Archinect - Features

Understanding and Combating an Architecture of Neo-Fascism

2019-06-25T09:58:00-04:00

Fascist ideologies have recently taken center stage for the first time in the 21st century, and it has since been up to a media-saturated public to make sense of what appears to be an international phenomenon. Whether as a space of gathering, protection, or protest, it is important to consider architecture's place in the matter by addressing the spatial politics of fascism.

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.

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.

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?

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.