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...

'The Notion of AI as a Form of Augmentation or Enhancement Is Fascinating to Me'; A Conversation with Behnaz Farahi

2023-06-05T07:31:00-04:00

Behnaz Farahi stands at an eclectic intersection between culture and technology. Trained as an architect, with specializations in computational design, interactive technologies, additive manufacturing, and digital fabrication, Farahi asks how emerging technologies can allow us to creatively explore the most pressing social and cultural issues of our time, from hierarchies and biases to objectification and bodily perception.

Among these many explorations, Farahi has won particular acclaim for her use of fashion to interrogate and subvert the subject of the male gaze on female bodies. In addition to honors and awards from the Cooper Hewitt, Fast Company, and beyond, Farahi's work has been the subject of several exhibitions, including Returning the Gaze at Milan Fashion Week (2022), Caress of the Gaze at the A+D Museum (2016), and most recently, in the immersive experiences Oneness and Blindness at the CSULB Innovation Space on June 10th, 2023.

In May 2023, Archinect's Niall Patrick W...

#ArchinectMeets @shesthearchitect

2019-01-11T13:40:00-05:00

#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 Sophie Chanson, the curator of @shesthearchitect. Put simply, the Instagram page celebrates the works and lives of women architects with exemplary photographs of their finest work. After realizing how difficult it was to name female architects off the top of her head, Chanson began to check the margins of architecture history to pull out rarely-seen treasures.

From the Ground Up: Lina Bo Bardi

2018-02-16T09:00:00-05:00

From the Ground Up is a series on Archinect focused on discovering the early stages & signs of history's most prolific architects. Starting from the beginning allows us to understand the long journey architecture takes in even the formative of hands and often, surprising shifts that occur in its journey. These early projects grant us a glimpse into the early, naive, ambitious and at points rough edges of soon to be architectural masters.

What we can learn from Chicago's CARYATIDS, the feminist curatorial collective that fought sexism in architecture

2017-06-27T13:11:00-04:00

This article was originally published on the blog of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the largest platform for contemporary architecture in North America. The blog invites designers, writers and other contributors to independently express their perspectives on the Biennial across a range of formats. The 2017 Biennial, entitled Make New History, will be free and open to the public between September 16, 2017 and January 6, 2018.

'Working through architecture and its refusal': an interview with f-architecture from Next Up: Floating Worlds

2017-03-29T12:07:00-04:00

“We’re interested in bodies and their implications in space, their political positions in space, and how materially and technologically they are constituted,” states the Feminist Architecture Collaborative, otherwise known as f-architecture, during an interview conducted as part of Archinect’s Next Up: Floating Worlds.

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.

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.