Archinect - Features

The Staging of Healthy Living: a Review of Beatriz Colomina's X-Ray Architecture

2019-04-12T12:01:00-04:00

In her newest book, X-Ray Architecture, the theorist Beatriz Colomina bypasses the clichéd analogies made between buildings and the human body to develop a persuasive and wholly original take on the origins of modern architecture. Recently released by Lars Müller Publishers, X-Ray Architecture elaborates on the author’s argument that modern architecture was both a tool and metaphor for the treatment of human illnesses just like any other - a theory Colomina has been mulling over since she first arrived in New York as a scholar in 1980.

Ornament and Extinction in the Nuclear Era

2016-10-26T13:01:00-04:00

The Anthropocene is a contested name for "the era of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of the earth." As the fourth installment of the recurring Architecture of the Anthropocene series, this piece looks at a design problem that is larger, and perhaps more important, than any other imaginable.

Architecture in the Givenness - Toward the Difficult Whole Again: Part 2

2011-04-26T22:06:00-04:00

Our education is based upon the Classical education. An architect is a mason who has learned Latin. Modern architects seem, however, more likely to have mastered Esperanto.

Adolf Loos, “Grundsätzliches von Adolf Loos,” Adolf Loos (Vienna: 1930), p. 17.

In our world of powerful stimuli and the often irresponsible, commercially motivated love of experimentation for its own sake, there is a great deal that does not establish real communication. For intoxication alone cannot insure lasting communication.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful (UK: 1970), p. 51.

The art of building has been transformed into a business of self-display and promotion through the design and construction of figurative motifs, making it an object of consumption.

David Leatherbarrow, The Roots of Architectural Invention, (UK: 1993), p.1.

Architecture in the Givenness - Toward the Difficult Whole Again: Part 1

2011-04-08T12:46:07-04:00