Archinect - Features

Husos Architects: One Guy, One Bulldog, One Vegetable Garden, and the Home They Share

2020-03-21T14:34:00-04:00

Project by Husos. Text by Camilo García and Diego Barajas (Husos)

This is a small refurbished house, 495 square feet (46 square meters) in size, in a modern variation on the traditional Spanish corrala––a block of flats whose access corridors look out over a shared interior courtyard––in the Acacias neighbourhood of Madrid. It began as a commission from Jaime, a young doctor who works in Casualty, in order to cater to his needs and those of his bulldog Albóndiga (Meatball).

Towards Neuro-Spatial Diversity: Thoughts on the Relationship Between Architecture and the Patterns of the Mind

2020-03-15T13:40:00-04:00

“Too proper for the black kids, too black for the Mexicans… what’s normal anyway…” opines mixed-race, LA-born R&B artist Miguel on his 2015 track, “What’s Normal Anyway.” The artist’s self-identified ethnic identity quandary serves to mirror our understanding of the gradated nature of mental health conditions. Mild encounters with anxiety, obsession, and mania, amongst other symptomatic states, are a fundamental part of the human experience. In the classical model of mental health disorders, it is only when these symptoms are abnormally heightened and chronic enough to cause consistent distress that the shift from ‘normal’ to ‘disordered’ occurs. Subjectivity is unavoidable in this act of categorization.

Crip Camp: An Interview with Filmmaker Jim LeBrecht About Accessibility, Universal Design, and Spaces of Freedom

2020-03-07T09:42:00-05:00

The politics of disability are fundamentally spatial. They respond to the struggle for equal access and representation against different forms of socio-spatial discrimination and aspire to alternative understandings of the relation between the body and space that destabilize both current constructions of an able body as well as established norms concerning the use of space. Expanding beyond design guides and regulations to encompass more broadly structural and systemic issues related to the experience of disablement and segregation, this concern continues to be relevant well beyond the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA).1 The goal, in this context, is not only to facilitate access to buildings for differently abled bodies but also access to society itself as equal individuals.

Curating Development: Carson Chan on Forming Community Through Building Groups

2020-03-01T07:00:00-05:00

Although trained as an architect, Carson Chan is mostly known for his work as a curator and writer. In 2006, after working for Barkow Leibinger Architects and the Neue Nationalgalerie's architecture exhibitions department in Berlin, he founded PROGRAM, a non-commercial initiative for art and architecture collaborations. Since then, he has worked on more than thirty international exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture, notably including the 4th Marrakech Biennale in 2012 and the Biennial of the Americas in Denver in 2013. Meanwhile, Chan has written for a wide range of publications across the fields of art, architecture, and contemporary culture, and serves as the Editor-at-Large of 032c—all while pursuing his doctorate in architecture at Princeton University, researching the rise of environmentalism and aquarium architecture in postwar United States.

Technoflesh: An Interview with Simone Niquille on Normalizing the Body Digitally, Physically, and in the Workplace

2020-02-24T11:55:00-05:00

Creator of the design and research practice Technoflesh, Simone Niquille draws from her background in graphic design, photography, and branding to demystify the processes behind the digitization of the body. Currently working in Amsterdam, Niquille received a BFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.A. in Visual Strategies from the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam. While currently teaching Design Research at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, Niquille continues to produce research, graphic work, films, and installations internationally, most recently as a commissioned contributor to the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale entitled Work, Body, Leisure.

A Cut Above the Streets: Robert M. Hayes, Co-Founder of Coalition for the Homeless, in Conversation with Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco

2019-05-01T09:57:00-04:00

Expelled from domestic spaces through cuts to social subsidies, layoffs, and the speculative real estate policies of the 1970s, the population of homeless individuals in New York has ballooned with the perpetuation of income inequality and long-term lack of affordable housing in the city. Despite increasing numbers, this social crisis has become less and less visible throughout the last decades [1]. In February 2017, the Department of Homeless Services estimated that 3,892 individuals spent the night in New York City streets [2]. Although the accuracy of this estimate has been contested [3], a comparison to the number of individuals sleeping in one of the 236 facilities of the city’s shelter system—a total of 62,435 [4]—makes us reconsider the “exposure” of public space as the privileged site of contemporary homelessness, and turn instead to a different architectural device: that of the shelter.

Suburbicide

2019-01-17T10:23:00-05:00

I. The United States Air Force does not publish statistics on suicides committed by pilots of their unmanned combat aerial vehicles, otherwise known as drones, but it is the most significant bodily risk they face. In general, suicide ranks as the biggest killer of all Active Duty airmen, and surpassed war as the leading cause of death for the entire military in 2014 [1,2]. Contrary to common assumptions, these suicides are not necessarily preceded by trauma from battlefield experiences. In fact, 68% of members of the Air Force who committed suicide were never deployed [3].

DATA-AND-MORTAR; Will the Technological Revolution Render Architects Obsolete?

2018-11-10T11:43:00-05:00

Globally, multinational tech companies are moving beyond the digital realm to enter the physical domains of where, when, and how we will produce our cities in the future. Grounded in the interdependency between us (citizens) as “users” and tech corporations as “providers,” we have no other choice than to open the doors to the core of our cities if we wish to remain “connected.” However, rather than simply accepting the imposition often dictated by tech companies and political policy-making, how can architecture’s response move beyond the current trends of uncritically adapting technology and, instead, begin to reclaim agency over architectural and urban development? What role can architects play in this seemingly-inevitable technical evolution, with their knowledge and sensitivity to the relationship between the body and space? It is undeniable that architecture will have to run much faster to catch up (with Silicon Valley) or the design of our cities will remain in the territory of...

The User’s Right to the City

2018-11-03T10:14:00-04:00

The “right to the city” has become a rallying call for social movements worldwide [1]. While the slogan serves as a generic container for a variety of issues that might otherwise go ignored, its origins pertain to a certain idea of revolutionary politics. More than symbolic negation, the right to the city was originally meant to signify an ongoing struggle at the level of everyday life. As such, the terms of the right to the city must be continuously renewed, today in regard to the advanced technical infrastructures that shape everyday life, in cities and beyond.

Designing on Unstable Ground #2: an Interview with Yoshihiro Kato Atelier from Japan

2018-10-18T11:30:00-04:00

We are never so aware of architecture as when it breaks down. Our lives require that buildings slip into the background, that we can trust their promise to shelter. But when the ground trembles, when cracks appear in the walls, and the foundation itself shakes, suddenly the frailty of this promise emerges in stark relief. An earthquake is the black mirror to architecture: the memento mori of its claim to firmitas.

Cooking Sections Explains Their Efforts to Adapt to Changing Ecosystems Through Food and Architecture

2018-10-04T09:10:00-04:00

At low tide, a cluster of cages emerge from beneath the recessing waters of Loch Portree. The emptying water gives way to a rocky floor, and with the addition of cushions, the familiar infrastructure of oyster farming in aquaculture is elevated beyond a site for collection to a site of exchange. Facilitating this transformation are Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual of the London-based studio Cooking Sections, who have created this lightweight architectural installation to examine the changing nature of these waters due to historical forms of aquaculture, and to reimagine their potential future. At the installation, the duo leads a series of performative tastings showcasing the preparation of various bivalves and seaweeds to a group of Scottish locals from the Island of Skye. CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones is both performance project and a form of responsive eating—a model Schwabe and Fernández have developed as a possible method for adaptation to the precarious conditions of clim...

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 5)

2018-06-19T10:00:00-04:00

Chapter 5: Halfway Point No (Fire) Escape

Prior to 1968, Rand Hall contained a single staircase located at the center of the building. That year the first floor of Rand Hall was renovated and the second floor was repartitioned for the Center for Research in Education. With only one mode of egress, the building did not comply with the fire safety regulations of New York State that required two exits at either end of a floor. An emergency stair tower was added to the eastern edge of the building and a three foot wide unobstructed corridor from one side of the building to the other. In another 50 years, the stair tower would be removed in favor of an interior staircase with the design of the new addition.

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 4)

2018-04-13T09:00:00-04:00

Chapter 4: Second Action Second Renovation

Rooms for data processor and faculty offices were installed on the first floor of Rand Hall for the Cornell Computer Center in 1959. Additional interior walls were erected to expand the office spaces on the west end of the second floor of Rand Hall. Today, the digitized collection of the entire library can be contained within the memory of a hard drive smaller than the size of a single book. But in 1959, the physical space required by a digitized library would have occupied more area than a traditional library of book stacks containing the same amount of information.

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 3)

2018-03-06T08:00:00-05:00

Chapter 3: First Action First Renovation

Non load-bearing partitions were added between the columns to create spaces for offices and seminar rooms on the east side of the second floor of Rand Hall in 1952. Earlier that year, Buckminster Fuller built a twenty foot diameter geodesic dome with students on the roof of Rand Hall that acted as an inverted planetarium. But what had been intended as a permanent fixture on top of the building was destroyed by vandals on Halloween night. Although the structure no longer exists on top of Rand Hall, it is well documented in the extensive Fuller Archives.

Assessing Surveillance: Infrastructures of Security in the Tohono O‘odham Nation

2018-02-13T09:00:00-05:00

In March of 2014, United States Customs and Border Protection awarded Elbit Systems of America a contract to design, construct, and deploy Integrated Fixed Towers (IFT) at an unspecified number of sites in unspecified locations along the southwestern border of the United States. Elbit’s responsibilities extended beyond mere construction and monitoring to in situ testing, ensuring customer satisfaction with their product’s ability “to detect, track, identify, and classify movement on the border” [1].

Silent Walls: The Architecture of Historical Memory in Spain

2018-01-23T09:00:00-05:00

In 1977, Spain celebrated its first free general election since the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship that followed, which together lasted over four decades. Despite that this restoration of democracy has become a model for peaceful political transitions, to this day the country still struggles to come to terms with its historical memory.

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 2)

2018-01-16T09:00:00-05:00

Chapter 2: Inciting Incident, Inciting Building

Before the construction of Rand Hall, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, gifted his architectural library to establish the Department of Architecture in 1876. That same year the American Library Association was formed. It marked a turning point in the way university libraries managed their collections and controlled access of their materials to faculty, students, and the public.

Object Objections

2018-01-09T09:00:00-05:00

Like many of their contemporaries, the Vienna-based studio iheartblob have taken an interest in emerging schools of philosophy, notably object-oriented ontology and thermodynamic theory. But, unlike many peers, they do so with a critical remove. In this excerpt from their project for Ed, iheartblob designs a series of alluring “objects” meant to enchant, but also reflect on the “crises of thought” they find dominate architecture today. The collective plays with new and popular ideas in architecture as if they were materials, engaging seriously with each while remaining at a distance from full immersion. Their designs are rarely seen in plan and section but rather expressed using renders, mixed realities (physical and augmented), and animations in order to reflect their Lagrangian derivations.

Architecture: the Geontopolitics of Knowledge and Time

2018-01-02T09:00:00-05:00

“Where is Vermilion Sands? I suppose its spiritual home lies somewhere between Arizona and Ipanema Beach, but in recent years I have been delighted to see it popping up elsewhere — above all, in sections of the 3,000-mile-long linear city that stretches from Gibraltar to Glyfada Beach along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and where each summer Europe lies on its back in the sun. That posture, of course, is the hallmark of Vermilion Sands and, I hope, of the future—not merely that no-one has to work, but that work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.”

- J.G. Ballard, preface to Vermilion Sands, 1975

The Arsenal of Inclusion & Exclusion

2017-12-12T09:00:00-05:00

A project several years in the making, Interboro Partner’s new book The Arsenal of Inclusion & Exclusion is a field-guide to the often-imperceptible codes and conventions that are as responsible, if not more, for the form of the contemporary city than traditional design. Like modern-day urban detectives, the Brooklyn-based studio shows that seemingly innocuous things, from zoning to parking restrictions, are responsible for either making the city more accessible or more closed-off, often depending on who you are or what you look like.

In this excerpt from a special feature for Ed, Interboro Partners break down some of the tactics used to open and close the city.

Heroes, Rumors, Cults: Designs on Architectural Celebrity

2017-12-05T09:00:00-05:00

I1 heard a lot of stories from my friend about Zaha, like: she had a giant red couch that all of her interns had sex on; she installed a phone in the studio at Cooper Union so she could call her students at all hours of the night and ensure they were working; she too stayed up all night in London painting and watching American Gigolo on repeat2, inviting famous artists and architects in to visit her; she was spotted at the Venice Biennale standing alone in a room on top of a world map projection, hands spread out, hair blown by a fan; or, most curiously, that she sat outside, sweating in Venice while shoving pizza into her face. My friend swears that the folds of the pizza slice collapsing into the folded skin of her face looked just like one of her buildings.

Portuguese-firm Brandão Costa Arquitectos Shows Off Their Library for the Village of Caminha

2017-11-28T09:00:00-05:00

Small Studio Snapshots is one of Archinect’s regular recurring series. In it, we take a look at the ins and outs of running a small-scale practice. What hurdles do you come across? Do you want to grow or stay small and flexible? What motivates your practice in the first place?

In this excerpt from a special iteration for Ed, we talk with the Portuguese practice Brandão Costa Arquitectos led by Nuna Brandão Costa.

Social Soup

2017-11-21T09:00:00-05:00

It’s been thought for some time that life emerged from the primordial soup. It now seems that humanity is the product of social soup.

Social soup is the bio-cultural-environmental complex of opinions, beliefs, desires, truths, values, myths, grudges, inventions, histories, conspiracies, rumors, plans, protocols, archetypes, dwellings, art, jokes, taboos, and other complex vectors of life woven through our mysterious emotional organic wetware. This mesh is our habitat. We don’t dwell in nature; we live amongst each other.

A House Without A Hierarchy

2017-11-14T09:00:00-05:00

Born out of the 2008 financial crash, the Barcelona-based studio MAIO cares less about form (although their forms are striking) and more about the politics of practice. At the heart of their work is the idea that architecture must change over time to keep up with mutating social and behavioral patterns. Their practice involves extensive research in order to find loopholes in the existing system that can be utilized to make architecture that, simply, works better. For example, with their first ground-up built project 110 Rooms, the studio developed a floor plan comprising uniform-sized rooms so that residents could use as them as they see fit rather than conforming to predetermined programs. After all, the typical father-mother-children family is not so typical anymore. MAIO is helping architecture catch up.

In this feature from the first issue of Archinect's new print publication Ed, we talk with the studio about 110 Rooms and their practice more broadly.

Why we're starting a print magazine after 20 years of publishing digitally

2017-05-02T15:31:00-04:00

When I started Archinect 20 years ago, in the summer of 1997, the internet was still many years away from becoming a replacement for newspapers and magazines. Since then, the media landscape has changed drastically, with most print publications now dedicating the majority of their time and budget to their digital platforms. Today we consume media in a different way than we have ever done in the past, for better or worse. We expect more content, with higher quality, but human nature tends to give in to the quick and gratifying. Journalism has struggled to monetize quality investigations and writing as sites like Buzzfeed have proven that listicles, fun photos, and quick content bites offer a much greater return in dollars and followers.