Archinect - Features

Op-Ed: A Unique Moment for Landscape Architects

2022-09-21T13:38:00-04:00

I recently joined American Society of Landscape Architects President Eugenia Martin, FASLA, and hundreds of other global leaders in landscape architecture in Gwangju, South Korea, at the International Federation of Landscape Architects World Council Meeting. IFLA represents landscape architects worldwide, with 77 member associations globally, including ASLA in the United States.

The time together was a reaffirmation that the global community of landscape architects share goals to promote and diversify the profession, set high professional standards, and exchange knowledge and best practices across cultures and communities.

The Architect's Power in Tomorrow's Energy Infrastructure

2021-10-04T14:35:00-04:00

The architecture of energy systems is undergoing a renaissance. As our ability to generate, consume, and store energy in a clean, sustainable way continues to accelerate, spurred by a heightened awareness of climate change, architects are steadily sculpting a new architecture to celebrate, showcase, and interweave these new technologies into the built environment.

To explore this new architecture of energy infrastructure, we spoke with two prominent architecture firms, AL_A and C.F. Møller Architects, both of whom have recently overseen the design of energy schemes that prioritize transparency, interaction, and a contemporary architectural flare. In addition to exploring the design process of energy infrastructure, we reflect on future possibilities for the energy typology and the role that architecture studios large and small can play in shaping it.

Trashing the Community-Backed BIG U: East Side Coastal Resilience Moves Forward Despite Local Opposition. Will NYC Miss Another Opportunity to Lead on Climate and Environmental Justice?

2021-07-13T08:28:00-04:00

In late October 2012, Superstorm Sandy crashed into the East Coast. Causing more than $70 billion in damage, the storm ripped buildings from their foundations and flooded streets. In New York City, the hard concrete edge that separates Lower Manhattan from the East River was breached, filling the FDR expressway with brackish water and short-circuiting ConEdison’s 14th Street Substation, causing the much-circulated image of a near-total blackout in all points south. With the freeway flooded and the Lower East Side dark, this unprecedented damage came to represent the vulnerability of coastal infrastructure.

The AIA Praised Trump and Biden's Infrastructure Plans But Lacks Political Vision to Draw Connections to Structural Racism

2021-06-08T08:01:00-04:00

In November 2016, the Executive Vice President and CEO, of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Robert Ivy, issued a statement congratulating President-elect Trump and the new Congress. Speaking for the organization’s 95,000 members, Ivy said they were “ready to work” with Trump to improve America’s infrastructure. Within liberal and progressive circles, the backlash was swift, given the divisive nature of Trump’s infrastructure plans, which included significant expansion of the southern border wall with Mexico and more coal power plants.

The Butterfly Effect: Retrofitting Low-Income Housing

2021-05-27T13:18:00-04:00

America's low-income housing stock is aging. The human health, social, economic, and environmental consequences of substandard housing is felt not just by their inhabitants, but by the general public. However, a growing number of architects, researchers, and policymakers are identifying a solution: retrofitting. In this article, we take a closer look at the current status of America's low-income and public housing stock, as well as the benefits, methods, and potential futures for a large-scale retrofit campaign that transforms both lives and living conditions.

The Open Workshop explores how housing density may have decided the U.S. 2016 Election

2017-07-21T13:11:00-04:00

Think about the American political landscape, and a highly partisan, Russian-government-colluding version may come to mind. But what about the literal American political landscape, as defined by housing density and building typology per acre? The project “Environment as Politics: From Identity to Density Politics” by The Open Workshop, originally presented on Places Journal, studied voting patterns in the 2016 election for the U.S. President and discovered that how closely people live together may be the soundest predictor of which candidate gets their vote.

Can Trump’s anti-immigrant border wall be built without immigrant labor?

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

Border agents don’t want an opaque, precast concrete wall. Financially, the wall is unlikely to be built without immigrant labor. And historically, large-scale border walls don’t keep people out as much as signal that an empire is caving in. Here’s why Donald Trump’s proposed U.S./Mexico border wall isn’t just a moral failure, but a practical one.

Untangling Manila's Infrastructural Mess With a Web of Aerial "Capsules"

2016-10-20T12:15:00-04:00

Manila, the capital of the Philippines and its second-largest city, is beset by heavy traffic, public health problems, homelessness, pollution, water sanitation issues, and a growing number of informal developments. According to Jonathan Gayomali, this is due, in part, to its underdeveloped infrastructure.

Putting the Planet to Paper: The Monumental Geographies of DESIGN EARTH

2016-10-19T11:50:00-04:00

“DESIGN EARTH is concerned with relationships between design and the Earth—as matter, scale, and worldview—to open aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism,” state El Hadi Jazairy and Rania Ghosn of their collective practice.

Michael Maltzan Envisions the Future of LA's Infrastructure

2016-10-18T12:18:00-04:00

Los Angeles is defined by its freeways: everyone from Joan Didion to Ice Cube to "Saturday Night Live" has conceptualized the city through them. So why is such an integral part of the city’s urban fabric left largely to stagnate in the collective architectural imagination?

A well, a windmill, a mirror: Sigil's real and symbolic interventions in Syria

2016-09-27T12:30:00-04:00

“Hospitals, water and electricity are always the first to be attacked,” states a doctor from Anadan, a city in Northern Syria, as quoted in an Amnesty International report. “Once that happens people no longer have services to survive.”

Water Wars: the Islamic State and the Mosul Dam

2014-08-28T14:48:00-04:00

Water has become a central focus for both the Islamic State and its combatants in the current struggle being waged over the large geographic area of northern Iraq and southern Syria. Previously overshadowed by the conflicts in Gaza and Crimea, the rapid emergence and expansion of the Islamic State (IS) has recently become the focus of international media attention, accelerated by the release and dissemination of a video depicting the execution of American journalist Steven Foley, allegedly by the IS.

The Trouble with a Bird’s Eye View: LA Forum's exhibition looks at Los Angeles from afar

2014-06-27T19:10:00-04:00

No single image can contain a city, particularly one as large as Los Angeles. But through the accumulation of many, it may be possible that the irreducible complexity of a city can become slightly more legible. Pairing aerial photographs by Los Angeles-based Lane Barden with a geo-mapping project by the German-American duo Benedikt Groß and Joseph K. Lee, the summer exhibition of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Design presents two distinct perspectives with which to view the city.

Student Works: Martin McSherry's "Vertical Graveyards"

2014-02-12T10:06:00-05:00

Martin McSherry’s “The Vertical Graveyards” is a speculative proposal for a new infrastructure of death, mimicking the skyscraper as a symbol of expanding and densifying urban systems. Currently an MArch student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, McSherry initially drafted the project as a proposal to the Nordic Association for Graveyards and Crematoria’s “The Graveyards of the Future” competition. Imagining the cemetery as vertical and central, rather than horizontal and suburban, the project focuses less on design specifics and more on provoking a change in societal attitudes towards death.

Working out of the Box: Steven Fleming

2013-10-23T11:00:00-04:00

Working out of the Box is a series of features presenting architects who have applied their architecture backgrounds to alternative career paths.

In this installment, we're talking with architectural-theorist of cycling Steven Fleming.

Are you an architect working out of the box? Do you know of someone that has changed careers and has an interesting story to share? If you would like to suggest an (ex-)architect, please send us a message.

Student Works: The Petropolis of Tomorrow: Drift & Drive

2012-12-10T01:11:00-05:00

Drift & Drive proposes a new model of water-based urbanism by readdressing the technological and logistical challenges of offshore oil extraction. Our project is a solution to the desire on the part of Petrobras, the Brazilian petrochemical company, to relocate workers offshore, as rigs are established ever further from the coast, increasing the transportation cost of both workers and oil.

What is a Park - Landscape or Infrastructure

2011-04-07T00:13:00-04:00

How can a park be designed to serve as infrastructure(s)? Thinking not in terms of metaphor alone. But rather a park as the architecture for numerous designed outcomes. Park as infrastructure, means park as platform not only designed object/scape. From a singular tool to multivalent toolkit. It is important in such discussion to think of the less immediate impact. Of social design, the design of relationships. Such a platform-as toolkit-may result from more efficient, and stack(ed) programming. Thus maximizing urban spaces, suburban spaces, available spaces, that are under-performing. In essence, we should think about the best ways to maximize our various infrastructural corridors: utility, transportation, waterways et al.