Archinect - Features

#ArchinectMeets @sssscavvvv

2018-09-25T10:00:00-04:00

#ArchinectMeets is a series of interviews with members of the architecture community that use Instagram as a creative medium. With the series, we ask some of Instagram’s architectural photographers, producers and curators about their relationship to the social media platform and how it has affected their practice.

Social media has undeniably affected the way we perceive, interpret and share opinions about architecture today. While we use our own account, @Archinect, as a site for image curation and news content, we wanted to ask fellow Instagram users how they navigated the platform.

We spoke to Ryan Scavnicky, the meme extraordinaire behind @sssscavvvv. Marshall Mcluhan's maxim, "the medium is the message," is nowhere more tested than with his class-bending Instagram posts, where a cryptic essay on Object Oriented Ontology can be interrogated by a forcefully skewed image under Clip Art text. Between his Instagram and his teaching fellowship at the School of Architecture at Talies...

Based on True Events. Copied from Past Ones.

2018-09-12T12:28:00-04:00

The role of Archinect’s series Cross-Talk is to bring forward the positive aspects of the polemic and allow for the resulting conflict to bring to life an otherwise still and comfortable climate of creativity—if there can be one. Cross-Talk attempts—if to only say that it did—to allow text the freedom that the image has accepted and embraced. Cross-Talk attempts to force the no, to contradict itself, to anger, to please and then anger again, if only to force a stance, to pull out the position of the self, of the discipline and of the hour as a means to begin and maintain conversations moving forward.

In this installment we hear from Brendan Shea on the topic of Creative Rights & Intellectual Property. Brendan is a Los Angeles based designer, educator and maker.

Mutant Authorship. Agency, Capitalism and Memes.

2018-09-11T09:00:00-04:00

In this installment we hear from Ryan Scavnicky on the topic of Creative Rights & Intellectual Property. Ryan is the Visiting Fellow at the School of Architecture at Taliesin, a producer of theory films with SCI-Arc Channel, and a practicing Architectural Designer with studio TECHNE.

Never Meant to Copy, Only to Surpass: Plagiarism Versus Innovation in Architectural Imitation

2017-04-13T12:15:00-04:00

Wangjing SOHO, a three tower complex in Beijing penned by Zaha Hadid, became a worldwide sensation when it was revealed that the scheme was being allegedly plagiarized by a construction team in Chongqing, southern China. Despite the subsequent outcry from the professional design world, Hadid responded that if the ‘copy-cat’ designs displayed innovative mutations, “that would be exciting”. While many architectural icons are commissioned precisely for their artistic originality, the design response is often non-site specific, which raises interesting questions when such icons are reproduced around the globe. What does it mean for architectural originality and innovation, when a ‘copy-paste’ strategy is normalized?