Archinect - Features

Dystopia in the Desert: Expo 2020 Dubai Embodies Our Unsustainable Attitude Towards Urbanism

2021-11-12T12:05:00-05:00

In a confluence of events, the autumn of 2021 saw the opening of both the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow and Expo 2020 in Dubai. While COP26 is billed as "the last chance saloon" to save the planet, Expo 2020 Dubai is described by its organizers as "the most sustainable expo in the history of expos." This opinion piece reflects on how beneath Expo 2020 Dubai's rhetorical and programmatic accolades, the event is in fact a symptom of a systemically unsustainable attitude towards the built environment and a warped exercise in utopian thinking.

#ArchinectMeets @hannespeer

2018-12-28T12:00:00-05:00

#ArchinectMeets is a series of interviews with members of the architecture community that use Instagram as a creative medium. With the series, we ask some of Instagram’s architectural photographers, producers and curators about their relationship to the social media platform and how it has affected their practice.

Social media has undeniably affected the way we perceive, interpret and share opinions about architecture today. While we use our own account, @Archinect, as a site for image curation and news content, we wanted to ask fellow Instagram users how they navigated the platform.

We spoke to Hannes Peer, the photographer, architect and curator behind @hannespeer. With an eye for "imperfections, nostalgic utopia, and future archeology," Peer captures architectural oddities of the 20th century with aplomb.

SoapBox: Utopia

2018-01-17T09:00:00-05:00

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.

(Un)believable Utopias: 6 Forgotten Projects and their Provocative Stories

2017-06-16T10:06:00-04:00

Consciously or otherwise, social context determines design. Architecture, in turn, is capable of not only representing political ideals but also of reinforcing or shaping them—for example, through fostering forms of collective living or through breaking down gendered behavioral norms. The following projects may not be well-remembered, but they represent ambitious attempts to address or challenge the status quo through the built environment.

Utopian Modernism in London: A Series of Drifts...

2006-06-26T03:00:00-04:00

London, as a centre of industry and a magnet for heritage tourists, as a vast metropolis and an obscurantist suburban sprawl, has always been about contradictions. To understand Modernism in London one has to consider a series of antagonisms. The conflict between Empiricism and Formalism as style, between the historicist and the modern, and between socialism and capitalism in this most mercantile of capitals. These oppositions and contradictions are still present in some form, so one way to look at these paradoxes could be to set up a series of oppositions--a weighing up of dreams and realities. We will frequently come down on the side of the former, as against the spurious pragmatism of the Blairite capital. As ever, the best way to do this is to walk through the city itself...