Just do it!

Cindy Allen -- Interior Design, 1/1/2004 12:00:00 AM

Lots of resolutions in motion this January. Imagine the resolve it takes to face off with Mies (of all people). Rem Koolhaas and Helmut Jahn did it nonchalantly. They just took one student body and one el track in Chicago—and housed both in a way that brilliantly transformed the Illinois Institute of Technology. And Koolhaas-Jahn isn't the only design duo in town. After months of merciless nagging, our very own contributing editor Cindy Coleman and her architect husband, Neil Frankel, reveal the destination of their weekend travels. It's on Lake Michigan, and it's a 1960's gem.

In New York, Annabelle Selldorf exhibited some truly New Year's–worthy single-mindedness, divesting a town house of its Assyrian-Tyrolean decor. OK, not quite. But she did align all five stories with a shrewd blend of tony simplicity and joyful richness. Speaking of multicultural and multiethnic—some of my best friends are Assyrian-Tyrolean—you're sure to appreciate NBBJ's Anchorage medical center, a veritable rhapsody to the native Alaskan population. And the folks at NBBJ, Seattle, made a promise to themselves to keep ego out of the equation.

Gensler's team in London Town demonstrated equal determination to satisfy strict rights-of-light requirements for a new office building, leaving behind hundreds of amazed attorneys and a shining glass curtain wall that swoops upward like a sail. But it's Fabio Novembre who vowed to take on nothing less than our planet's gravitational field. Without batting an eyelash, he unleashed a renovating onslaught on a century- old warehouse in Florence, Italy, and walked away from a hotel positively smoldering with colors.

So what are you waiting for? Join in.