Archinect - News

Architecture's controversies in 2022: The industry continued to be scarred by strife and scandal

2022-12-21T08:00:00-05:00

The year’s end brings the chance to survey architecture’s progression and social impact through salient entryways that include labor, activism, and the development of topical building trends.

Another way of recapping things is by looking at the varied rows, discord, stories of ill-treatment, and critical reactions to certain projects that shape the way the architecture progresses and is viewed by the broader public. With everything from conflict to college dorms domineering the news cycle, our coverage has been as influenced by current events as it was by goings-on inside halls of higher learning and professional practice.

Previously on Archinect: Updated Munger Hall images show two floors removed as controversial project seeks approval

Twelve months ago, we documented what happened once the industry began to recover from a years-long pandemic-plagued economy. What followed was a year marked by new pinnacles and uncertainty within the industry. With an eye for the murkiness that ha...

Criticism of the 2022 Stirling Prize adds another wrinkle ahead of next week's announcement

2022-10-05T17:06:00-04:00

The debate surrounding sustainability and the Stirling Prize is heating up again in the lead-up to RIBA’s October 13th announcement of the coveted annual award.

Just eight weeks after the Institute's new president Muyiwa Oki was swept into office on a platform of change, UK-based critic Kunle Barker took to the Architects’ Journal to answer some of the organization’s more vocal critics, including the group Architects’ Climate Action Network (or ACAN), who have derided the so-called “greenwashing” presented in certain shortlisted projects and, they say, promoted tacitly by RIBA’s decision to endorse them.

Orchard Gardens, another shortlist project that drew criticism. Image: Enrique Verdugo.

“ACAN is correct on all points. However, I’m not sure its criticism has been levelled at the right party,” he wrote, stating that “we have to remember that the Stirling Prize is ostensibly an architecture competition and not a sustainability one.”

“It is impractical and unrealistic to suddenly ex...

Angry letter from Architects Climate Action Network ignites controversy over 'greenwashing' and the 2022 Stirling Prize shortlist

2022-07-29T12:35:00-04:00

A public rebuke from the UK-based activist group Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) has triggered an enlivened debate online around greenwashing and the 2022 RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist after the initial group of projects was revealed last week.

Two London area residential projects included in the six-project shortlist — Panter Hudspith’s Orchard Gardens and Hopkins Architects’ 100 Liverpool Street — were given as examples of what the environmental group called “architecture that pollutes the planet.”

ACAN called out the former over its involvement in the demolition of the Heygate Estate as part of developer Lendlease’s Elephant Park ‘regeneration’ scheme, which helped displace some 80 percent of council housing residents in the SE17 postal code. In response, Panter Hudspith said: “It’s the job of the RIBA to judge buildings on their architectural quality with environmental credentials being an ever-increasing criteria in their assessment. So it seems unreasonable to suggest...

If London Garden Bridge is cancelled, NAO report says taxpayers could lose £20m

2016-10-12T19:58:00-04:00

Ministers have repeatedly given more public money to London’s planned garden bridge, despite official advice against doing so, and risk losing more than £20m if the controversial project is cancelled, according to a report from the National Audit Office...The Garden Bridge Trust has yet to secure the necessary sub-lease on the area of the South Bank where the bridge will land, the report notes, while the main contractor [is] on standby and construction has been delayed for at least 18 months.

For previous news on this ongoing struggle:

London mayor Sadiq Khan blocks extra funds for garden bridge

Allies and Morrison propose an alternative to the garden bridge

London's garden bridge, the saga continues

Sadiq Khan investigates troublesome details in Thames garden bridge project

A green veil for ugly towers

2016-04-22T17:30:00-04:00

That is the question that plagues all these green towers. Will they really ever look like they do on the billboards? The question is important because what this outbreak of green means is that architects and developers are hiding ugly, ill-considered buildings behind curtains of foliage and if the green doesn’t grow, all we’re left with is the dumb, naked towers, blank and expressionless with the fig leaf of a few, well, fig leaves for cover.

Related on Archinect:

"Eco-Gentrification," or the social ramifications of "urban greening"

2015-05-12T15:38:00-04:00

The High Line is...a perfect example of “environmental gentrification” – the growing phenomenon of rising property values in the wake of a large-scale urban greening project... While intended to serve existing residents, in reality it tends to increase land values to the point that those who live there are forced to leave. This exodus in turn transforms the sociological contours of the area and, by extension, the spatial segregation of the entire city.

Archinect's Lexicon: "Bike-Wash"

2014-11-06T14:05:00-05:00

Welcome to Archinect's Lexicon. Architecture notoriously appropriates and invents new language – sometimes to make appeals, sometimes to fill conceptual gaps, sometimes nonsensically. But once a word is used, it's alive, and part of the conversation. We're here to take notes.

bike-wash [baɪk - ˈwɒʃ], noun: a pejorative term for the PR spin-tactic of making a design appear more bike-friendly than it actually is.

This definition was derived from what may likely be the term's first appearance, on Archinect's Working out of the Box interview with architect and cycling advocate, Steven Fleming:

Then there are people who really surprise you, like the developers I met in America a few months ago. I thought talking to them about space for bikes inside apartments, to really incentivize riding, would be going too far—that they would only want to bike-wash their project with something like a shower down in the basement. They surprised me as well. But then they're like the government in Singapore:...

Is Shigeru Ban "Goodwashing" in Aspen?

2014-09-02T17:12:00-04:00

[Shigeru] Ban in Aspen represents a high-culture culmination of this goodwashing force. His museum, a beautiful structure faced with a woven screen and featuring a timber truss, uses his signature paper tubes non-structurally, as decoration in the corporate board room and the gift shop—all the style of his humanitarian work with none of the substance. -Dana Goodyear

O’ Mighty Green

2011-06-08T07:43:27-04:00

0. Introduction
Sustainability currently shares many qualities with God; supreme concept, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; creator and judge, protector, and (...) saviour of the universe and the humanity. And, like God, it has millions of believers. Since we humans are relatively simpleminded and suspicious and need evidence before belief can become conviction, Green has come to represent sustainability; has become its incarnation in the human world. But sustainability, like God, might not have a form, nor a colour…

1. Emancipation
In a desperate attempt to give shape to an all-encompassing ideology the Green proves to work as the quickest and easiest representation of sustainability. The Green is the only symbol able to keep pace with today’s lack of patience and hunger for images; a Lady Gaga-Sustainability: effective, noticeable, creative, sensationalist. In a persistent effort to become the allegory of Sustainability, Green has been emancipated as its caricature.

...