Archinect - Features

AI Bias and Digital Colonialism; A Conversation with Morehshin Allahyari

2023-10-16T08:16:00-04:00

Whether through her art, writings, or lectures, Morehshin Allahyari's work evokes a range of emotions among its audience. There is wonder and intrigue at her reinterpretation of centuries-old Middle Eastern stories, images, and artifacts. There is introspection on our preconceived views on concepts from open-source data to digital archiving. Finally, there is a blend of frustration and motivation to act as Allahyari takes us on a journey through the exploitative history of colonial power relations between the West and the Middle East.

Using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication, Allahyari warns us of a modern landscape in which power dynamics straddle both digital and physical worlds, articulating her theory of Digital Colonialism as a "framework for critically examining the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations." In an age of artificial intelligence, the messages and critiques found within Allahyari's...

University of Washington M.Arch Graduate Michelle Hook on Using "Speculative Fiction as a Queer Tactic to Disorient and Deconstruct the Norm in Architecture"

2020-06-25T14:03:00-04:00

Michelle Hook is an M.Arch graduate from the University of Washington College of Built Environment. Archinect was able to chat with Hook and dive into her thesis project, "Step into my Queerhouse: Queering the Now/Future." Hook explores architecture's role in representation and how speculative fiction can help change the built environment's perspectives.

Hook shares, "...to construct a new architecture, one that may be inherently queer, speculative fiction becomes the tactic of world-building, free from the constraints and the framework of the normative. The final action of imagining, and therefore queering, creates the new world." She also discusses her take on finding a job during a pandemic and her plans for staying sharp as opportunities present themselves.

Archinect's Spotlight on 2020 Thesis Projects: 2020 has been an extraordinarily challenging year for architecture graduates. Students were displaced as schools shut down, academic communities had to adapt to a new virtual for...

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.

Soapbox: Gender

2018-03-07T09:00:00-05:00

Soapbox is a weekly series delivering a curated set of lectures, talks and symposia concerning contemporary themes but explored through the archives of lectures past and present. With the plethora of lectures, talks, symposia and panels occurring world wide on a daily basis, how can we begin to keep up and if not, find them once they are gone? Soapbox looks to assemble a selection of recent, archived and outlier lectures surrounding a given theme. Soapbox looks to curate this never-ending library of ideas into an engaging and diverse list of thoughts and provocations. Soapbox is just that, a collection aimed at discovering the occasional needle in a haystack.

Xeno-Architecture: Radical Spatial Practice and the Politics of Alienation

2017-02-17T12:46:00-05:00

Following on from Archinect’s interview with Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the recent book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work—wherein the pair discussed the implications of their ‘accelerationist’ political theory for the field of architecture—we spoke to a Brussels-based curatorial and research platform that seeks to transpose ‘xenofeminist’ politics on to considerations of spatial practice. Xenofeminism is a critically updated, queer and gender abolitionist response to accelerationism’s political and economic theory, laid out in the manifesto of collective Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation.

Life After Sundown: Disco Architecture in the Global City

2017-02-07T12:14:00-05:00

Disco architecture is a typology that makes users engage with space differently. Refracting sound, light, heat and force, they are spaces intended for excess and multi-sensory, bodily pleasure. Historically popularized by people of color, queer and trans populations, the dance floor has largely been celebrated as spaces of inclusion and sites of liberation. Yet despite this idealized legacy of disco, its spatial-politics are perhaps a more nuanced and underdeveloped terrain. What might disco have to do with the development and rhythm of the global city? Even better, what is the value of considering these types of spaces against our current political moment?