Archinect - News

Does architectural education "brainwash" students? Nikos A. Salingaros thinks so

2017-06-13T13:57:00-04:00

Recently I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that architectural education does some very specific things to its students, and in remarkably short order: 1.) It disconnects them from their bodies....2.) It brainwashes them.

In a brief article on Common Edge, the University of Texas San Antonio's Dr. Nikos A. Salingaros lists five effects he's witnessed as a teacher on students, and they include disasociation from one's body, a certain brainwashing through abstraction, and an emphasis on insularity and novelty over the actual human experience of a building. As he notes:

Contemporary architecture is obsessed, to the point of arrogance, with “innovation.” But unless you’re trained to admire and revere it for its own sake (something architecture students are routinely taught), aggressive “novelty” often triggers negative reactions from everyone else: alarm, anxiety, even physio-psychological pain. Remember the poor Vitra firemen, unwitting victims of “cutting edge” architecture? That’s just the proverbial tip of the iceberg, as far as alienation and architecture are concerned. Once upon a time, shareable stories were embedded onto and into buildings. Today architects detach their stories and apply them inst...

Frank Gehry Is Right: 98% Of Architecture Today 'Has No Respect For Humanity'

2014-12-04T14:27:00-05:00

The architect, who implicitly exempted himself from that 98%, might have been arrogant, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right. [...] many if not most buildings are the work of contractors, not architects, and that this has been and will likely always be the case. Unfortunately, architectural education and criticism tends to focus on important buildings at the expense of the common and ordinary.

Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Robert A.M. Stern, and Others Design a Collection of Rugs for Arzu Studio Hope

2013-02-12T11:22:00-05:00

Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Zaha Hadid, Robert A.M. Stern, Margaret McCurry, and Stanley Tigerman have designed rugs for Arzu Studio Hope’s new Masters collection. However, Arzu’s mission is about much more than making beautiful carpets—the Chicago-based not-for-profit organization is dedicated to improving the lives of Afghan women weavers and their families, based on a model of social entrepreneurship.

The Architecture of Juvenile Detention in America

2012-04-11T11:45:00-04:00

On any given night in the U.S., there are approximately 60,500 youth confined in juvenile correctional facilities or other residential programs. Photographer Richard Ross has spent the past five years criss-crossing the country photographing the architecture, cells, classrooms and inhabitants of these detention sites.