Academic institutions have a mandate to contribute to public knowledge, but the structures that support the transfer and dissemination of research, and the application of research within urban design practice, are often weak. There is a widening gap between what happens within the academy and what happens on the ground in cities — often a retrograde, generic and ad hoc agglomeration of politically or financially motivated initiatives. — Places Journal
Places interviews Ila Berman, director of architecture at the California College of the Arts, and Mona El Khafif, project coordinator of URBANlab, about research + design initiatives at the lab. The feature includes a slideshow of faculty and student work, including design proposals for... View full entry »
In the last decade, much has been written about architecture for the greater good, and it would seem that the field, as a whole, is invested in bringing design to underserved communities. Yet all of this talk — at conferences, in the press, at universities — has focused hardly at all on how to put together a career in social design. — Places Journal
On Places, Virginia Tech graduate Will Holman gives an honest report of his experiences volunteering, studying and working at Arcosanti, Rural Studio, and Youth Build. Does the architecture profession need to do more to support young architects who take this path? View full entry »
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. — Places Journal
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... View full entry »
We were able to meet the Grimms’ strict design requirements by employing a slender tower design of vertical cylindrical stems that are joined by intermittent outrigger beams with a reinforced space at the very top for Rapunzel’s long captivity. — Places Journal
This week, Places has a holiday series on fairy tale architecture. Participating firms — Bernheimer Architecture, Leven Betts, and Guy Nordenson and Associates — have selected favorite tales and produced works exploring the intimate relationship between the domestic structures of... View full entry »
In landscape, legible intent is different for forms we perceive to be buildings than for forms we perceive to be sculptures, since in most cases (Gehry is the exception) before we ask, what is the architect’s purpose, we ask, what is the building’s purpose? This may be the single most profound difference between architectural and sculptural presence in landscape. — Places Journal
David Heymann analyzes the very different ways in which works of sculpture and works of architecture occupy the landscape. And he looks closely at a grain elevator, and shows how a form which we usually experience as a familiar and even neighborly presence can come to seem evil. The final... View full entry »
![Occupy Wall Street, Day 60, November 15, 2011, after the police evicted protestors and cleaned the park. [Photo by David Shankbone]](http://cdn.archinect.net/images/514x/ci/ciolh18taz89mjaa.jpg "Occupy Wall Street, Day 60, November 15, 2011, after the police evicted protestors and cleaned the park. [Photo by David Shankbone]")
For if there is one abiding historical certainty it is that, eventually, things change. And they can be made to change. There is no such thing, however, as a revolutionary architecture. Nor does history ever simply start from scratch. Instead, post-revolutionary questions can be posed in advance to infrastructures that already exist.... to reinvent what used to be called housing, schools, hospitals, factories, and farms in a way that asks: What else must change for these changes to be possible? — Places Journal
Reinhold Martin argues that architects must plan for post-revolutionary conditions. A follow-up to his earlier essay for Places, "Occupy: What Architecture Can Do." View full entry »
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