Archinect - News

Oliver Wainwright on RIBA's '100 Women: Architects in Practice,' a new primer for industry-wide change

2024-02-29T13:40:00-05:00

We’re not there yet. In an industry where the gender pay gap has widened in recent years, where all-male panels at conferences are not unusual, and where macho culture still prevails on building sites, a book like this, sadly, still has a place.

Writing for The Guardian, critic Oliver Wainwright says he hopes RIBA’s new publication 100 Women: Architects in Practice, which we previewed in December, will encourage competition judges, academic panels, awards juries, exhibitions organizers, and rebuke “the headhunters who claim women never apply, [...] the clients who say they just can’t find women with the right experience.”

Many of the architects included in the book, namely Mariam Kamara, Suhailey Farzana, and others, are women whose practices are informed by and in service to decolonization in the developing world à la the 2023 RIBA Gold Medal winner Yasmeen Lari and 2021 Soane Medalist Marina Tabassum. (The profiles are divided into 18 geographical "sub-regions" based on the UN's geoscheme.)

The 320-page book was written by Harriet Harriss, Naomi House, Monika Parrinder, and Tom Ravenscroft, with Alison Brooks responsible for the foreword.

'Atlas of Brutalist Architecture' reflects a significant change in public opinion

2019-01-17T16:19:00-05:00

"If there was any lingering doubt that Brutalism — the architectural style derided for everything the name implies — was back in fashion, the “Atlas of Brutalist Architecture” quashes it with a monumental thump. At 560 pages representing some 878 works of architecture in over 100 countries, the outsize volume is part reference tool, part coffee table book, and certainly part of an ongoing design trend favoring big, big books."

It has been remarkable to see the dramatic change in public opinion towards brutalist architecture in the last few years. Not only has the style shed its identity as a blight on the majority of modern cities, but dozens of products have recently entered the market in honor of these monumental edifices.

Spread of "Atlas of Brutalist Architecture" Phaidon

Mimi Zeiger's review of 'Atlas of Brutalist Architecture,' the 560-page treatise to the movement now carried at Archinect Outpost, is a reflection of this recent phenomenon. "Today," Zeiger writes, "the architectural ugly duckling is a swan with an Instagram following. The monolithic and blocky design of Kanye West’s Yeezy headquarters in Calabasas was inspired by Brutalism. And this fall, Archinect, a digital platform for architecture based in Los Angeles, launched a line of coffee called Brutal in partnership with Yeekai Lim, a former architect and founder of Culver City’s Cognoscenti Coffee."

Brutal Coffee at Archinect Outpost. Pho...

Goodbye to "A Daily Dose of Architecture"; Hello to "A Daily Dose of Architecture Books"

2019-01-11T14:39:00-05:00

John Hill started blogging about buildings back in 1999, providing a regularly-updated single-author architecture blog for longer than anyone else I'm aware of, and I've been around the block a few times since starting Archinect in 1997. As 2019 kicks off, it looks like John is pivoting from buildings to books, as evidenced in the new format and title of his blog, "A Daily Dose of Architecture Books".

The new blog replaces his two previous blogs, "A Daily Dose of Architecture" (2004-2018) and "A Weekly Dose of Architecture" (1999-2014). The new blog will feature a book review every day, in a rigid structure consisting of title, author, publisher, date, cover image, publication details, publisher description, photos of page spreads, author bio, referral links, and commentary about the book by the author.

To source, read, vet and review a book every day, even if it's rather brief, as it tends to be with his first few reviews, is quite an impressive feat. Hopefully he'll keep this up...

Paul Goldberger on the science behind sublime architecture

2017-10-12T19:31:00-04:00

Clearly, Goldhagen is not a writer who approaches her subject with a sense of tentativeness. But once you get a little deeper into this book, it becomes clear that her hubris (if we can call it that) coexists with a sense of earnestness and civilizing intentions. Goldhagen is an engaging and generous writer, alert to the subtleties of human experience, and she has written Welcome to Your World with a desire to genuinely reveal something new to us about how cities, buildings, and places affect us

Paul Goldberger dissects Sarah Williams Goldhagen's book, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, itself a dissection of the human mind and how neuroscience can explain our ability to detect when architecture is merely good — and when it is awe-inspiring.

Click here to find more on the topic of neuroscience and architecture.

'The New Urban Crisis' as Richard Florida's mea culpa

2017-08-21T14:45:00-04:00

After fifteen years of development plans tailored to the creative classes, Florida surveys an urban landscape in ruins. The story of London is the story of Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Sydney. When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich.

Richard Frorida's latest book, The New Urban Crisis, represents the culmination of this long mea culpa. Though he stops just short of saying it, he all but admits that he was wrong. He argues that the creative classes have grabbed hold of many of the world’s great cities and choked them to death. As a result, the fifty largest metropolitan areas house just 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of its growth. These “superstar” cities are becoming gated communities, their vibrancy replaced with deracinated streets full of Airbnbs and empty summer homes. Meanwhile, drug addiction and gang violence have spread to the suburbs. “Much more than a crisis of cities,” he writes, “the New Urban Crisis is the central crisis of our time” — “a crisis of the suburbs, of urbanization itself and of contemporary capitalism writ large.”

The author offers both—specific solutions like more affordable housing, more investment in infrastructure, and higher pay for service jobs—and va...

A monumental new biography of Kahn

2017-05-12T19:39:00-04:00

In You Say to Brick, her subtle interpretations of conversational remarks by Kahn’s intimates, and especially of of Kahn’s written ephemera—a dream journal entry on the back of an airline receipt, an unsent postcard—are luminous and deep. It is difficult to develop, in prose, an architectural equivalent for this kind of close reading or close listening.

Over at n+1, Thomas de Monchaux reviews Wendy Lesser's newly published 'You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn'.

While everyone knows the story of Kahn's gothic and ignominious death, did you also know that "When Kahn died, his firm...owed its creditors $464,423.83. In 1974 dollars"?

MONU Magazine Review

2017-03-16T14:32:00-04:00

I came across MONU during my early doctoral investigations on critical, non-academic publications looking into this arguably poorly unknown, plural and contested entity that is the city. MONU, does not actually qualify as a non-academic outlet, for the breadth and depth of the analysis it offers, but still provides critical insights on the ways urban forms are shaped by socioeconomic, institutional and political forces without falling in the trap of being highly jargoning, inaccessible or theoretical. It speaks to a wide audience interested in urban policy, activism, architecture, social movements, all from a multidisciplinary lens.

MONU mixes text of different textures with images, collages and various forms of writing, including short and long city stories, mixed up with photographic journeys and conversations with architects, artists and urbanists. By treating its form and its content as equally important, MONU de facto invites the reader to think about socio-political processes a...

Archinect's 2015 holiday guide to architecture books

2015-12-17T14:42:00-05:00

No matter how prepared I think I am, December is always a frenzy. Between wrapping up end-of-the-year projects and remembering to buy wrapping paper, the days disappear faster than my coworker’s toffee. If you’re anything like me, the holidays are heralded by a panicky visit to the mall and a desperate scramble to find the right gift. Chances are that gift will be a book (sorry, sis).

Luckily for you, we’ve put together a handy guide to some of this year’s most exciting titles. Have an architecture student in the family? No problem. A vegan, card-carrying eco-warrior aunt? Perfect. A cousin who just loves design? We’ve got you covered.

And if you have a long-haul flight coming up, treat yourself to one of these great titles and you’ll arrive at your destination before you know it!

The Young-at-Heart

Architecture is always changing and it can be hard to catch up. Young Architects 16: Overlay highlights the six emerging American firms who won the prestigious Architectural League Prize, an...

Relishing the physical in the digital: review of "The New Concrete"

2015-08-20T13:49:00-04:00

Although jaded art critics might argue that there is nothing new under the sun, they are overlooking the fact that there is important work that has been shaded by time. Concrete poetry, an art form that emphasizes the physical arrangement and visual presentation of poetry as much as its literary content, is widely presumed to have reached its zenith in the 1960s, only to become obsolescent in the digital age. "The New Concrete," a collection of contemporary concrete poetry edited by Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe, not only proves this assumption wrong, but spotlights a form that is perhaps the inadvertent template to our daily onscreen lives.

"Many of concrete poetry's ideas about language's materiality have ended up being mirrored in our computational systems and processes," argues Kenneth Goldsmith in the book's introductory essay. "When we click on a link, we literally press down on a word. When, in the analogue age, did we ever press down on words?...The Internet itself is entir...

Book Review: Shannon Mattern's "Deep Mapping the Media City"

2015-06-13T10:56:00-04:00

Amid the seemingly endless barrage of new writings about the imminent arrival of the technologically mediated “smart city,” a slim volume published by the University of Minnesota Press suggests that so-called intelligent urbanism might not be so new after all. In Deep Mapping the Media City, author Shannon Mattern, an associate professor at the School of Media Studies at the New School, argues cities have been “mediated, and intelligent, for millenia.” Rather than arbitrary ruptures, our cities have developed over time, as new infrastructural developments build off – or plug into – the infrastructure of the past.

Mattern takes a broad look at contemporary urban discourses, and compellingly advocates for an “urban media archaeology,” a “materialist, multisensory approach to exploring the deep material history” of our cities. She makes clear that her invocation of archaeology shouldn’t be read as part of the proliferation of the Foucauldian genealogical methodology en vogue in academia...

Book Review: Katrina Palmer's "End Matter"

2015-06-09T20:02:00-04:00

On September 2, 1666, a fire began in a bakery on Pudding Lane in London. By the next day, the flames had fanned out north and west, engulfing much of the city’s medieval center. The fire, later knowns as the Great Fire of London, destroyed much of the old cathedral of St. Paul as well as the overcrowded, narrow streets that surrounded it. In the aftermath of the fire, a period of social unrest was followed by a large-scale reconstruction, helmed by the noted architect Sir Christopher Wren. He built a new cathedral in the English Baroque style and supervised, to some extent, the city’s larger reconstruction. Today, St. Paul’s Cathedral and much of the city’s core owes its appearance in part to Wren’s preference for a particular variety of white, soft stone hewed on the Isle of Portland. The restitution of London spurred the industrial development of Portland’s quarries. For every monument that rose up, such as the looming Doric column that memorialized the fire itself, a hole was e...

Bradley Garrett on the importance of gonzo journalism for understanding cities

2015-05-27T17:09:00-04:00

Understanding the nuances of city stories, and tracing those tensions, requires immersion and patience. Whether we are writing about police work, protests, squatting, free parties, banking or parkour, the best socially engaged journalism – like the best university research – is rooted in participation, spiked with empathy, and resists being reduced to spectacle fodder. As any war correspondent will tell you, immersion can also be dangerous...

Bradley Garrett recounts his own infiltration into urbex (urban exploration) communities, and provides a list of the "five most influential 'gonzo' ethnographies." If you aren't familiar with Garrett's work, be sure to check it out. In particular, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City is a must-read primer on sneaking into the secret corners of the city. In a way, urbex picks up where the Situationists left off, reimagining the urban environment as a giant, unending game board.

Coy Howard book, The Thickening of Time, reviewed by Craig Hodgetts

2015-05-20T16:40:00-04:00

Those images, wrought by a wicked mash-up of the hand, the eye, and the mouse, defy any effort to reverse-engineer their creation. Dot for dot and pixel for pixel they proclaim their origin as documentary evidence. Yet by their implausible point of view, their visceral texture, and their mini-Wagnerian scale, they are more painterly than Maya-ish, far more lavish than Rhino.

A long time colleague Craig Hodgetts reviews Coy Howard's newly printed book 'The Thickening of Time' for Architect's Newspaper.

Being familiar with Coy Howard's work, Hodgett's words describe the essence of the enigmatic images and the persona well. I'd just say poetry of the images is verbatim with Coy's architecture. As his built works are rare gems, Coy is a legend capable of thickening time to process exceptional architecture, meticulously considered.

McCafferty House in San Pedro, CA, 1979

Book review: Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable Future

2015-04-22T18:40:00-04:00

I have to admit to a degree of wariness when I first opened Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World, a new book edited by Jared Green and published by Princeton Architectural Press. The introduction makes some bold claims for a rather slim book with little text. “We have the answers. We are both the cause of the problems and the solution to them,” Green writes with supreme optimism. The book is a collection of eighty projects that leading architects, urban planners, artists, critics and thinkers chose as a response to the question: “What gives you hope for the future?” The criteria for their responses stipulated that they must discuss a project they admire, not their own. And the results are as varied as one might imagine for a question that is both vague and expansive.

More than anything else, the responses highlighted the mutability of the term “sustainable” within contemporary architecture discourse. Some of the responses, such as that of Katrin Kling...

What is Interior Urbanism? - A Review of MONU #21 by Claudia Mainardi and Giacomo Ardesio

2015-01-26T13:04:00-05:00

In 1969 Reyner Banham in his book The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment marked the shift between the concept of interior to that of an artificial environment. Technology and new human needs in fact had become an integral part of architecture, defining a new paradigm to describe indoor space, that it was not any longer a concern of the singular living-cell but rather of its internal atmosphere.

The issue 21 of MONU describes the current development and the extreme consequences of what this Interior Urbanism means. As Brendan Cormier emphasizes in his article Some Notes Towards an Interior Archipelago: “90% of our lives are spent inside. Urban life is an interior affair.” This statement manifests the necessity to invert the canonical approach to read and plan cities, unfolding a new possible stream of research which considers how architecture affects our everyday life.

Climate, or the need to erase the atmospheric conditions, is one of the trigger factors of the production o...

Zaha Hadid sues architecture critic Martin Filler over book review

2014-08-22T12:40:00-04:00

Hadid, who was born in Baghdad and is now a British citizen, claimed that Filler falsely implied she was indifferent to the alleged difficult working conditions of migrant workers on high-profile construction projects in the Middle East, including her own. She also claimed Filler used large portions of his June 5 review of Rowan Moore's "Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture" to question her success and fault her personality, although she was not a prominent character in the book.

BIG in Arquitectura Viva's "Monographs"

2013-11-06T18:03:00-05:00

It seems as if BIG will stop at nothing short of world domination. As the subject of Arquitectura Viva’s 162nd monograph, the sheer volume and span of projects from Bjarke Ingels Group since its founding in 2005 is staggering. After breaking away from OMA and then his partnership with Julien De Smedt of PLOT to form BIG, Bjarke Ingels has consistently spewed out (mostly unbuilt) large-scale international projects, while also establishing a momentous array of icons.

Within the Danish context, BIG is a loud firm -- in presence, perspective, and popularity. Conceptually, the projects blend Danish sensibilities of high-minded idealism and humbled, matter-of-fact rationalism with social-democratic values and no small seasoning of pomo gimmickry. A maritime museum “docked” in the landscape? A waste-energy treatment plant that blows smoke rings? A multi-use Chinese hotel complex, shaped like the character for “the people”? But in their graphical representation, through promotional mat...

Fred Bernstein reviews "Phyllis Lambert’s Building Seagram"

2013-05-13T18:37:00-04:00

As Seagram’s director of planning, Lambert visited the site daily. “I had intended to go back to Paris, but I stayed in New York, convinced that if the one person who really cared about the building was not there, Mies would not build Seagram,” she says. With Lambert as his protector and Johnson as his assistant, Mies went on to create in 1958 the Seagram building, a landmark of 20th-century architecture.

Kingdom of Kitsch

2012-12-31T12:12:00-05:00

The oversize public monuments and buildings in the capital of North Korea confirm the subservience of the citizen to the state and display the ghastly aesthetic imperatives of totalitarian art.

The WSJ's Eric Gibson reviews the book "Architectural and Cultural Guide: Pyongyang," edited by Philipp Meuser, a German architect and architectural historian.

The Wired City, PD Smith

2012-08-06T12:42:17-04:00

In this excerpt from his new book, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, PD Smith explores the history of ‘invisible’ urban infrastructure, from the network of subterranean steam pipes synchronising Paris clocks in the 1870s to the ‘organism’ that is Seoul today. The next step: a city that talks back to its citizens?

MONU #15 "Post-Ideological Urbanism" - Review by Michael Hirschbichler

2012-03-15T21:05:00-04:00

In its latest issue #15 Rotterdam-based MONU magazine set out on a daring journey to investigate, as chief editor Bernd Upmeyer proclaims, “one of the most fascinating and biggest issues of our time and in culture, or what is left of it: the non-ideological – or better post-ideological – conditions of our society when it comes to cities.” At a time when the news is full of reports on breathtaking riots erupting in European cities, revolutionary chain reactions and their cruel suppression in the Arabic world, the rejuvenation and continuation of the world’s most isolated and propagandistically charged dictatorial empire in Asia, among many others, assuming a post-ideological condition might seem contradictory. Now even more than in recent history, ideological battles are being fought and their physical and violent revolutionary implementation transforms the reality of many urban territories. How can it be that, when it comes to urbanism, the non-ideological and post-ideological gai...