Archinect - Features

How can architecture become more diverse? On May 5th, L.A. AIA's "Encompass" conference addresses this question

2017-05-04T11:44:00-04:00

Although there's always a few ignorant and ignoble members of any profession, architecture is primarily made up of progressively-minded, ethically-bound professionals. So why is architecture so white, male, and socioeconically monolithic? More importantly, how can these statistics be changed?

Between the home and the market: an interview with Christine Bjerke from Next Up: Floating Worlds

2017-03-28T12:03:00-04:00

“The economy of the home becoming an investment culture instead of a savings culture disrupts the idea of very specific gendered roles in Japanese society,” states the Copenhagen-based architect Christine Bjerke during an interview conducted as part of Archinect’s Next Up: Floating Worlds. Bjerke’s project (On the Floating World of the) FX Beauties, which inspired the name of the event, derives from her research into the spatial implications of the work of the FX Beauties, a club of Japanese housewives who engage in day-trading on foreign exchange markets.

Finding the Contemporary City Between the Local and the Global with In-Between Economies

2017-03-22T12:03:00-04:00

How is the city made? Who is it made by? Who is it made for? These are the questions poised by In-Between Economies, an interdisciplinary research platform based in Copenhagen, London and Oslo. In their view, the only way to address them in the 21st century is to expand beyond the purview of architecture or urbanism. “Urban life, and our experience of it, is a complex mix of economic systems, social relationships, and infrastructural spaces,” they tell me. And to grapple with it, we need to start talking with people besides architects.

The internship test or: why even become an architect at all?

2016-04-06T09:11:00-04:00

The question of internships frames something of a litmus test in architecture – although they tend to indicate more about the hiring firm than the hire. Exploited labor or necessary rite-of-passage? It’s a debate that’s been raging for decades almost exclusively through this binary, even as the context in which it’s been waged has transformed considerably. While certain practices have moved to institute fair compensation into their intern programs, life for many architecture interns today remains a struggle.

Architecture after capitalism, in a world without work

2016-03-18T10:32:00-04:00

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” writes Karl Marx in Das Kapital, likely the most direct invocation of architecture in his influential, and controversial, writings. “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”