Archinect - Features

Reyner Banham Is Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies at 50

2021-08-19T07:59:00-04:00

If you have an interest in Los Angeles, you also have a copy of Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. My own is a mid-1980s Pelican paperback, which I chose because it had the dumbest cover of all the editions. Though it shares with previous printings the image of David Hockney's A Bigger Splash, an unimpeachable representation of a certain midcentury vision of the city's hauntingly good life, its title replaces their elegant Helvetica with letterforms better suited to a post-apocalyptic action movie gone straight to video. "Angeles" is spelled out in forward-slanting, shadow-casting, bright yellow capitals but for the red initial "A," rendered as if hastily spray-painted and set inside a circle to form the 1970s anarchy symbol. Right, Los Angeles — that's the zone of semi-controlled urban chaos obedient to no conventional rules or order, architectural or otherwise, isn't it?

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?”

Atlas of the Copenhagens: Book review

2019-06-19T10:18:00-04:00

The past two decades have seen a marked increase in city ranking indexes and urban metrics, yet across the board American cities continue to score poorly—last year no US cities made the top 25 in lifestyle magazine Monocle's Quality of Life Survey. On the opposite end of the spectrum lies Copenhagen, the capital city of Denmark, presented time and again as one of the world’s most ‘liveable’ cities and celebrated as a global model of sustainable urban development. In the run-up to this year’s rankings, we look closer at Atlas of the Copenhagens, a thoughtful and engaging book edited by Deane Simpson, Kathrin Gimmel, Anders Lonka, Marc Jay, and Joost Grootens, to explore the multiplicity and complexities of Copenhagen today and how the city can begin to inspire new ways of analysing and interpreting the urban environments around us.

New Book Looks at the Last 60 Years of Work by Ricardo Bofill Taller De Arquitectura

2019-06-03T12:17:00-04:00

In light of the ‘rediscovery’ of Ricardo Bofill’s work in the era of social media, it was a brilliant move by Gestalten - a publishing house firmly committed to the coffee table book genre, with titles including Northern Comfort: the Nordic Art of Creative Living and Bohemian Residence: Metropolitan Apartments and Interior Design - to make the last 60 years of work by Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura their most recent focus. With gorgeously reproduced photographs of gorgeously produced architecture, Ricardo Bofill: Visions of Architecture, will be as desirable a coffee table book as any other today.

Slow Reasoning for Fast Times: A Review of "New Investigations in Collective Form," The Open Workshop's Newest Monograph

2019-04-18T15:39:00-04:00

New Investigations in Collective Form, the newest monograph for The Open Workshop, is a timely book at a moment which feels short on time. Our best plans for combating the challenges facing the built environment will not come from the fixity nor the haste of any independent practice, but rather the meticulously thought up and drawn out plans of The Open Workshop and any other individuals willing to venture out into the collective.

Join us in celebrating New Investigations In Collective Form: The Open Workshop, the latest book by Neeraj Bhatia at Archinect Outpost on Friday, April 26, 7–9pm.

Keith Krumwiede will give a short introduction to kick off the event, followed by a panel conversation between Neeraj Bhatia, Noémie Despland-Lichtert and Jimenez Lai.

The book can be preordered here for pickup at the event, or shipping immediately after the event. Please go here to RSVP for the event.

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.

Finding the Artful in Artless Spaces: A Review of Thomas Demand's 'The Complete Papers'

2019-03-26T20:02:00-04:00

Weighing in at over 6 pounds, the breadth of work and reference material makes The Complete Papers, the newest and most comprehensive book from the artist Thomas Demand, an indispensable resource for anyone invested in art, architecture or media theory. The catalogue raisonné compiles all of Demand's individual works, selections from larger series works and the most critical texts from art and architecture historians over a 28 year span.

Join us at Archinect Outpost on March 29th, from 7-9pm to host artist Thomas Demand and The Complete Papers, the comprehensive survey of the artist's photographs to date.

The Candid Musings of a Seasoned Observer: A review of Craig Hodgetts' 'Swimming to Suburbia'

2019-03-13T12:00:00-04:00

In his collected book of essays, Swimming to Utopia, Craig Hodgetts appears to be a proud writer, though his career never seems to have depended on it. Throughout the book one finds writing written purely for the thrill of it, and that is precisely why it is arguably more pleasurable than so much other architectural criticism.

Archinect Outpost is hosting Swimming to Suburbia on Saturday, March 16th, from 7-9pm. You can preorder a copy of his book here and RSVP to the event here. Craig will be speaking about the book, followed by a book signing.

37 Fearless Moments of Modern History: A Review of ‘The Architecture of Closed Worlds’

2019-02-27T11:36:00-05:00

The 37 prototypes in Lydia Kallipoliti's The Architecture of Closed Worlds reveal the 20th century’s nebulous relationship with science, ecology and architecture in a way that helps make sense of that landmark era. Their presentation in a single publication also doubles, intentionally or not, as a survey of some of the most unusual and visionary experiments in modern history.

If you are in Los Angeles March 6th, join us at Archinect Outpost from 7-9pm to host Lydia Kallipoliti and her newest book! Kallipoliti will provide a lecture, followed by a book signing. RSVP here. The book can be preordered here.

A History of the Garage Without a Footnote: a Review of Erlanger’s and Govela’s ‘Garage’

2019-01-10T11:21:00-05:00

“We have taken the garage to be the most important architectural form of the 20th century.”

This is the provocation that drew me in and inspired me to consider each and every subsequent one offered by artist Olivia Erlanger and architect Luis Ortega Govela. ‘Garage’ has a lot of arguments about the nature and significance of the automobile garage - none of which, I quickly learned, are supported by footnotes. This is rare for a book that focuses on the history of a subject, especially one published by the formidable MIT Press.

Aranda\Lasch's 'Trace Elements' Outlines the Seeds of Their Design Process

2018-04-10T12:43:00-04:00

The past decade has witnessed the canonization of a new type of architectural publication, the anti-monograph. This type of book could be defined as an early retrospective publication of a working architect on the architectural avant-garde. Unlike the traditional monograph which collects and focuses on a discreet body of work from a period of time, these books prefer to collect and frame the process and thought that animate the firm’s approach, often through speculative and projective work.

Book review: "Entr'acte: Performing Publics, Pervasive Media, and Architecture"

2016-06-05T18:27:00-04:00

During the month of May, inspired in part by the theme of Alejandro Aravena’s Venice Biennale, Reporting from the Front, Archinect’s coverage has included a special focus on socially-engaged practices and, accordingly, hosted many conversations about how and why architects should engage with the public. Yet largely absent from this discussion is the question of who or what constitutes the public today.

Ways of Seeing in the Anthropocene: Review of "The Geological Imagination" and "The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform"

2015-12-03T16:51:00-05:00

Jim Inhofe, the senior Senator from Oklahoma, resumed chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in early 2015, following an eight year hiatus. Shortly after, he stood on the Senate floor holding a snowball sealed in a plastic bag. "In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” Inhofe began, taking the snowball out of the bag and chucking it across the room. “You know what this is?”

Imagine that: review of “Imaginary Apparatus: New York City and Its Mediated Representation”

2015-09-17T14:31:00-04:00

Like an infrastructural Ouija board planchette, the Foucaultian “apparatus” isn’t exactly a device, but rather the effect of a multiplicity of participants. Each of these participants, whether they are the media, philosophical traditions, physical objects or even legal proceedings, exert a complex and nuanced force on the other, helping to control the method by which reality is shaped.

Book Review: "The City in the City—Berlin: A Green Archipelago. A manifesto"

2014-07-31T09:07:00-04:00

When its first seeds were presented in 1977, Berlin: A Green Archipelago was a quiet, prescient manifesto. Oswald Mathias Ungers and a number of colleagues at Cornell University deviated from the intellectual tenets of current reconstruction efforts, seen in the post-war development of European cities, to propose a new model for the "shrinking city". The text's idea of a polycentric urban system really took hold in the 1990s, as urban planning discourse turned towards socioeconomic considerations of ebbing and flowing growth.