Wasted Space: Comparing Horton Plaza and The Vessel

2019-07-16T13:25:00-04:00

One is brand new, the other, at the end of its life. One is a place for shopping, the other a place for selling oneself. One, a facsimile of the city, the other, a rejection of it.

However unalike they might seem, Jon Jerde’s soon-to-be-demolished Horton Plaza in San Diego and Thomas Heatherwick’s recently-completed The Vessel in New York City have much in common.

Let us count the ways.

AfterShock #4: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neuroscientific Architecture Research

2014-10-14T15:50:00-04:00

You’ve heard it before. In the span of architecture folklore, this origin story is old hat: I wanted to become an architect because it combines art and science. As pithy as it sounds, this always struck me as problematic, because it presumes that such a combination is easily wrought. What is really going on, at the arguably-genetic root of architectural practice, that manages the push and pull between expression and empiricism? Architecture occupies that limbo space between the quantifiable and the phenomenological, and that gap is insistently being narrowed by technology – not only in design, but in how we actually perceive our surroundings.

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Wasted Space: Comparing Horton Plaza and The Vessel

AfterShock #4: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neuroscientific Architecture Research