Archinect - Features

CONTOURS: Urbanism, Housing, and the Economy

2012-02-13T15:32:00-05:00

Two issues that effect everyone, whatever social, economic, and professional strata they occupy, are population and urban growth. What’s more, ongoing shifts in population and urbanism across the world, especially in developing nations, have dramatically impacted the building industry. Housing and mixed-use projects in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America are rapidly increasing.

Farmers Field: Bringing Football Back on a Need-to-Know Basis

2012-02-06T16:08:00-05:00

By Anthony Carfello with Orhan Ayyüce as curating editor

Over the past year, Los Angeles’ local news media and blogosphere have provided up-to-the-minute coverage of a new plan by Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), the professional sports and concert conglomerate behind several of the world’s entertainment venues, like The O2 arena in London, the Home Depot Center in Carson, Califonia, and Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai(1). CEO of AEG Tim Leiweke has proposed construction of a 68,000-seat(2) football stadium on the site of one existing wing of the Los Angeles Convention Center, adjacent to the campus of AEG’s already built and operating Staples Center, Nokia Theater, Grammy Museum, and ESPN Zone (as part of their L.A. Live complex), along Figueroa Street in the southwestern part of downtown.

The CRIT: Thoughts on MoMA's Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream

2012-01-30T15:25:00-05:00

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work."
— Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846-1912)

“yes i was wondering how i go about not lossing my house it has been in my wifes famlily for over a hundred years my wife was layed off the morgage company wouldnt talk to us because she was layed off and now we are so far behind we cant get cought up so now we are loosing our home is there help out there for me”
— unedited comment from MoMA workshop blog (2011)

In Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, part of MoMA’s Issues in Contemporary Architecture series, five architects-in-residence and their interdisciplinary teams [1] were challenged to “engage in a rethinking of housing and related infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation.” The investigation also sought to “begin a conversation,” on the “recent” (though painfully on-going) foreclosure crisis by examining su...

Top 10 Design Initiatives to Watch in 2012—for the public good

2011-12-27T14:34:00-05:00

By John Cary

Last week’s Top 10 Design Milestones of 2011, published here at Archinect, highlighted advances in design for the public good by profiling leading organizations from IDEO.org and Mass Design Group to individuals like Jeanne Gang and Michael Kimmelman. As we round out this year and usher in the next, it feels important to also look towards the future—though, of course, looking back is always easier than looking forward.

With that in mind, this is not an exercise in trend spotting, but rather a simple meditation on initiatives poised to advance the field, and how they can be scaled up, refined, tweaked, borrowed, and leveraged. None of the following is entirely new; some are a long time in the making, while others are testing new directions. Some initiatives also evade mention, either because they’re not yet public or because they haven’t yet been dreamed up. One thing is for certain: the bar is higher than ever, even—and perhaps especially—for design efforts that c...

Decoding Bangkok’s Pocket-Urbanization: Social Housing Provision and the Role of Community Architects

2011-10-31T12:00:00-04:00

An endless six-lane herd of neon taxis sputter along a network of brutalist flyovers while scooter drivers weave boldly in between. Spiced scents escape from side alley markets, penetrating the air as sweltering heat rises from oil soaked pavement. This is modern cosmopolitan Bangkok, a now so called Alpha city that due to the Asian investment boom of the 1980s and 90s became a hotbed for multi-national corporation influx, cementing it as a business-financial force, the second most expensive South-eastern Asian city after Singapore.

Op-Ed: an Open house?

2011-06-21T19:18:00-04:00

Written by Nick Axel

The recent project of Open house by Droog with Diller Scofidio + Renfro is refreshing in the sense that it engages a pervasive condition and experience of the built environment that often goes unthought. The idea of envisioning a ‘future suburbia’ has strongly provoked the attention of architects and the non-architect, better known as the resident. The content of the project has to this date contained a one day event that included a seminar taking place in New York City, polemical installations within the archetypal suburb of Levittown, New York, visionary representations of a potential life in suburbia (1), and a host of online journalism. Open house uses traditional architectural conventions as provocative mediums in order to communicate, what I would like to show, a much deeper and significant concept that is at the root of the project. By employing the potentiality of a service economy, Open house fundamentally works on an ideological level that seeks to...

Architecture in the Givenness - Toward the Difficult Whole Again: Part 2

2011-04-26T22:06:00-04:00

Our education is based upon the Classical education. An architect is a mason who has learned Latin. Modern architects seem, however, more likely to have mastered Esperanto.

Adolf Loos, “Grundsätzliches von Adolf Loos,” Adolf Loos (Vienna: 1930), p. 17.

In our world of powerful stimuli and the often irresponsible, commercially motivated love of experimentation for its own sake, there is a great deal that does not establish real communication. For intoxication alone cannot insure lasting communication.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful (UK: 1970), p. 51.

The art of building has been transformed into a business of self-display and promotion through the design and construction of figurative motifs, making it an object of consumption.

David Leatherbarrow, The Roots of Architectural Invention, (UK: 1993), p.1.

Architecture in the Givenness - Toward the Difficult Whole Again: Part 1

2011-04-08T12:46:07-04:00

A Conversation with Michael Woo

2011-04-07T20:02:59-04:00

By Orhan Ayyüce

Michael Woo is the dean of California Polytechnic University, Pomona the College of Environmental Design which contains departments of Architecture, Art, Landscape Architecture, Urban and Regional Planning, and the John T. Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies. He is a familiar name in Southern California. Mr. Woo has served in Los Angeles City Council and ran for the mayor's office in 1993 as the Democratic candidate, losing by a small margin to Republican candidate and businessman Richard Riordan. A planner by education, Mr. Woo is a unique dean for a design school with the background of an established politician and, to a degree, an environmental activist. I sat down with him last December in his office and had this conversation.

What is a Park - Landscape or Infrastructure

2011-04-07T00:13:00-04:00

How can a park be designed to serve as infrastructure(s)? Thinking not in terms of metaphor alone. But rather a park as the architecture for numerous designed outcomes. Park as infrastructure, means park as platform not only designed object/scape. From a singular tool to multivalent toolkit. It is important in such discussion to think of the less immediate impact. Of social design, the design of relationships. Such a platform-as toolkit-may result from more efficient, and stack(ed) programming. Thus maximizing urban spaces, suburban spaces, available spaces, that are under-performing. In essence, we should think about the best ways to maximize our various infrastructural corridors: utility, transportation, waterways et al.

Meeting Mike Davis

2009-10-12T14:07:00-04:00

Mike Davis and I met on a summer day in San Diego. He graciously drove his truck and showed me his collection of “interesting sites” he planned for us to see in the area. As we were visiting those places, we talked about variety of subjects.

CONSTELLATIONS OF LOS ANGELES

2009-04-02T15:36:39-04:00

The Pink Project

2007-12-03T07:25:00-05:00

While filming on a set in New Orleans, actor Brad Pitt became seduced by the powerful image of a pink-clad CGI house within the lush Louisiana surroundings. He saw the pink structure as a metaphor, representing the future of renewed housing for those displaced by the recent disasters.