The last time I wrote about an endangered building it was Richard Neutra’s 1963 Cyclorama at Gettysburg. After years of legal battle, the 50 year old building was demolished just last month. It’s a disappointing outcome, but the building did stand for five decades which is longer than many buildings. Sadly, one of those buildings that will not make it to the fifty year mark is the American Folk Art Museum by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

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This beautifully austere science building addition is on the campus of the University of Alcalá in Spain, and from the drafting boards of Héctor Fernández Elorza. Because the technological and spatial needs of research buildings tend to evolve quickly, the original building was in desperate need of a renovation to bring the building up to the working standards of a modern facility.

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OMA and Knoll have officially debuted a new line of furniture called Tools for Living, in Milan. The kinetic and boxy pieces may look familiar to fashion-savvy readers because they were first seen back in January on the runway of Prada’s 2013 Autumn/Winter Men’s Runway show. What’s remarkable is that most of the furniture that makes up Tools for Living is somehow kinetic: it swivels, has complex inner hinges, or an adjustable height. It sounds almost more like a Swiss Army Knife than a line of furniture, but these aren’t meant to be static and stately pieces, and they’re called tools for a reason.

The Tools for Life range is based on the idea that furniture should be understood as a high-performance instrument rather than a design statement. OMA conceived the furniture to facilitate the contemporary flow between work and social life, while adjusting to the different needs of both.

Rem Koolhaas commented: “We wanted to create a range of furniture that performs in very precise but also in completely unpredictable ways, furniture that not only contributes to the interior but also to the animation of the interior.”

The good news is that the same tools can turn your space into a casual and social space again at the push of a button.

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Sometimes while joking with my old friends who work as architects, I’ll offer my own summary of the entire history of the profession: “Let me just go ahead and boil this down for you: it was built to keep the poor people away.” It’s an absurd summary, and is far removed from the reality and concerns of practicing architects. More rational people might summarize the recent history of architecture (since Modernism) using either popular dictum from Mies van der Rohe, “less is more,” or another from Le Corbusier that describes architecture as a “machine for living in.” But, more recently, there seems to have been a shift toward thinking of buildings as organisms. I can’t think of a snappy saying associated with this shift, although I think the cover of the first Mark Magazine was getting somewhere with, “Let’s Build Trees!”

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