story on the Gallery House in San Francisco designed by Ogrydziak / Prillinger Architects. The project was also featured in the ArchDaily blog and quickly picked up by the architectural blogosphere.

At Bellarmine College Preparatory School in San Jose, Steinberg Architects have installed a sleek stainless steel mesh to screen the external passageways of the newly opened humanities building. While allowing light and airflow through the busy spaces, the screens also provide expansive views across the valley to the Santa Cruz mountains to the west.

The architectural web resource Architype Review has just published its Summer 2010 edition on schools. Of the eight schools selected from across North America, two were projects we had photographed. Camino Nuevo High School in Los Angeles by Daly Genik and The Nueva School Hillside learning Complex in Hillsborough by Leddy Maytum Stacy.

The successful entrants of the 2010 PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris were recently announced and I was pleased to have been awarded First Place in the Fine Art – Architecture category with four images selected from my Immediate Future exhibition.

As some readers will have noted, I like to figure out the days shoot around the café table, using whatever props may be at hand to create some three dimensional representation of the project. This process somehow reduces even the largest of problems into more manageable, dare I say it, bite size chunks.

Replicating the awe-inspiring engineering prowess of the Burj Khalifa was a challenge in itself but as some say in Dubai. nothing is impossible. The three entrance lobbies, hitherto known as Strawberry, Apricot and Marmalade echoed the Residential, Hotel and Commercial entrances. The colour  and finishes in each providing a different sensory experience to those passing through.

After shooting several less than satisfactory snaps out through the dusty windows of my hotel, a few dangling ropes the following day signaled that perhaps some relief was on the way.

Indeed this proved to be the case and I waved gratefully as my sudsy saviour slipped slowly out of sight to bring a little more sunshine into the lives of those on the floor below. And the floor below that. And the floor below that.