Archinect - Features

Archinect's Guide to the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale: Part I — The National Pavilions

2023-06-06T14:17:00-04:00

With the opening week of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale now passed, there has been much discussion and media coverage of the anticipated international exhibition. It's safe to imply that the high-profile event aims to highlight, unveil, celebrate, and at times, provoke new and further existing discourse surrounding architecture. It can, however, be daunting to navigate the scene as a whole, especially for those who are learning about the pavilions, installations, participants, and overall event programming from afar.

To help Archinect readers who can only experience this year's Biennale virtually, we've created a handy reference guide to provide visuals and added context. In this two-part mini-feature series, we provide a summary and context for this year's exhibition theme, The Laboratory of the Future. Our guide offers a breakdown of important figures that make up the event, a list of participants, pavilions and installations, and upcoming events, as well as critical takes...

Architecture’s 'State of the Union': Reflections on the 2022 World Architecture Festival

2023-01-05T06:00:00-05:00

From November 30th through December 2nd, 2022, the World Architecture Festival (WAF) held its first physical event in three years. The annual festival, adapting to an online format during the COVID-19 pandemic, is regarded as one of the most critical events in the global architectural calendar, from identifying award-winning projects from over 700 candidates around the world to facilitating debates, discussions, and critiques on the built environment, and the forces entwined within it. Below, Archinect’s Niall Patrick Walsh reflects back on his visit to the 2022 edition of the festival, held in Lisbon, Portugal.

NJIT's Upcoming eLCAd Symposium Builds Cross-Disciplinary Bridges in Design and Environmental Life Cycle Assessment

2022-03-19T10:30:00-04:00

Sustainability is more than a buzzword for the team behind New Jersey Institute of Technology's (NJIT) upcoming Environmental Life Cycle Assessment in Design Symposium, better known as eLCAd. What began in 2020 as an idea to bring together the disciplines of architecture, design, and data-driven techniques for assessing environmental challenges has now become a book and industry-focused symposium for working professionals and students.

When it comes to sustainable design approaches and best practices, there are numerous conferences and symposiums to talk about and attend. But what makes eLCAd different? Why highlight this symposium in comparison to others? In a nutshell, eLCAd 2022 is a three-day, international event that "unites two professions engaged in parallel systems thinking [...] to define actionable, collaborative opportunities brought about through continuing advances in computational tools." For John Cays (Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Interim Director of the Schoo...

California Architecture Students Celebrated Through Exhibition and Scholarship at the 2021 2x8:Assemblies Student Showcase

2021-12-03T15:04:00-05:00

California is home to public and private educational institutions that offer architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, and urban planning programs — not to mention the myriad of community colleges providing notable two-year programs. In 2002, the AIA Los Angeles and a group of LA-based architects, architecture faculty, and design collaborators launched the first 2x8 Exhibition at the A+D Museum in the Bradbury building. Fast forward 19 years later, the 2x8 Exhibition has become the foremost student-focused architecture exhibition and scholarship event in Los Angeles.

Archinect has been a frequent supporter and media sponsor of the 2x8 Exhibition and Student Awards Program. While last year's exhibition and awards ceremony was conducted virtually, the current iteration, 2x8:Assemblies, features a collection of outstanding student works, enthusiastic exhibition designers, and a community of supportive architects, design professionals, and visitors.

Unpacking The Spatial Implications Of Architecture's Accessibility Failures

2020-01-14T13:19:00-05:00

There is a particular type of obliviousness to the built environment that most of us have the privilege of experiencing day-to-day. This obliviousness relates not to architecture’s aesthetic values, but rather to architecture’s accessibility out in the world. Built to Scale, an exhibition by artist Emily Barker currently on view at Murmurs Gallery in Los Angeles, is designed to knock you right out of it. And for designers and architects, it's a must-see. On view in a young gallery tucked between the nondescript buildings of LA's Manufacturing District, Barker's new solo show delves deep into the fundamental misunderstandings of architectural accessibility and its spatial implications, particularly in the realm of the home.

The Propping of Art and Architecture: a Review of the Frieze Art Fair Los Angeles

2019-02-26T18:54:00-05:00

The inaugural Frieze Art Fair Los Angeles, held on the famed Paramount Studios Lot, proved to be a success in numbers and figures. But what did the event suggest about the current states of art and architecture, and what did it suggest about the future of cultural events in the city often overlooked for its sprawl?

A Final Shot for One-Night Stand LA #3: Last Call

2017-05-26T12:12:00-04:00

On May 20th, the third and final iteration of One-Night Stand for Art and Architecture (ONS-LA)—a popular annual event in Los Angeles where designers transform motel rooms into installations for the night—took over the Royal Viking Motel in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park. Over the course of its three year run, ONS-LA has established itself as a dynamic platform for alternative architectural production, exhibition and engagement. It’s also very fun. After all, how often do architects get to have a party of their own?

Getting in the mood for One-Night Stand LA #2: the Rendezvous

2016-04-30T11:29:00-04:00

One balmy Los Angeles night last spring, throngs of architecture aficionados descended on a dingbat motel in the MacArthur Park area for what was billed, alongside amatory promotional material, as a "One-Night Stand for Art and Architecture." For a single evening, the trysting place was transformed into a series of distinct, room-size installations rendered with 3D-mapped projections, robotics, or simple 2x4’s. On May 14 of this year, the project will be reprised in the same location but with different curators and a new roster of participants. I chatted with the organizers to get the low down on what to expect from One-Night Stand LA: the Rendezvous.

Art + Architecture: Refik Anadol at Walt Disney Concert Hall

2014-11-21T18:16:00-05:00

The billowing wood panels of the concert hall imploded before my eyes, as if physically ripped apart by the thundering crescendos of Edgard Varèse’s Amériques. One moment the massive organ was radically disfigured to the point of unrecognizability; the next, its forms re-emerged beneath the luminous, moving mesh mapped onto the structure by the artist Refik Anadol. For less than a half hour, the Walt Disney Concert Hall was transformed in an exhilarating synthesis of architecture, music and digital art: the first iteration of in/SIGHT, a series of ongoing collaborations between video artists and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Review: Glen Small, Father of Green Architecture

2013-11-25T17:33:00-05:00

It is always good to see old friends, past mentors and new students at an exhibit honoring someone you love and admire. The work of Glen Small, the 'hesitant' father of Green Architecture is on display until the end of November.

The organizer and curator of the exhibit, Assembly and Archinect's own Orhan Ayyüce, has put together a smart, focused, visual overview that also includes several lectures, workshops, a book and a screening of the documentary film MY FATHER THE GENIUS.

Air Rights: an exhibit by Drone Research Lab

2013-10-18T15:17:00-04:00

The printed catalog for “Air Rights” – an exhibition by the Drone Research Lab (DRL) at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning – begins with a Bartlett's-worthy quote from R. Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” It is often observed, on the contrary, that unmanned aerial vehicles, unlike the billion-dollar state-of-the-art fighter jets they are replacing in some military applications, are a cobbling together of existing technologies. None of their components (aside from advanced optical sensing) is inaccessible to everyday consumers, and the mechanics would likely be familiar to Fuller himself.

7 Lessons from the 3rd International Architectural Education Summit

2013-10-07T10:45:00-04:00

Just over a year ago, the Architectural Review published “Alternative Routes for Architecture”, calling for a drastic reinterpretation of architectural education in the face of rigid institutions and extreme financial strains. Certainly this demand is older than a year -- as we allow technology to knit information more thickly into our cultural fabric, we question the nature of education at large as having a physical place and hierarchy, through systems such as MOOCs or mobile workspaces. Add prohibitively high costs, followed by debt and depressing unemployment rates, and the architect is getting fit to reconstitute itself as newly relevant and multi-faceted professional.

Architecture Photography in the 21st Century: Interview with Bilyana Dimitrova

2013-09-03T19:02:00-04:00

There’s no denying that architectural discourse has drastically expanded with the ease of image-sharing technology. Without even being in the same country as a building, anyone feels entitled to form an opinion of that structure based on photographs that are perpetuated over the internet, to the point where they almost become a stand-in for the actual structure. But the images that reach this singularity are rare, and may only achieve this state through carefully orchestrated harmony with their building-subjects.

The Science Fiction of "Never Built: Los Angeles"

2013-08-01T17:16:00-04:00

What can we learn from the aborted potential icons of Los Angeles? Whether underfunded, over-dramatic or anachronistic, the structures on display in "Never Built: Los Angeles" at the Architecture and Design Museum in L.A. never saw the light of day. But because they were the twinkle in the eye of a few established names in post-war American architecture, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and John Lautner, these imaginings are vetted with their creators' robust reputations for modern, revolutionary forms. Seen with a 21st century perspective, jaded by the likes of Frank Gehry or Bjarke Ingels, it's actually pretty easy to imagine these never-built structures existing -- at least in terms of form, anyway.

Art Basel comes to Hong Kong

2013-05-30T15:20:00-04:00

During the yearly art fair in Basel, Switzerland, the city is activated and reconfigured, and art is brought to the forefront of civic discourse. What, if any, impact could the fair have on daily life in a city of 7 million? How would this art world mega-event translate to the Hong Kong context?

SmartGeometry 2012 in Troy, New York

2012-04-15T18:27:00-04:00

Text and photos by Terri Peters

SmartGeometry is an international community of academics and professionals who hold annual workshops and conference days at academic institutions around the world. Now in its ninth year, this year´s theme was Material Intensities and both the four-day workshop and conference day was held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. Sponsored by software company Bentley, the next event will be held in London in 2013. Previous Archinect features reported on SmartGeometry 2009 in San Francisco and SmartGeometry 2011 in Copenhagen.