Archinect - Features

Jerry Saltz is Wrong

2019-07-26T10:25:00-04:00

Yesterday I was sitting in the waiting area of a car dealership outside of Columbus, Ohio. My car was having some service done for a recall and I came prepared for a wait, so I turned on a podcast, got a complimentary cup of coffee, and picked up my Nintendo Switch to continue where I left off replaying Final Fantasy X for the nth time. I’m not prodding for sponsorship (though I will listen to any offers!), but framing the importance of expediency in current criticism and online discourse. As the 15 minute podcast finished, I hopped onto Instagram and the first image that came up struck a nerve.

Senior art critic and columnist for New York Magazine Jerry Saltz had posted his advice for architects designing an art museum. The post had me shook. I felt an immediate urge to form a rebuttal, so I took a break from helping Yuna save the world of Spira, and went into my mobile image editor to challenge his points one by one.

Let's get a little deeper into what is so problematic about th...

Get F*^king Paid

2019-06-17T12:56:00-04:00

Unpaid internships are a systemic issue, not an architectural one. They are a symptom of the relationship between markets, labor, and value. Calling for an erasure of unpaid internships is calling for ethics inside a system that rewards exploitation. How can we change this? What tools do we have to evaluate our options as they are right now?

Extra Extra: Meow Wolf Transmogrification

2019-06-01T10:48:00-04:00

“It is art, just like sci-fi and fantasy is literature” — George R.R. Martin on Meow Wolf

Everyone knows that most interstellar spacecraft visiting Earth prefer landing in New Mexico. UFO’s consistently enjoy the remote landscapes, fresh cuisine, and picturesque scenery of the Southwestern United States. In a recent visit I decided to search for stranded vessels. What I found was an entirely different type of otherness in the desert. But I didn’t look in the vast empty darkness of Roswell or the secure and mysterious Area 51. My search began and ended with Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return at 1352 Rufina Circle in Santa Fe.

Extra Extra: Desert Dispatch

2019-05-03T12:46:00-04:00

Soon I will finish my appointment as the Visiting Teaching Fellow at the School of Architecture at Taliesin. I thought it would be fun to share a bit of what is happening here. We are wrestling back the legacy of American modernist Frank Lloyd Wright’s radical dedication to progressive experimental architecture from Froebel® Blocks, LEGO® sets, and stained glass tchotchkes from the desert enclave of Taliesin West. It feels like every architect I talk to has a small pom-pom in their pocket they are secretly waving, and to those cheers I offer the following work.

Extra Extra: Shaving the Shawarma

2019-04-16T11:49:00-04:00

Everyone is criticizing the Vessel and I want to join in on the fun. But I have never been to the Vessel. So instead of relaying the experience I will discuss it through what I’ve learned about it on the internet: it looks like a shawarma. Let’s not talk about the Vessel itself but the digital presence of the Vessel as it exists through mediated discourse; let’s shave the shawarma.

Extra Extra: A Sprinkle of Defense of the Museum of Ice Cream

2019-03-29T14:35:00-04:00

The Museum of Ice Cream kicked our ass. It beat architecture to a project for a contemporary image-conscious culture in an era of social media. This is a shame considering architecture has a long history of staging the image of social life. From the success of the grand escalier at l’Opera Garnier de Paris and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim to the new and problematic Vessel at Hudson Yards, the faith in architecture to frame and showcase experience itself is unquestioned. An image-based culture has clearly developed and seeks to define its subsequent social media marketing as a major participant in the design process.

Extra Extra: Fake Buildings

2019-03-19T11:27:00-04:00

Architecture mustn't try to compete with the attention economy, but belong to it. So far, I have written about developing techniques to utilize time better in architectural renderings in addition to my own project of finding different ways of issuing architectural criticism. In such a temporally stressful lived experience, attention is a currency. In order to discuss topics like architecture — or bring architectural issues to an audience — a crafty attitude is required. My research method is to search for strange ways of getting attention and find patterns which can help architects belong rather than compete.

Extra Extra won’t focus on memes but try to illustrate problems through them. To that end, the looser conditions of a column allow for visible cracks in my positions. Unanswered questions are welcomed. Criticisms formed on a mimetic hunch can be built up. Nothing here is too polished, neither is it expected to be.

As architecture culture breaks into architecture cultures, let's...

Extra Extra: My BIG Beef

2019-03-08T09:00:00-05:00