Archinect - News

NEW CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR MONU #19 - GREATER URBANISM

2013-05-15T11:36:00-04:00

Are cities becoming "greater" these days? (Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, May 2013)

Are cities becoming "greater" these days? When two years ago, in our 14th issue of MONU Magazine entitled "Editing Urbanism", we claimed that in the Western world, the need for new buildings and city districts was decreasing or even ceasing to exist altogether due to demographic changes and financially difficult times, we did not believe in all those new, big-scale, and long-term urban development strategies for the metropolitan areas of certain European cities that were being proposed at the time. The growth numbers that plans such as "Greater Helsinki" envisioned for the year 2050, trying to brand the city as one of the most dynamic metropolises in Europe, predicting a population growth from 1.3 million to 2 million, were too exuberant and too vast. However, other European cities, such as Paris, seem to be changing substantially within their metropolitan areas, their "greater" areas. Paris needs to build 70.000 new housing units per year. Mainly because of such requirements, but...

Fred Bernstein reviews "Phyllis Lambert’s Building Seagram"

2013-05-13T18:37:00-04:00

As Seagram’s director of planning, Lambert visited the site daily. “I had intended to go back to Paris, but I stayed in New York, convinced that if the one person who really cared about the building was not there, Mies would not build Seagram,” she says. With Lambert as his protector and Johnson as his assistant, Mies went on to create in 1958 the Seagram building, a landmark of 20th-century architecture.

Thresholds - Issue 41, now available online

2013-05-07T18:02:00-04:00

What actions are prompted by revolution in the space of the city? Which publics take part in this struggle, and who are the agents that mobilize it? And after a revolution has subsided, how is it remembered, represented and memorialized? thresholds 41: REVOLUTION! turns to the history, design, and cultural production of the public realm as a site of dissensus...

Traditional news outlets recruit architecture critics Lamster, Saffron and Sorkin

2013-04-22T16:45:00-04:00

The shrinkage of daily newspapers and news and culture magazines has thinned the already slim ranks of architecture critics. While blogs and social media proliferate debate about architecture and design, many have fretted about the lack of a common dialogue around architecture and urbanism as defined by the work of leading critics. It turns out that architecture criticism is far from dead, however, as three established voices are finding new outlets with newspapers and national magazines.

Mark Lamster has been appointed architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News. Inga Saffron has begun writing a monthly column on urbanism for the website of the newly re-launched New Republic. Michael Sorkin is slated to begin writing for the left-leaning Nation magazine.

Why did some Columbia architecture students treat their annual like garbage?

2013-04-16T13:01:00-04:00

Departing with the familiar tradition of producing a hefty physical volume, GSAPP offered its most recent Abstract in the form of an iPad app. In addition to (or on cover-like behalf of) this app, students received an object: It looks like a book, but turns out to be a book-shaped plastic box, and its contents consist of a URL, where the app can be downloaded. This object, as you can see, has not been universally embraced.

Bracket [Goes Soft] Toronto Book Launch

2013-02-22T19:56:00-05:00

Bracket [Goes Soft] Toronto book launch will be hosted by creatures:collective on March 1st, starting at 7pm. Editors Lola Sheppard and Neeraj Bhatia will launch the book, which will be available for purchase. Edited by Neeraj Bhatia and Lola Sheppard of Infranet Lab, this second volume in the impressive [bracket] series “examines the use and implications of soft today – from the scale of material innovation to territorial networks.” Free and open to the public, no RSVP is required.

An Architectural Photographer on Saving Russia’s Wooden Churches

2013-02-21T03:06:00-05:00

Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” is the result.

Bracket 2 — Goes Soft launch event in Houston February 17

2013-02-13T10:30:00-05:00

Bracket [Goes Soft] HOUSTON Book Launch and Discussion with Neeraj Bhatia, Ned Dodington, Scott Colman, and Christopher Hight. February 17th @ Architecture Center Houston

Henning Larsen Architects shares "Design with Knowledge" on Issuu

2013-02-05T20:29:00-05:00

In a cross-disciplinary research collaboration between The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), among others, Henning Larsen Architects has developed a knowledge-based design approach. The research has continuously been tested on real projects. By means of a number of articles and cases, the book presents the results, analyses and methods which make it possible to work with sustainability as a design parameter.

Bracket 2 — Goes Soft, available soon, launch event in NYC this Friday

2013-02-05T09:52:00-05:00

This Friday: Bracket [Goes Soft] NEW YORK Book Launch and Discussion with Neeraj Bhatia, Fionn Byrne, Michael Chen, Leigha Dennis, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Geoff Manaugh and Chris Perry. February 8th @ Studio-X NYC

Kickstart the next issue of SOILED!

2013-01-24T19:33:00-05:00

Making a mess of the built environment and the politics of space, one issue at a time.

With the arrival of a new year, SOILED has big plans. Building on our first three issues, Groundscrapers, Skinscrapers, and Platescrapers, we aspire to elevate our forthcoming issue No. 4 Windowscrapers: more dynamic, more tactilely pleasurable, and filled with more ephemera for you to soil. Rather than our current model of print-on-demand or lower-resolution PDF download, we seek to do a print run of 1,000 issues through this Kickstarter campaign. Working with a local print house will allow us more freedom to bring our vision to life, to sell SOILED at lower costs, and to distribute issues through independent bookstores, cultural institutions, and communal spaces across Chicago, the US, and beyond.

Get dirty with us in 2013! Help us spread the word far and wide. And did we mention the promise of excellent swag that you could earn by supporting our campaign? You have until February 1st to support this independent publishing endeavor!

More info:
http://soiledzine.org
http://kck....

A City for Books and Architecture in South Korea

2013-01-16T11:21:00-05:00

When I first heard of Paju Bookcity, I imagined a bibliophilic paradise of human-scaled buildings with legible facades nestled side-by-side like volumes on a shelf. When I traveled to the real Paju Bookcity, I found an industrial estate created by companies related to all aspects of book manufacturing, sited north of Seoul in the marshes near the Demilitarized Zone. But if Bookcity is not the fairy tale I envisioned, it is a kind of Cinderella story: this is the industrial park remade.

On Places, Shannon Mattern explores the ongoing remaking of Bookcity — which seeks to reinvent invent Korean publishing, architecture and urban planning — in the digital era.

Adaptation: Architecture, Technology and the City by INABA in collaboration with FREE

2012-12-12T15:03:00-05:00

"As the city becomes more technological, architecture will become more essential. Technologies are growing as part of the functioning of cities, and as a result, the design of the urban environment will take on central importance. But this shift won’t occur as we might think.”

Download the PDF

Bringing together a host of interviews, contributions, and art works, Adaptation: Architecture, Technology and the City is a preliminary study of digital technology in the built environment. The publication surveys the ways that technology generates new kinds of experiences in the city, as well as the spaces created in its wake, including outmoded infrastructure, glitch space, and public zones populated with tethered cables. If digital technology promised a smooth environment independent of the constraints of geography, Adaptation makes clear that the digital also overlaps with and complicates the physical world.

Adaptation concludes by exploring the unexpected ways in which t...

Pharrell Talks Jean Prouvé, Gio Ponti, Zaha Hadid, And “Other Super Genius Guys” at Design Miami/

2012-12-10T18:19:00-05:00

The budding industrial designer also gave his top picks from the fair, which unsurprisingly all feature bright swaths of primary colors: a Charlotte Perriand bookshelf from Galerie Downtown accented with yellow squares; a Pierre Guariche chair from Demisch Danant, a Riteveld chair from Galerie Vivid; and a desk from Galleria Rossella Colombari by Gio Ponti, whom he was so delighted to have discovered: “He tried to make the office fun!”

A Stunning Survey Of Pics By Eero Saarinen's In-House Photog

2012-08-15T15:02:00-04:00

In 1954, a young Hungarian went to work with Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. As his then colleague, Cesar Pelli, describes him: “[He] was a small sensation: he had a fur-trimmed coat, a homburg, and a Van Dyke beard.”... He had been a distinguished architectural student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in Paris, and a draftsman under Le Corbusier... he was quickly tapped as the in-house photographer, creating pictures that became indelible symbols of the Mad Men age of Modernism.

What is the Future of Academic Publishing? An Interview with Gita Manaktala from MIT Press

2012-07-17T12:16:00-04:00

University presses will endure as long as they are in a position to offer significant value to academic authors and their readers, and as long as they have the support of their home institutions. In the present and near future, we will see new models for the university press including funded open access models, collaborative publishing models, and global partnerships to develop and disseminate high quality scholarship worldwide.

What lies behind the battle over the New York Public Library

2012-07-09T12:25:00-04:00

The hottest cultural controversy of this already hot summer concerns the New York Public Library (NYPL), and a plan to disembowel its main building – a plan that will slice open the stacks and "replace books with people", in the words of the NYPL system's CEO, Tony Marx. It's enraged writers and professors, demoralized a staff already coping with layoffs, and called the entire purpose of the system into question.

They went their own way, to a late acclaim

2012-07-05T16:33:00-04:00

A UK friend is writing "a little book" on architectural losers. Such a British idea. He's collecting the under-talented and the under-appreciated, the beaverers-away in an unappreciated style. To which my predictable response is: how many volumes can you run to? How, from the myriad, will you choose?

London Underground | Mass Observation

2012-05-02T14:56:44-04:00

The fact that one of Britain’s most exciting new design practices is named after a social research organization formed in the 1930s is not a coincidence. The photographer Theo Simpson and the graphic designer Ben Mclaughlin founded their London studio, Mass Observation, last year with a mission to examine everyday experiences and surroundings. Their expanding portfolio of self-published books and print editions investigates contemporary social, political and economical issues...

SOILED's third installment: Platescrapers

2012-04-02T11:24:00-04:00

Platescrapers navigates itinerant fare, comestible politics, and gastro-ritual to purvey stories about social issues and exaggerated realities; each story illustrates food as a monument to galvanize the public.

SOILED is an architectural periodical based in Chicago. It investigates latent issues in the built environment and the politics of space.

SOILED's latest issue, entitled Platescrapers, is out! With three issues to date, SOILED is available in both a print edition and a free downloadable PDF via www.soiledzine.org. SOILED is published by CARTOGRAM architecture + urban design.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Stewart Hicks, Allison Newmeyer, and Joseph Altshuler challenge us to play with our food.
Annie Lambla connects yogurt making to dairy farms while observing the Midwest's culture.
Thomas Hillier recounts the exodus and edible nostalgia of an English twosome.
Greg Corso champions the inclusion of cannabis cultivation into architectural vernacular.
Kyle Andrew Sturgeon strategizes an infrastructure to combat the invasion of Asian carp.
Eylül Kethüda choreographs a mega-event around victuals, monuments, and mob mentality.
Francesco Vedovato sets the table with an ec...

Kickstart: WAX MAGAZINE

2012-03-20T23:06:00-04:00

We are two graphic designers and a writer who all surf together. When at our local breaks, we found that many of the people we met were artists, architects, designers, and writers — often leaders in their fields. We wanted to create a publication that tells their stories and opens up a rich dialogue in the urban surf community.

Check out Archinect's latest curatorial pick at Kickstarter. To view all of our selections visit Kickstarter.com/Archinect.

MONU #15 "Post-Ideological Urbanism" - Review by Michael Hirschbichler

2012-03-15T21:05:00-04:00

In its latest issue #15 Rotterdam-based MONU magazine set out on a daring journey to investigate, as chief editor Bernd Upmeyer proclaims, “one of the most fascinating and biggest issues of our time and in culture, or what is left of it: the non-ideological – or better post-ideological – conditions of our society when it comes to cities.” At a time when the news is full of reports on breathtaking riots erupting in European cities, revolutionary chain reactions and their cruel suppression in the Arabic world, the rejuvenation and continuation of the world’s most isolated and propagandistically charged dictatorial empire in Asia, among many others, assuming a post-ideological condition might seem contradictory. Now even more than in recent history, ideological battles are being fought and their physical and violent revolutionary implementation transforms the reality of many urban territories. How can it be that, when it comes to urbanism, the non-ideological and post-ideological gai...

Call for Submissions: (Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture, 306090 15

2012-02-08T19:11:00-05:00

What is essential knowledge for architecture? This frequently posed question targets fundamental principles of design, those basic criteria and priorities through which disciplinary stability is ensured. Yet, insofar as relevance is a core value of architecture, in both theory and practice, the contingent nature of the future guarantees that some forms of knowledge not presently considered essential will eventually become indispensable.

DO WE SIMPLY HAVE TO STOP HAVING SEX...?

2012-01-26T04:14:00-05:00

In August 2009 the editorial of MONU #11 on the topic of "Clean Urbanism" started with the lines "Do we simply have to stop having sex to produce Clean Urbanism..."

These lines are now featured on a bag designed and produced by MONU Magazine. The bags were produced in a limited edition of 50 pieces. To get a bag please e-mail your order to bag@monu-magazine.com .

Text on MONU Bag: "Do we simply have to stop having sex to produce Clean Urbanism - i.e. an urbanism that is dedicated to minimizing both the required inputs of energy, water, and food for a city as well as its waste output of heat, air pollution as CO2, methan, and water pollution, Samo Pedersen asks in his piece “Sci-fi greenery..or just Responsibility?”. In fact Randall Teal sees the growing world population frequently ignored in discussions on sustainability, as he points out in his article “Coming Clean: Owning Up to the Real Demands of a Sustainable Existence”. Fewer people spend less energy, and as the gas and oil supply will come to an end sooner or later, saving energy may be a cheaper and smarter solution for cities than depending on renewable energies, as Gerd Hauser, on...

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS – Limited Edition Book

2012-01-04T14:10:34-05:00

Our friends at eVolo have sent us a copy of their limited edition book, EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS, and boy, it's a festival for eyes and biceps. At 1224 pages, the book measures 9″ x 11.5″ x 2.5″ and calls for extra sturdy coffee tables.

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS celebrates six years of the internationally acclaimed eVolo Skyscraper Competition and compiles 300 outstanding high-rise architecture projects selected from the over 4000 submissions since its inception in 2006. The contest recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the implementation of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations. Studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution are some of the multi-layered elements of the competition. It is an investigation on the public and private space and the role of the individual and the collective in the creation of dynamic and adaptive vertical communities.

The projects are divided into six chapte...

London Underground | Architecture in Print

2012-01-03T17:37:07-05:00

The last few years have seen a new generation of alternative publications and editorial talent emerge, and London is very much a part of the scene. This month saw the release of the fourth issue of P.E.A.R.. Printed on newspaper stock, this zine was started by the editorial collective of Rashid Ali, Matthew Butcher, Julian Krueger and Megan O’Shea, with the designer Avni Patel, in 2009.

John Hill, celebrating New York one building at a time

2011-12-09T17:19:30-05:00

This is John Hill’s element, and these are his people. Hill has begun to emerge, in the past five years or so, as one of New York’s great architectural communicators, an exquisitely informed tour guide for the layman design enthusiast. His main platform has been his website, A Daily Dose of Architecture, which, if it does not quite stand astride the world of design blogs, nevertheless lords over a small sub-fiefdom of largely unstaffed, noncommercial sites.

Call for submissions, Conditions Issue #10: GOSSIP

2011-11-30T17:08:12-05:00

What is the function of gossip in architecture? Let’s face it, architects don’t openly criticize or debate each others work in public; they prefer to gossip within their chosen networks, aiding social bonding through subtle passive aggression. Gossip has always been around in architecture as one of the oldest ways of sharing, maneuvering and convincing. But how does it manifest itself today within the instant culture of internet and social media? What is the role of gossip in contemporary networking? Has the logic of gossip and instant gratification also penetrated what we used to call architectural critique? How does the world of architecture really work? Why are some more successful than others? Why do some get their projects built and others not? Are they better architects? How important are networks? How do they work? Why don’t the best projects always win the competition? Behind every project, office or architect there is a story that reveals the truth of how it really happen...

Unhappy Hipsters goes to print

2011-10-09T23:50:52-04:00

From the creators of the wildly popular Web site Unhappyhipsters.com, this essential guide is for today s hipsters what The Official Preppy Handbook was for prepsters. The authors advise on a number of topics. Readers will learn how to navigate the vast array of concrete finishes and plywood grades, accessorize with children and pets, opine with authority on rooflines.

ARCHI-ZINES Exhibition to Launch Nov. 5 / Archinect is Represented (twice)!

2011-10-06T18:49:10-04:00

The exhibition, curated by Elias Redstone, originated as an online project and showcases 60 architecture magazines, fanzines and journals from over 20 countries. From Australia and Argentina to the UK and USA, these independent publications are reframing how people relate to their built environment – taking comment and criticism out of just an architectural arena and into everyday life.

We're honored to have both our new Archinect News Digest 'zine, as well as Bracket, included in the upcoming ARCHI-ZINES exhibition at the AA in London.