Archinect - Features

Unpacking Politics and the 'Apparatus of Power' Through Architecture and Film with SCI-Arc Graduate Julia McConnell

2021-11-02T08:37:00-04:00

Architectural representation in film and television often provides highly impressionable results. Beyond a story's narrative, architecture can be used as a secondary 'character' to help create a sense of place, tone, and facilitate visual association for the viewer and the story's setting. Julia McConnell, a recent M.Arch graduate from SCI-Arc, used her interests in film to further explore questions relating to representation, ethics, and aesthetics.

In her thesis project, "Pledge of Allegiance," McConnell explained that her thesis research requires "architects flatten the ontological plane and view individual instances of a particular type for their particularity. Thus, establishing that we may be able to differently value what architecture inherently contains: a myriad of views, positions, and possibilities."

Architecture thesis acts as a catalyst that allows young designers to explore their interests while expanding their perspectives and architectural thinking. Continuing with ...

From the Editors: What We're Thankful For in 2020

2020-11-26T16:21:00-05:00

2020 has been an extraordinarily challenging year. Covid-19 forced us to isolate from family, friends and colleagues, and work from home as the industry struggled to keep up with the changes the pandemic brought. Many firms experienced drastic reductions in work, as industries such as hospitality and retail faced incredible hardship and an uncertain future. As a result, many individuals in our industry faced layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts. Political tensions, cultural divisions and a heightened push for social justice further defined this historic year. During this hardship, however, there remains much to be thankful for. We'd like to take this opportunity, as Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, to share a few those things that our team is grateful for in 2020.

The Geometry of the World

2019-04-30T12:14:00-04:00

City-States

Permanent Crisis

The American City seems to exist now in a state of permanent crisis.

That is to say: our cities seem lashed to a self-renewing state of emergency driven by entrenched and multiplying acts of violence. We bear witness to police violence against civilians; civilian aggression towards officers of the peace and, inevitably, mass shootings by radicalized citizens against communities: Las Vegas, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Parkland, Thousand Oaks, Poway and so on and so on. Add to this ongoing acts of seemingly retaliatory public rioting and counter-violence organized by the citizen militias as far afield as Portland and Charlottesville. In this context and we can and should consider the possibility that our cities have become settings for persistent urban confrontations pitting citizens against citizens and civilians against the police, the very branch of local government retained to maintain a civil society.

Architecture in a Country of Stage Sets: Our Interview with Oliver Wainwright on Inside North Korea

2018-12-21T11:24:00-05:00

Now available at Archinect Outpost, Inside North Korea is the ambitious new book from British journalist Oliver Wainwright. I spoke to Wainwright about the making of the book and how he extended his journalistic talents to become its principal photographer. Though North Korea had long been a subject of interest to Wainwright, he had the chance in our interview to expand on how similar its architectural techniques are to those more familiar in Western practice.

New Ground I: Advancing the Countryside

2018-01-31T09:50:00-05:00

Across the urbanized world, the contemporary countryside is a paradox. While media attention is absorbed by the city, many rural regions are experiencing accelerating change due to increased automation, the emergence of megastructures and new self-learning systems, all of which are reshaping the terrain. The divisive political events of 2017 exhibited just how much today’s countryside has grown apart from the city both ideologically and spatially. To kick off 2018, in New Ground I, the first of a two-part feature series co-authored with Christine Bjerke from In-Between Economies, we will briefly explore a selection of major shifts that have influenced how the countryside operates today. We check in with rural demographer and sociologist Ken Johnson from the University of New Hampshire and Ivan Sergejev, an architect exploring the potential of the data center typology. In addition, will be tapping into the latest research from international architecture practice OMA*AMO, who have bee...

From buildings to books and animations, WAI Think Tank approaches architecture from all angles

2017-07-05T11:50:00-04:00

Books, magazines, film, animations, installations, exhibitions and curatorial programs, teaching and workshops, performance, buildings and more. Today we are talking with WAI Architectural Think Tank, a practice started in 2008 by Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia that approaches architecture from a variety of mediums and expressions.

What we do as architects is not neutral: it is political

2017-07-05T05:30:00-04:00

I started writing this on the 13th of June. It was going to be a piece on the importance of critical engagement for sole or small practitioners. Thoughts on why, generally, as architects, we don't engage with other practices as much as we should; why it is important to do so; and to tell you about something we did here in Belfast to begin to explore how we might address this issue. Then, on the morning of the 14th of June, we all woke up to the news. The pictures. Smartphone footage. Tweets. Stories. Silhouettes of ghostly figures standing in smoke-filled rooms behind double glazed windows. The recordings of firefighters as they first saw the 24-storey, 67m high building that moments later they would be entering — “Fuck me, there’s children in there, there’s fucking children in there”. The numbers; statistics; faces of missing loved ones and the beginnings of public displays of collective grief soon to be followed by anger and protests.

Architects of Social Responsibility: Views of Humanitarian Architecture in Practice

2017-05-24T12:11:00-04:00

Last month, Airbnb announced they had hired former Architecture for Humanity co-founder Cameron Sinclair to lead their project to supply temporary housing to 100,000 people in need, shortly after launching a program to secure refuge for members of Chicago’s homeless community. Users of the online hospitality service can now register as ‘hosts for good’, and architects are stepping in to make that happen. IKEA’s recent drive to create flat-pack temporary homes for refugee camps through their Foundation in collaboration with UNHCR is another example of how companies are exploring philanthropic interests through the medium of architecture. This month’s feature engages with architects adopting a range of business models to pursue social responsibility and looks deeper into ways the profession is engaging with building for a common good.

Parliaments around the world: what can architecture teach us about democracy?

2017-05-18T09:00:00-04:00

David Mulder van der Vegt and Max Cohen de Lara, who comprise the Amsterdam-based creative agency and architecture office XML, have spent the past five-years studying the halls of Parliament. Comparing all 193 different assembly halls, the duo investigates how the architecture of these political congregations affects the governing process and in effect, how architecture shapes political culture.

With recent elections in the US and abroad exposing serious divides in the politics of these nations, we have decided to share with you a timely excerpt from their book Parliament, documenting their findings.

Social Object Relations: Window Breaking and Projective Identification

2017-04-06T12:24:00-04:00

Throughout modern history, the shattered transparent envelope has, in various ways, indexed social crises wherein revolution leads to the dismantling of the crystalline boundaries between public and private property. From the Watts Rebellion, WTO, and G8 protests to the 2011 London Riots, Black Lives Matter protests, and the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, the shattered glass window repeatedly proves to be a site of counter-identification with systems of oppression under late capitalism. Learning from these events, how might we differently consider the act of window-breaking beyond the conventional understandings of protest and felony, and instead, reframe it as an intersubjective form of resistance and disavowal?

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.”

From the Farnsworth to Wikileaks: Metahaven on Transparency, Propaganda and Design

2017-03-30T06:15:00-04:00

Where are we? Somewhere in Eastern Ukraine, July 18, 2014—the day after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down, killing all 238 passengers as well as the fifteen crew members on board. Later, Russian media would suggest that the shooting was an attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin; that it was shot down by Ukrainians by mistake; that Ukrainian air traffic controllers had intentionally misdirected the plane over a war zone; that it was an attempt to smear the pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine. Other stories spread: the plane was filled with 100 AIDS researchers or already-dead bodies and explosives. Eventually, the news cycle moved on.

Between the home and the market: an interview with Christine Bjerke from Next Up: Floating Worlds

2017-03-28T12:03:00-04:00

“The economy of the home becoming an investment culture instead of a savings culture disrupts the idea of very specific gendered roles in Japanese society,” states the Copenhagen-based architect Christine Bjerke during an interview conducted as part of Archinect’s Next Up: Floating Worlds. Bjerke’s project (On the Floating World of the) FX Beauties, which inspired the name of the event, derives from her research into the spatial implications of the work of the FX Beauties, a club of Japanese housewives who engage in day-trading on foreign exchange markets.

Reflecting and Refracting the Politics of Glass Architecture

2017-03-16T12:17:00-04:00

It seems to me unquestionable that an anti-capitalist world—a society that emphasizes process over product, lived experience over representations—would look very different from the one we currently inhabit. The distinguishing characteristics of that world are more difficult to determine. In what way would a historically unique organization of labor yield a correspondingly unique architecture?

A voting guide for Los Angeles architects on the anti-growth Measure S

2017-03-06T12:24:00-05:00

Opposed by a majority of architects, yet backed by a handful of prominent Angelenos including AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein, Measure S is on the March 7th ballot. Is it a sneaky ratification of NIMBY, or a sensible call for considered growth?

"The environment we design, designs us back:" A Conversation with Eran Chen of ODA

2017-02-16T12:53:00-05:00

Founded in 2007 by Eran Chen, ODA’s distinctive residential projects seem to ripple and blossom in the urban realm. From housing to libraries to mixed-use structures, ODA’s design philosophy is both socially inclusive and visually compelling. I spoke to Eran Chen about his ideal city, the challenges behind designing “permeable buildings,” and what he learned from his dealings with Donald Trump.

Architecture in the Trump Era: A Report from Columbia GSAPP by A.L. Hu

2017-02-16T12:11:00-05:00

A week after taking to the streets for the Women’s March in New York City and two weeks into the spring semester, I felt restless and helpless as the barrage of outrageous news took its toll. It’s difficult to sit still in studio when it seems as if the world is beginning to morph into a reality that is at once unrecognizable in its incredulousness and intensely familiar—the beginnings of history repeating itself.

The Internet Was a Desert

2017-01-27T12:47:00-05:00

Looking for a picture that represents something related to the internet, we thought about the desert.

No Particular Place To Go: Cuba, 2016

2017-01-06T13:18:00-05:00

There’s no divorcing architecture from politics. Every construction project beyond a certain size necessitates coordination - cooperation, or coercion – and an organization of effort and labor in service of a design. Until the day a builder can direct a swarm of drones to lay brick or erect steel, architecture will by necessity remain a collaborative effort; buildings and cities the work of societies, not individuals.

Deans List Special: How Architecture School Leaders are Responding to Trump

2016-12-06T12:11:00-05:00

As seen in the recent #NotMyAIA shake-up, the election of Donald Trump provoked a heated response within the architecture community. Many architects felt that now, more than ever, they had to voice their concerns over the president-elect's policies that threatened their professional values—chief among them, the leveraging of architecture to perpetuate xenophobic rhetoric, through one of Trump's loudest campaign promises, the U.S./Mexico border wall.

Many in architecture schools also felt the responsibility to organize and speak out, perhaps especially because of their position to influence the next generation of architects. Since the election, we've been reaching out to academic leaders from across the U.S. to hear how they were handling Trump's presidency—and what they were telling their students. We've gathered their responses here.

Tweaking the City: the Politics of Urban Interventions

2016-11-23T12:14:00-05:00

“We know that we are living in a crisis,” states Mathias Klenner, one of five members of the Santiago-based architectural collective TOMA. “We also know that the neoliberal political and economic system is so deep inside our minds and inside our bodies that we cannot think of any solutions. And yet you see that sometimes people have actually managed to gather together, like in the Occupy movement. But the question is: how do you create possibilities? How do you think about the future? And how do you connect these different groups of people?”

Architects Respond to the AIA’s Statement in Support of President-Elect Donald Trump

2016-11-14T14:42:00-05:00

The AIA’s formal statement, and follow-up, in response to Donald J. Trump’s election has elicited outrage within the architecture community. Architects, AIA-members and not, feel that the organization has failed to represent their interests, choosing instead to cooperate with what many equate to a fascist regime, and in so doing has compromised the entire profession. Architects have taken to social media to air their concerns and organize their own responses—we’ll be updating this piece with more statements as the issue evolves, and collecting them all over here. Share your thoughts with us by submitting to the news here.

Architecture after capitalism, in a world without work

2016-03-18T10:32:00-04:00

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” writes Karl Marx in Das Kapital, likely the most direct invocation of architecture in his influential, and controversial, writings. “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”