Archinect - Features

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 5)

2018-06-19T10:00:00-04:00

Chapter 5: Halfway Point No (Fire) Escape

Prior to 1968, Rand Hall contained a single staircase located at the center of the building. That year the first floor of Rand Hall was renovated and the second floor was repartitioned for the Center for Research in Education. With only one mode of egress, the building did not comply with the fire safety regulations of New York State that required two exits at either end of a floor. An emergency stair tower was added to the eastern edge of the building and a three foot wide unobstructed corridor from one side of the building to the other. In another 50 years, the stair tower would be removed in favor of an interior staircase with the design of the new addition.

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 4)

2018-04-13T09:00:00-04:00

Chapter 4: Second Action Second Renovation

Rooms for data processor and faculty offices were installed on the first floor of Rand Hall for the Cornell Computer Center in 1959. Additional interior walls were erected to expand the office spaces on the west end of the second floor of Rand Hall. Today, the digitized collection of the entire library can be contained within the memory of a hard drive smaller than the size of a single book. But in 1959, the physical space required by a digitized library would have occupied more area than a traditional library of book stacks containing the same amount of information.

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 3)

2018-03-06T08:00:00-05:00

Chapter 3: First Action First Renovation

Non load-bearing partitions were added between the columns to create spaces for offices and seminar rooms on the east side of the second floor of Rand Hall in 1952. Earlier that year, Buckminster Fuller built a twenty foot diameter geodesic dome with students on the roof of Rand Hall that acted as an inverted planetarium. But what had been intended as a permanent fixture on top of the building was destroyed by vandals on Halloween night. Although the structure no longer exists on top of Rand Hall, it is well documented in the extensive Fuller Archives.

Assessing Surveillance: Infrastructures of Security in the Tohono O‘odham Nation

2018-02-13T09:00:00-05:00

In March of 2014, United States Customs and Border Protection awarded Elbit Systems of America a contract to design, construct, and deploy Integrated Fixed Towers (IFT) at an unspecified number of sites in unspecified locations along the southwestern border of the United States. Elbit’s responsibilities extended beyond mere construction and monitoring to in situ testing, ensuring customer satisfaction with their product’s ability “to detect, track, identify, and classify movement on the border” [1].

Silent Walls: The Architecture of Historical Memory in Spain

2018-01-23T09:00:00-05:00

In 1977, Spain celebrated its first free general election since the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship that followed, which together lasted over four decades. Despite that this restoration of democracy has become a model for peaceful political transitions, to this day the country still struggles to come to terms with its historical memory.

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 2)

2018-01-16T09:00:00-05:00

Chapter 2: Inciting Incident, Inciting Building

Before the construction of Rand Hall, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, gifted his architectural library to establish the Department of Architecture in 1876. That same year the American Library Association was formed. It marked a turning point in the way university libraries managed their collections and controlled access of their materials to faculty, students, and the public.

Object Objections

2018-01-09T09:00:00-05:00

Like many of their contemporaries, the Vienna-based studio iheartblob have taken an interest in emerging schools of philosophy, notably object-oriented ontology and thermodynamic theory. But, unlike many peers, they do so with a critical remove. In this excerpt from their project for Ed, iheartblob designs a series of alluring “objects” meant to enchant, but also reflect on the “crises of thought” they find dominate architecture today. The collective plays with new and popular ideas in architecture as if they were materials, engaging seriously with each while remaining at a distance from full immersion. Their designs are rarely seen in plan and section but rather expressed using renders, mixed realities (physical and augmented), and animations in order to reflect their Lagrangian derivations.

Architecture: the Geontopolitics of Knowledge and Time

2018-01-02T09:00:00-05:00

“Where is Vermilion Sands? I suppose its spiritual home lies somewhere between Arizona and Ipanema Beach, but in recent years I have been delighted to see it popping up elsewhere — above all, in sections of the 3,000-mile-long linear city that stretches from Gibraltar to Glyfada Beach along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and where each summer Europe lies on its back in the sun. That posture, of course, is the hallmark of Vermilion Sands and, I hope, of the future—not merely that no-one has to work, but that work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.”

- J.G. Ballard, preface to Vermilion Sands, 1975

The Arsenal of Inclusion & Exclusion

2017-12-12T09:00:00-05:00

A project several years in the making, Interboro Partner’s new book The Arsenal of Inclusion & Exclusion is a field-guide to the often-imperceptible codes and conventions that are as responsible, if not more, for the form of the contemporary city than traditional design. Like modern-day urban detectives, the Brooklyn-based studio shows that seemingly innocuous things, from zoning to parking restrictions, are responsible for either making the city more accessible or more closed-off, often depending on who you are or what you look like.

In this excerpt from a special feature for Ed, Interboro Partners break down some of the tactics used to open and close the city.

Heroes, Rumors, Cults: Designs on Architectural Celebrity

2017-12-05T09:00:00-05:00

I1 heard a lot of stories from my friend about Zaha, like: she had a giant red couch that all of her interns had sex on; she installed a phone in the studio at Cooper Union so she could call her students at all hours of the night and ensure they were working; she too stayed up all night in London painting and watching American Gigolo on repeat2, inviting famous artists and architects in to visit her; she was spotted at the Venice Biennale standing alone in a room on top of a world map projection, hands spread out, hair blown by a fan; or, most curiously, that she sat outside, sweating in Venice while shoving pizza into her face. My friend swears that the folds of the pizza slice collapsing into the folded skin of her face looked just like one of her buildings.

Portuguese-firm Brandão Costa Arquitectos Shows Off Their Library for the Village of Caminha

2017-11-28T09:00:00-05:00

Small Studio Snapshots is one of Archinect’s regular recurring series. In it, we take a look at the ins and outs of running a small-scale practice. What hurdles do you come across? Do you want to grow or stay small and flexible? What motivates your practice in the first place?

In this excerpt from a special iteration for Ed, we talk with the Portuguese practice Brandão Costa Arquitectos led by Nuna Brandão Costa.

Social Soup

2017-11-21T09:00:00-05:00

It’s been thought for some time that life emerged from the primordial soup. It now seems that humanity is the product of social soup.

Social soup is the bio-cultural-environmental complex of opinions, beliefs, desires, truths, values, myths, grudges, inventions, histories, conspiracies, rumors, plans, protocols, archetypes, dwellings, art, jokes, taboos, and other complex vectors of life woven through our mysterious emotional organic wetware. This mesh is our habitat. We don’t dwell in nature; we live amongst each other.

A House Without A Hierarchy

2017-11-14T09:00:00-05:00

Born out of the 2008 financial crash, the Barcelona-based studio MAIO cares less about form (although their forms are striking) and more about the politics of practice. At the heart of their work is the idea that architecture must change over time to keep up with mutating social and behavioral patterns. Their practice involves extensive research in order to find loopholes in the existing system that can be utilized to make architecture that, simply, works better. For example, with their first ground-up built project 110 Rooms, the studio developed a floor plan comprising uniform-sized rooms so that residents could use as them as they see fit rather than conforming to predetermined programs. After all, the typical father-mother-children family is not so typical anymore. MAIO is helping architecture catch up.

In this feature from the first issue of Archinect's new print publication Ed, we talk with the studio about 110 Rooms and their practice more broadly.