Archinect - Features

Keller Easterling’s Medium Design: Oblique Strategies for Reprogramming Design Practice

2021-04-22T12:52:00-04:00

Keller Easterling is a thinker intent on peering behind the veil to inquire into the forces and conditions that give rise to forms and spatial formations: the infrastructural, political, and financial milieux that softly but surely govern the production of architectural objects.

Medium Design: Knowing how to work on the world is concerned with a central preoccupation: how can designers and design thinkers operate with agency in the face of “intractable dilemmas” arising from entrenched power and its fixations on convenient solutions? In the words of the late Mark Fisher, how can we “conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we live?”

Build Something Big! One Million New Affordable Housing Units, 2020-2030

2020-09-04T17:34:00-04:00

The USA has an ever-growing affordable housing problem. For Black Americans, however, this problem has been a chronic condition that desperately requires a solution. As DC-based architect and author Melvin L. Mitchell discusses in this op-ed, the work needed to fix this must involve Black individuals from every aspect of the building industry.

This essay references the second part of Melvin L. Mitchell's recently published book African American Architects: Embracing Culture and Building Urban Communities. Mitchell asserts that African American architects must catalyze a Black controlled housing industry and develop/build one million affordable new houses over next ten years.

Midwest Architecture Journeys Shares the Sacred and Profane History Behind Chicago's Streamline Moderne Church

2019-09-28T09:13:00-04:00

Belt Publishing's forthcoming title, Midwest Architecture Journeys, features contributions from over twenty architects, critics, and journalists, taking the reader on a tour of some of the regions most inventive structures. The collection of writings feature works by Eliel Saarinen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff, and Bertrand Goldberg, among many others, while also giving equal attention to unique sites along the way, such as indigenous mounds, grain silos, parking lots, flea markets, and abandoned warehouses.

Midwest Architecture Journeys is edited by Zach Mortice, a design journalist based in Chicago. The book will be released on October 15th and may be purchased directly from Belt Publishing.

Don't Think. Discard!: Dirty Furniture Addresses Our Anxiety About Clutter on a Global Scale

2018-12-20T16:59:00-05:00

Founded by three design writers, Dirty Furniture is a biannual magazine that focuses on domestic design criticism, each issue taking on a different piece of furniture as its theme from which to explore topics spanning politics, design, history, technology, and beyond. Their latest focuses on the topic of closets, the modern wardrobe essential that serves as an entryway for thinking about things like moths, fashion, modularity, coming out, and the latest obsession with decluttering.

This issue of Dirty Furniture can be purchased at our online shop or in store.

Screen/Print #68: Phillip Denny Contemplates the Information Overload of Instagram

2018-12-06T15:31:00-05:00

The newest issue of PLAT Journal, "7.0: Sharing," concerns the nature of contemporary sharing that proceeds today with fervor, given the prevalence of social media and screen technologies.

Former Dwell Editor Amanada Dameron Sits Down with Shohei Shigematsu for Some Cocktails and Conversation

2018-10-30T09:00:00-04:00

For the past six years, AIA New York has been hosting an intoxicating series of dialogues that pairs an architect with a critic, journalist, curator or other design professional to discuss design over a custom-crafted cocktail. What began as an informal, casual Friday evening event for architects, has evolved and resulted in a treasured catalogue about how to design.

Screen/Print #66: Hans Hollein's Mobile Office and the New Workers’ Reality

2018-04-05T09:00:00-04:00

In 1969, decades before winning the Pritzker Prize, Austrian architect Hans Hollein built an inflatable mobile office that could be carried around and set up practically anywhere. Prophesying what would later become a laptop, the project—part pneumatic architecture, part performance, part video art—involved Hollein landing a small airplane on a runway and setting up the portable, plastic space, in which he could be seen talking on the telephone and typing.

Screen/Print #65: Student Publication from Harvard GSD Reflects on Early Generation of Refugee Architects

2018-01-30T09:00:00-05:00

Very Vary Veri is a student run journal coming from Harvard's GSD that publishes archival material found at the Loeb Library alongside newly commissioned pieces; their latest, Issue 3, explores the theme of Exile.

For this iteration of Screen/Print, we are sharing an included essay by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, an art history professor at University College Dublin. In it, James-Chakraborty reflects on America's early generation of refugee architects—Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Erich Mendelsohn, to name a few—who came to the U.S. and forever shaped its built environment.

Screen/Print #64: Pedro Bandeira Narrates His Field Trip to Arcosanti

2017-10-18T10:11:00-04:00

In 2012, Pedro Bandeira, architect and professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Minho, travelled to Arcosanti with a class of architecture students. In 2012 Arcosanti, the educator recounts his travel and shares his unique views on the Arizona urban laboratory.

Screen/Print #63: Experimental Preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos Talks About Cherished Objects and Adolescence

2017-10-11T10:47:00-04:00

"What does it mean to be 17 in 2017?" That is the question the most recent issue of Harvard Design Magazine, Seventeen, seeks to explore by looking into teenagehood and its relation to the spatial imagination.

Screen/Print #62: A Year After Ghost Ship Fire, Writer and Activist Jaime Omar Yassin Reflects on City's Response

2017-09-22T09:00:00-04:00

In December of 2016, a fire broke out during a show at Oakland's Ghost Ship, a DIY-venue located in a two-story warehouse. The incident tragically took the lives of 36 young concert-goers and prompted national discussions (including one on our podcast) of the safety and vitality of DIY venues and the long-term effects of such building code violations for gentrification and zoning.

S/P #61: Husos Architects trace the role of remittances on migratory urbanisms

2017-08-03T12:00:00-04:00

Since the late 1990s, remittances, or money transfers made by international migrants to their countries of origin, have played an increasingly large role in both the local and national economies of the receiving countries. In some cases, like Nepal, remittances can make up a full third of a countries total GDP.

Screen/Print #60: Suzannah Victoria Beatrice Henty on the contradictory nature of reparation politics

2017-07-28T12:00:00-04:00

What does it mean when a country takes responsibility for a historical act of injustice while ignoring its contemporary actions of a similar nature? In this essay by Suzannah Victoria Beatrice Henty for The Funambulist, she examines the often-contradictory nature of reparation politics.

Screen/Print #59: Katya Tylevich takes us on an aquatic journey through LA in the latest issue of Art Papers

2017-07-07T12:00:00-04:00

"Film, case study houses, rooftop parties, rec centers, hotel lobbies, and other watery spaces such as car washes, reservoirs and the LA river" are just a few of the "LA knowns" that the pool conjures up for Jennifer Bonner, a guest editor for the latest issue of Art Papers.

Screen/Print #57: Dora Epstein Jones On Re-centering 'the Building' in Architectural Discourse

2017-06-23T10:30:00-04:00

“We forgot about buildings,” claims Dora Epstein Jones in this provocative essay for The Building, a new volume edited by José Aragüez and published by Lars Müller, featured here as part of Archinect’s recurring series Screen/Print.

Screen/Print #56: Alessandro Bava and Oskar Johanson Reflect on the Future of the AA in 'DUE'

2017-06-14T12:01:00-04:00

One of the preeminent schools of architecture in the world, the Architectural Association of Architecture (AA) in London is in the midst of some significant changes. Brett Steele, the director of the school, is heading out to Los Angeles where he will serve as Dean of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. During this time of transition, the students and alumni of the AA have taken to the school’s weekly publication DUE, featured here as part of Archinect’s recurring series Screen/Print, to reflect on the past and project towards the future of the institution.

Screen/Print #56: Diana Balmori is interviewed by MAS Context about Bilbao's Abandoibarra Master Plan

2017-05-19T12:11:00-04:00

The story of Bilbao—and its Architectural Wonder™—has been told to the point of cliché. Yet in MAS Context's BILBAO issue, the familiar trope is given new life and depth as a series of architects, designers, and denizens of the city explain how they helped to transform this Spanish industrial town into a case study for holistic, rejuvenating design. In this excerpt from the issue for Screen/Print, Iker Gil interviews the late, great Diana Balmori about her firm's work on the Abandoibarra master plan.

Screen/Print #55: Marlon Blackwell On Moving Architecture Away from Idealism, Utopianism, and Easy Meanings

2017-05-11T12:00:00-04:00

In American architecture, the big cities, in particular New York and Los Angeles, tend to hog attention. So, for the latest issue of Project, a yearly journal for architecture, the editors decided to look elsewhere. The issue, which is featured here as part of our recurring series Screen/Print, highlights a new cast of architects and critics operating outside these two hubs of architectural production.

Screen/Print #54: Galen Cranz on Why We Need to Rethink the Chair

2017-04-28T12:04:00-04:00

Besides buildings (obviously), chairs are probably architects favorite things to design. There’s Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair and Gerrit Reitveld’s Zig-Zag chair; Arne Jacobson’s Model 3107 and Frank Llloyd Wright’s Peacock chair. Today, the tradition continues, with architects from David Adjaye to Rem Koolhaas to Zaha Hadid all designing places to perch. Yet, for all their formal grace and beauty, these chairs rarely break the mold. Invariably, they are designed around an upright individual sitting at a right angle. And, according to Galen Cranz, a Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, such traditional chair designs just don’t cut it—and they're even harming our health.

Screen/Print #53: Richard Meier Ponders the Meaning of 'Home' in America, Today

2017-04-21T12:09:00-04:00

“What does it take to make a house a home?” asks Bernard Friedman, editor of the newly-released book The American Idea of Home: Conversations About Architecture and Design. Featuring interviews with thirty of the most significant architects practicing today, the volume probes the meaning of home past and present, as well as the role of architecture in constructing it, particularly during an era when most American homes aren’t designed by architects at all.

Screen/Print #52: Shela Sheikh Searches for New Political Vocabularies in 'And Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency'

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

On November 8, 2016 Donald Trump won the US Presidential election. Just under a month later, the US Army Corps of Engineers temporarily halted the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline following large protests heavily covered by the media. These events frame Shela Sheikh’s essay “Translating Geontologies”, which contends with an emerging (or at least, for some, a newly visible) political landscape marked by “an insidious violence that is more often than not environmental and affecting the bodies of racialized subjects.”

Screen/Print #51: Moving from the Ordinary to the Extraordinary with "The Generic Sublime"

2017-02-28T17:52:00-05:00

Luxury condominiums, airport hubs, resort complexes, gated communities, satellite cities — these are among the “extra-large” architectural typologies that have proliferated globally in recent years. In The Generic Sublime: Organizational Models for Global Architecture, a new book edited by Ciro Najle and co-published by Actar and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a series of essays explores these dominating edifices, investigating how the generic “holds the potential to become its very opposite: the singular, the irreducible, and the extraordinary”.

Screen Print #50: Rem Koolhaas discusses controversy, collaboration, and cultural revolution in "Happy Tropics"

2017-02-22T13:25:00-05:00

What is the role of an ethically and aesthetically astute architect in a market-driven economy? For Rem Koolhaas, the obstacles of reality shouldn't hinder architects who wish to contribute works that enhance the public realm. In this discussion with Michael Schindhelm excerpted from Happy Tropics 1, Koolhaas explains how by working in Asia, he has not only witnessed the increasing cultural influence of the East versus the West, but also retained his idealism, drive, and desire for collaboration.

Screen Print #49: "Bracket" ponders how architecture should respond in extreme times

2017-01-31T12:11:00-05:00

How can design be productive in chaotic times? In its latest release "At Extremes," the journal Bracket examines the role of architecture in a world in which "extreme" is constantly being redefined.

Screen/Print #48: "Lobby" Investigates Faith in Architecture

2016-12-13T01:07:00-05:00

The fifth issue of LOBBY, the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London's publication of thematically related essays and interviews, explores the meaning, fragility, and ultimate worth of a unifying architectural "faith."

Screen/Print #47: Fresh Meat's 'Of the City', from UIC

2016-11-09T12:05:00-05:00

Individuality is a prized commodity. “Dare to be different,” we’re told. “To thine own self be true,” inspirational posters implore, butchering a quotation from Hamlet that originally implied multiple, different meanings. But how? After all, the most punk of punks is the one who copies the best.

Screen/Print #46: 'Quick Images' Complicate Architectural Discourse in 'Hatch' from Penn Design

2016-10-27T12:25:00-04:00

What is architectural discourse in an era of so-called "quick images"? As a collection of conversations between students and professors, Hatch explores the culture of social media and the subsequent disconnect it has created between disciplined, professional works of architecture and flashy (if ubiquitous) presentations.

Screen/Print #45: Orhan Ayyüce interviews "The Wire" actor Bob Wisdom for LA Forum's summer issue

2016-09-22T12:09:00-04:00

For locals and beyond, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design has a simple aim—highlight what makes L.A.'s architecture and urbanism discourse special, and what it can teach the rest of the world. Seasonally, LA Forum draws on its own board members and reaches into the community to publish a newsletter under a single theme or proposition.

Screen/Print #44: 'Education: Trial and Error' from The Metropolitan Laboratory Magazine

2016-09-08T11:26:00-04:00

A hyper-competitive culture pervades today’s workplaces and academic settings. It often seems like the only path to success is, well, success. But what about the value of failure? After all, it’s hard to know what’s right when you don’t know what’s wrong.

Screen/Print #43: 'Beautifully Banal' by Architecture Hero

2016-08-24T09:00:00-04:00

Beautifully Banal, a marvelously detailed, narrative-driven exploration of architectural drawing types via a fly’s structural adventures, is both a slender comic and an architectural delight.