Archinect - News

Architecture as Child's Play

2013-05-01T19:31:00-04:00

At university, students from other courses felt that we in architecture weren’t really studying at all; to them the studio seemed like some kind of uber-kindergarten, legitimated for academic credit.... The architecture profession seemed from the outside, and perhaps even to us on the inside, to promise an idyllic eternal childhood of balsa and glue and gee-whiz drawings on computers.

On Places, Naomi Stead discusses the popular conception of architecture as a kind of "child's play."

What do dollhouses and architectural models have in common? Why should we care about Lego Architecture and Architect Barbie and the romantic depiction of architects in Hollywood movies?

She concludes: "If the profession of architecture is constructed from the outside as an escapist daydream, available for the idle fantasizing and wish-fulfillment of all, then this leaves the whole profession operating inside a doll’s house: idyllic, hermetic and controlled, but largely powerless to act in the actual world."

Oren Safdie's architecture-themed play "False Solution" opens this June

2013-04-16T14:57:00-04:00

Oren Safdie, son of Moshe Safdie, and writer of plays themed around architecture, will be opening his third play, titled "False Solution", on June 13th. The play deals with an established architect struggling to design a new Holocaust museum in Poland, focusing on the architect's creative process.

FALSE SOLUTION -- a world-premiere play about an architect's struggles to design a Holocaust museum in Poland - written by Oren Safdie (author of the Off-Broadway hit PRIVATE JOKES, PUBLIC PLACES, and THE BILBAO EFFECT) - will be presented Off-Broadway with previews starting June 13 prior to an official press opening night on June 16, 2013 at La MaMa ETC (74A East 4th Street) in Manhattan.

PRIVATE JOKES, PUBLIC PLACES, which also premiered at La MaMa in 2003 before transferring to the Center for Architecture, starred Anthony Rapp. Mr. Safdie's Off-Broadway play THE LAST WORD, also enjoyed critical and popular success in 2007, and starred Emmy Award-winning actor, Daniel J. Travant...

'A Raw Space' explores the architecture of marriage

2012-02-07T13:44:00-05:00

Baker is an architect who has just purchased one of [Richard] Meier’s raw space apartments with his wife and is supposed to be using his design skills to turn it into a home. But he is suffering through an artistic slump, a malaise his wife hopes to remedy by forcing him into a competition with a younger, up-and-coming architect, whose wife was once her best friend. Through constantly shifting perspectives, the private design competition provides a funny, insightful look at love and ambition...

A Raw Space is a play by Jon Marans, currently running at the Bristol Riverside theater in Philadelphia. The play is set inside of one of Richard Meier's Perry Street luxury apartments, while the tenants, two high powered architecture couples, tangle during a design competition.

Carsten Höller Is Installing a Slide at New Museum

2011-10-07T12:28:13-04:00

If all goes as planned, the New Museum’s five-year-old building on the Bowery will become something of an amusement park beginning Oct. 26, with visitors hurtling through a giant plastic tube from the fourth floor to the second

Bilbao Effect turns Off-Broadway Effect

2010-03-25T18:57:00-04:00

Playwright Oren Safdie, son of architect Moshe Safdie, will be debuting his latest play "The Bilbao Effect" at the Center for Architecture on May 16th.

In Mr. Safdie's play THE BILBAO EFFECT -- the second play of a planned trilogy focusing on contemporary architecture -- Erhardt Shlaminger is a world famous architect who faces censure by the American Institute of Architects, following accusations that his urban redevelopment project for Staten Island has led to a woman's suicide. The play tackles controversial urban design issues that New Yorkers have recently encountered in Brooklyn as a result of the hotly-debated plans to redevelop the Atlantic Yards into an architecture-star mega-development. THE BILBAO EFFECT explores whether architecture has become more of an art than a profession, and at what point the ethics of one field violate the principles of the other.

Broadway World