Archinect - News

Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990

2013-04-09T18:11:00-04:00

This exhibition charts L.A.’s rapid transformation into one of the globe’s most influential industrial, economic and creative capitals. From its ambitious freeway network and sleek coffee shops, to its dynamic cultural destinations and experimental residences, the vast metropolis’s rich yet often underappreciated built environment is reexamined, promising new insight into the region’s development and impact as a vibrant laboratory for cutting-edge design.

Luxury Project Suspended: Protests in Berlin Save the Wall for Now

2013-03-05T14:24:00-05:00

The investor behind a controversial luxury housing complex in the German capital has suspended construction after thousands protested plans to remove a section of the Berlin Wall to accomodate the building. He will try to find a compromise at a meeting with officials later this month.

Click here to see the full photo gallery. The online petition "Save Berlin's East Side Gallery from being torn down for luxury condos" can be found on change.org.

Mariana Van Rensselaer, Founding Mother of Architecture Criticism

2013-03-01T19:18:00-05:00

Whatever you want, then, go to an architect for it; not to a carpenter, or a mason, or your own still more profound incompetence. Tell him all your practical, material desires, and insist that they shall be respected... Settle your practical desires and state them clearly; and, if you will, pour out your vague aesthetic wishes; try to explain those crude artistic preferences, those misty, formless visions which you are pleased to call “my own ideas.”

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, though little known today, was not only a leading architecture critic of her day but also one of the pioneers of the field in the late 19th century. On Places, Alexandra Lange analyzes her writings and her influence. As she writes, "Mariana Van Rensselaer worked out the ground rules of the fledgling profession, struggling to be a critic of greater conscientiousness, while calling upon her players — architects, clients, public — to do their jobs properly."

In a related features, Places has republished Van Rensselaer's 1890 essay, "Client and Architect."

What the White House Looks Like Completely Gutted

2013-02-27T03:12:00-05:00

Harry S Truman inherited a White House that was in horrendous shape. After the British nearly burnt it to the ground in 1814, the construction of 20th-century innovations—indoor plumbing, electricity, and heating ducts—had also taken its toll on the structure. The building was nearly 150 years old, and it showed its age. In November 1948, the building was in a near-condemnable state... So it had to be gutted. Completely.

WAI Think Tank Video "Généalogie d'un collage"

2012-12-02T13:07:00-05:00

WAI Architecture Think Tank has released the video narrative “Généalogie d'un collage”. The video displays the creation of the collage ‘Cities of the Avant-Garde’ as well as one of the poems that were developed with the iconic image.

Music:
Asap Rocky “Peso” (2011)
Jan Garbarek & Agnes Buen Garnas “Rosensfole” (1988)
www.wai-architecture.com
www.waithinktank.com

Uncovering Berlin’s Hidden Architectural History

2012-11-30T02:23:00-05:00

A recent structural discovery that was recently found buried beneath 30 tonnes of rubble has the global industry abuzz. The architectural secret, which was dubbed ‘Berlin’s best kept architectural secret,’ is a three-storey German Music Hall Theatre, designed by famous architect and business owner Oscar Garbe and built in 1905.

Project 1984: What About the Possibility of a Kynical Architecture?

2012-08-24T12:11:00-04:00

For an architect, in the instant that he has undivided attention of a patron with the power to realize his designs, literally nothing else matters; not a fire alarm, not even an earthquake; there is nothing else to talk about but architecture.

-Dejan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex

The fully developed ability to say No is also the only valid background for Yes, and only through both does real freedom [begin] to take form.

-Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

City
Four towers rise above the city like muscular trunks in a grass field. Their scale obliterates any possible question about the intentionality of their disproportionate size. The exaggerated disparity between them and the urban fabric could not have been accidental. The towers were unquestionably built to be the main focus, the sole object of attention. They are by lengths the most important buildings in the city. The towers deliver an explicit message of datum and order. Visible from any point in the ci...

Never-before-seen photos from 100 years ago tell vivid story of gritty New York City

2012-04-25T01:53:00-04:00

Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the internet. The city's Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database. Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the 870,000 photographs feature all manner of city oversight -- from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.

'If Walls Could Talk': A History Of The Home

2012-03-14T12:49:00-04:00

The book answers questions like: Why did the flushing toilet take two centuries to catch on? Why were kitchens cut off from the rest of a home? And did strangers really share beds as recently as a century ago? (Yes, they did.)

On Detroit and Ruin

2012-01-12T15:53:00-05:00

The truth I’m trying to present is one about site-specific forgetting. If our history is a history of forgetting how to remember the past, as I am arguing, then the city of Detroit is the engine of our conflicted deliverance. It’s the machinery we’ve used for particular acts of forgetting, each connected to the place and time where the forgetting got done.

This week on Places, two features by Detroit residents contextualize the city's ruins.

In "The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit," Jerry Herron reflects on the decline of Hudson's and the improbable hopefulness of the retrofitted car park in the Michigan theater. He critiques two recent books of ruin photography and offers an alternate reading of the city as a machine for forgetting.

In "Detroit Re-Photography," Dave Jordano presents a slideshow of Detroit buildings and landscapes photographed in the early 1970s and in 2010. Photo editor Aaron Rothman notes that Jordano's then-and-now images "implicate us in the changes they depict," and work as a kind of antidote to the cool aestheticism of ruin porn.

History in the making: How Constantinople was built for Assassin's Creed

2011-11-18T13:59:35-05:00

Games gurus and architects have much in common: both design the movement of people through space. Assassin's Creed: Revelations, set in 16th-century Constantinople, writes that similarity large. To furnish the video-game's levels with verisimilitude, art director Raphael Lacoste and mission design director Falko Poiker turned draftsmen. They made a research trip to the city (today's Istanbul) to collect images that could be turned into computer graphics.

Los Angeles is gaining a sense of history

2011-11-12T20:32:04-05:00

All over Los Angeles, the places where artists, architects and engineers were busy in the postwar years inventing the future are being recast as monuments and historical shrines. This new attitude toward the city's recent heritage can be seen in increasingly visible battles over the fate of postwar landmarks like Richard Neutra's Kronish House in Beverly Hills and in nascent efforts to preserve and display artifacts from the early years of the computer and aerospace industries in Los Angeles.

AJ Writing Prize: Alan Berman on what makes good architectural writing

2011-06-13T17:33:17-04:00

Historians today don’t do history, but historiography. Each aims to better the last in range of content and extremes of references, in language increasingly esoteric and dense: a babble of self referential writing that addresses only others in the lodge. Architectural writing, prone to fashion like all else in the design professions, has followed.

Museums hire architects but forsake past architecture

2011-05-28T16:17:02-04:00

Institutions including SFMOMA, the Whitney, the Barnes Foundation and MoMA plan various additions and exits, a boom for contemporary architects but a bust for architectural history.