Archinect - Features

In a Time of Deep Uncertainty, Finding the Courage to Build Something New

2020-07-26T15:33:00-04:00

The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have brought me back to the last time I experienced something seismic like this: the 2008 financial crisis. It was frightening, it tested me, and ultimately it made me and my work better. Fear, uncertainty, and a kind of creative energy all seem to go together in times like these.

Curating Development: Carson Chan on Forming Community Through Building Groups

2020-03-01T07:00:00-05:00

Although trained as an architect, Carson Chan is mostly known for his work as a curator and writer. In 2006, after working for Barkow Leibinger Architects and the Neue Nationalgalerie's architecture exhibitions department in Berlin, he founded PROGRAM, a non-commercial initiative for art and architecture collaborations. Since then, he has worked on more than thirty international exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture, notably including the 4th Marrakech Biennale in 2012 and the Biennial of the Americas in Denver in 2013. Meanwhile, Chan has written for a wide range of publications across the fields of art, architecture, and contemporary culture, and serves as the Editor-at-Large of 032c—all while pursuing his doctorate in architecture at Princeton University, researching the rise of environmentalism and aquarium architecture in postwar United States.

S9 Architecture is Remaking the City and Suburbs Through Iterative Design

2017-05-02T12:14:00-04:00

S9 Architecture, a Manhattan-based firm, is involved in a plethora of projects that are not so much shaping the skyline of the city as quietly addressing the context of the city and the impacts of new spatial needs from the street and human scale. Their work has even attracted the likes of ‘starchitect’ Bjarke Ingels, who recently moved into a rustic, rusted penthouse in one of their Brooklyn buildings. A relatively young firm, S9 has a style and philosophy that has helped them secure a position at the forefront of a new market for vibrant mixed-use development in New York and its surroundings, with projects like the Dock 72 building in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard under construction—which has WeWork as a major tenant—to iterations on reviving and adapting the shopping experience in suburbia.

From Bjarke Ingels to Kengo Kuma, Ian Gillespie is a Developer that Appreciates the Value of Architecture

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

Making the leap from paper to brick and mortar (or from the screen to IRL) tends to require a fair amount of financial support. Back in the old days, that would mean a wealthy patron like a Medici or a Guggenheim. And today—well, it also usually means a wealthy patron. For big projects, like a BIG tower, they’re often developers. But, as every architect knows, few developers actually support innovative design. Enter someone like Ian Gillespie, the founder of Westbank and the backer of many significant projects by major architects, from Bjarke Ingels to Kengo Kuma.

Using algorithms to disrupt suburbia's monotonous designs

2016-10-13T12:22:00-04:00

“Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same,” Malvina Reynolds sang in 1962, forty-three years before her verses served as the theme music for the TV show Weeds. The song still resonates because, despite formal changes, suburban developments have, for some, represented monotony and homogeneity since they were first constructed in the late 1920s. But who said that mass-produced housing has to be boring?

"This incredible, derogatory, racialized way people talk about the space": director Kelly Anderson's Cutting Room interview on gentrification and activism in her doc, "My Brooklyn"

2014-06-12T11:53:00-04:00

My Brooklyn takes a close look at the guiding forces behind Brooklyn’s gentrification, from the highly personal perspective of documentary filmmaker (and self-identifying gentrifier), Kelly Anderson. Pivoting around Anderson’s and producer Allison Lirish Dean’s investigation of redevelopment efforts for downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall, the documentary carefully considers both the personal and historical factors behind gentrification’s economic shifts, outlining (if not simplifying) the complexity of the gentrification debate.

Screen/Print #17: Scenario Journal's "Building the Urban Forest"

2014-05-30T16:52:00-04:00

Scenario Journal pools fresh, collaborative conversations on urbanism from design and the sciences, focused on rethinking urban landscape performance. Metamorphosing from its previous incarnation as the Landscape Urbanism Journal, the journal builds on the theoretical foundation of "landscape urbanism," which emerged from the backlash against both modernist urban planning and New Urbanism. It champions landscape manipulation as the core organizational system of successful contemporary urban environments — a move away from objectified buildings as the currency of a thriving urban space.