Archinect - News

Video of Toyo Ito's lecture, "What Was Metabolism? Reflections on the Life of Kiyonori Kikutake"

2012-10-18T12:46:00-04:00

The Metabolist Movement in the 1960s established the foundation from which contemporary architecture in Japan has emerged up to the present. Even today, the visionary architectural and urban projects created by the leading Metabolist Kiyonori Kikutake continue to shine brightly, according to Toyo Ito. In this lecture, he will consider Metabolism’s significance today through his rereading of Kikutake's works of that time.

After March 11th, Kengo Kuma's Lecture at GSD

2012-10-11T18:21:00-04:00

The great disaster of March 11, 2011 differed from any other catastrophe since the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. In the age of advanced technology and "strong" buildings, the tsunami flattened Tohoku coastline in seconds. The nuclear accident that followed further revealed the vulnerability of "big and strong" architecture. In the face of radiation, materials such as concrete and steel were insufficient, even though nuclear energy had been a solution for our drive to be bigger, stronger...

To follow up with Lian's exceptional, as always, live coverage of Kuma's lecture, we present you with the video.

The Yale Daily News summarizes last night's WORKac lecture

2012-09-07T12:50:00-04:00

“We don’t believe architecture can solve anything,” Andraos said of the relationship between environmentalism and design in WORKac’s creations. “Rather, we feel this is a question of impacting culture. In the architect’s Sisyphean relation to power, we believe in the visionary, and his agency to radicalize and to move culture.”

Marc Simmons, "Process Performance"

2012-04-06T18:34:00-04:00

With the firm Front, in which he is a Partner, Marc Simmons has collaborated on projects with OMA, Asymptote Architecture, ARO, Beyer Blinder Belle, Gehry Partners, Herzog & De Meuron, Kengo Kuma, KPF, Mack Scogin Merril Elam Architects, Renzo Piano, Sejima + Nishizawa Associates, Steven Holl Architects, Toshiko Mori, and many other architects. His lecture will explore themes in his recent work, including the speculative and experimental potential of the facade specialist.

Via Lian's GSD blog

Watch Live: Digital Systems: Theory + Practice; Keynote by Greg Lynn

2012-03-29T19:27:00-04:00

The Panelists will explore the theoretical approaches to Digital fabrication and tooling systems, as well as the various implications and practical applications of digital fabrications and their impact on the practice and pedagogy of architecture.

Barbara Bestor: Blue Sky Curricula For the Next Century

2012-02-07T14:37:00-05:00

Architect and Woodbury School of Architecture professor Barbara Bestor presented an optimistic vision of architecture—one grounded in entrepreneurial practice and creating new opportunities—at the 2011 ACSA Administrators Conference: Old School/New School in November. (Co-chaired by Dean Norman Millar.)

Post(card) Ideological Icons

2011-11-28T05:14:00-05:00

What about revisiting the hardcore shapes of the avant-garde?

It has been almost a century since the air was heavily saturated with the combustible gas of ideology. Almost a hundred years have passed since everything from film, through art and architecture, to urbanism was susceptible to the slightest friction in the atmosphere sparking endless manifestoes and multiple visions of the perennial “new beginning”. But what happens when the ideological fire that fuels urbanism is extinguished, and in its place just smoke remains? What is left after the idealistic energy of the avant-garde has vanished and we are left with necrophilic icons of dead ideologies? Why aren’t we able to see the striking similarities and contrasting disparities between the avatars of yesterday’s ideological urbanism and today’s pop-architectural icons?

In the twenties imaginary taut wires, steel trusses, and structural concrete gave form to the muscular monuments of a Potemkinesque avant-garde. Utopia had...