Archinect - News

Take a look inside Kengo Kuma's newly-opened Hans Christian Andersen Museum

2022-04-14T15:34:00-04:00

One of Denmark’s most highly publicized cultural projects has now officially begun its public operation after being previously inaugurated in a soft opening last June.

Set amongst a massive new public park that opened earlier in the fall, Kengo Kuma and Associates’ design for the new H.C.Andersen Hus museum in Odense is a “fantasy world” of interconnected circular forms which give shape to the museum’s more than 60,000 square feet of education centers and subterranean exhibition space.

Photo: Rasmus Hjortshøj - COAST

Visitors can experience the physical dualities endemic in the architecture and inspired by classic Andersen tales like The Tinderbox and The Little Mermaid. After entering through an extension of the writer’s adjacent birth home, they begin their journey on the timber-clad upper level and descend into an unraveling underground labyrinth containing a “unique artistic experience” designed by Event Communications dotted with evocative commissi...

Elizabeth Diller is drawing personal lessons from her design for the Jewish Museum's Edmund de Waal exhibition

2021-10-18T16:40:00-04:00

The personal has never been a hallmark of Diller’s work in architecture and design. But working with de Waal’s emotionally charged travelogue, she said, had a transformational effect. “Seeing the world of his family through Edmund’s eyes,” she said, “I saw my family history also.” “Edmund dug into his past,” Diller added. “I didn’t. I couldn’t bear it.” Designing an exhibition based on de Waal’s book has changed that.

Six rooms designed by Elizabeth Diller give viewers a glimpse into de Waal’s inner world informed by his relatives, the Ephrussis, who, like the architect’s own Polish family, was forced into exile during the Holocaust. Diller said she wanted the exhibition spaces to reflect the displacement felt by the storied art-collecting family and chronicled by de Waal in his fiction. The author referred to Diller as “the great dramaturge of space.”

Diller had previously designed a 2016 exhibition at the museum which focused on the lifework of French architect Pierre Chareau.

The exhibition "The Hare with Amber Eyes" goes on view starting November 19th. More information can be found here.

How do architecture and literature relate?

2019-10-30T11:41:00-04:00

This is the second time the Architecture Department will offer "Topographical Stories: Architecture, Literature, and Cities," a seminar taught by Architecture professor David Leatherbarrow. Leatherbarrow said students in the class will examine texts from authors writing about specific cities, comparing them to pieces of architecture from the same city and the same time period.

The UPenn Benjamin Franklin Seminar will be offered this spring. According to Professor Leatherbarrow, "the goal for the course is to get students thinking about architecture in a new way by looking at the discipline using many approaches," reports The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Some of the pairings reported for the seminar include author Sherwood Anderson and Frank Lloyd Wright exploring the city of Chicago; Italian writer Dino Buzzati and Ernesto Rogers to examine Milan; and many others.

“Life Begins at the Apocalypse Monster Club” — a personal tribute to Rem Koolhaas' “Exodus” collage by scholar Enrique Ramirez

2017-09-14T17:45:00-04:00

The pitch-perfect paean to the only city we knew could have been taken straight from Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Avowal (1972) by Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis with Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis [...] No wonder, then, that of all the images from this project, a photocollage of musicians posing in the “strip of intense metropolitan desirability” resonates with my memories of Houston and its eclectic punk scene.

Inspired by the confusing yet formative years of adolescence, Harvard Design Magazine's “Seventeen” issue explores “teens of all sorts—humans, buildings, objects, ideas—and their impact on the spatial imagination”.

In the poetic “Life Begins at the Apocalypse Monster Club” by architectural scholar and historian (and recording/touring bassist) Enrique Ramirez, he reflects on his punk-rock teenage years in the transforming “Space City” of Houston, and his personal connection to Rem Koolhaas' 1972 photocollage, “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Avowal”.

“This is a vision of youthful urbanism. This was us. This was our band. And like the titular dwellers of Exodus, we transformed the city, building a version of it that mirrored our own desires,” Ramirez writes.

Imagining the popular Elena Ferrante novel "My Brilliant Friend" as a building

2017-04-17T18:00:00-04:00

Tension and compression often meld into each another. In this building, two volumes are interwoven by strong connecting rods, extended columns and daring beams, with one of the two seemingly suspended from the other. With its mass and swirled dynamism, the suspended volume (that we will call Lila) seems to be slipping away from the one that is holding it up (that we will call Elena) making it extend and stretch as if it was Lila that was shaping Elena and providing her with her dynamic energy...

The name of this architectural complex is My Brilliant Friend, after Elena Ferrante’s novel in which the relationship between its two protagonists (Elena, the narrating voice, and her childhood friend Lila) is a constant, alternating flux of blurred identities and imperfect dreams.

Investigating the literary and sociopolitical implications of the skyscraper

2016-12-14T20:32:00-05:00

So I’d argue that the birth of the middle class, or the managerial middle class, is in some ways tied to the invention of the skyscraper.

Before the skyscraper, looking down at people from great heights was more of a figurative state of mind than an actual experience. But afterwards, the notion of people as dots on a landscape went beyond just a slangy Georges Seurat reference and became a Thing. But what were the ramifications of this change? How did novelists respond to the new structures, and what did those responses say about society and the influence of the skyscraper?

"[Henry James] tried to give the skyscraper a chance; he imagined seeing it and falling in love with it, but he really kind of ultimately dismissed it again as ugly, unaesthetic, a horrible structure that’s also destroying the ways that we tell stories and destroying the intimacy that his kinds of stories require," says Adrienne Brown, an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago whose forthcoming book, "The Black Skyscraper" explores just about every cultural ramification of the skyscraper one can imagine.

In this extended interview with JSto...

Changing architectural ideals as illustrated through child literature

2016-08-23T14:22:00-04:00

In this fascinating piece by Rumaan Ali for Slate, he explores how children's picture books offer a fun historical survey of the ideal architecture and interior decor for each place and time, spanning from the early 20th century to contemporary times. Although the books usually incorporate some element of fantasy, the throw rugs, furniture, and division of space tend to be reflective of the real world of that era.

As Ali writes about the "Best Storybook Ever" by Richard Scarry:

"The silhouettes of the sofas in the living room and the attic den are similar. This is not a home of ostentatious decorative gestures, but one of comfort, a faith in the modern culture (the television, the record player, a single book, from the Book of the Month Club, no doubt, left out on the coffee table). We see the home at the start of the day: one son lacing up his shoes, mother working on breakfast. The house is awake, alive with an optimism about what the day, the decade, the century holds for the peopl...

Future cities of the past

2015-04-29T18:17:00-04:00

But supplementing that aesthetic of “the future” sketched in imaginary edifice, the full SF vision of the future city is a mosaic, constructed from fragments of the cities that we recognize, including symbols that are decidedly from the past. [...] If SF functions by taking the world we know and altering it with a constructed future fantasy, the Statue of Liberty serves as the junction point, the axis where the speculative fantasy begins and ends.

"Constructing Holden Caulfield": Learning to build character through literary architecture

2014-06-12T18:22:00-04:00

The writer and the architect aren't so different from each other when you consider each one as builders of an environment, and what better way to introduce that concept than to a class of high school students. After reading about Matteo Pericoli's "The Laboratory of Literary Architecture" course in The New York Times, English teacher George Mayo was inspired to teach it to his 10th grade class at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD.

Matteo Pericoli created and taught the workshop in the Scuola Holden creative writing school in Turin, Italy and then in the M.F.A. writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Students picked a literary work they closely understood and then broke it down to its core elements, from which they based their architectural designs.

The goal was for students to avoid literal representations and instead design literary representations that symbolize "the essential ideas of the narrative structure in a spatial form," as described in P...

What happens when we ask writers to try their hand at architecture?

2013-08-06T11:26:00-04:00

Great architects build structures that can make us feel enclosed, liberated or suspended. They lead us through space, make us slow down, speed up or stop to contemplate. Great writers, in devising their literary structures, do exactly the same. So what happens when we ask writers to try their hand at architecture?

A sneak peek of the new architecture-obsessed Batman graphic novel

2012-05-22T14:17:00-04:00

Gotham City is undergoing one of the most expansive construction booms in its history. The most prestigious architects from across the globe have buildings in various phases of completion all over town. As chairman of the Gotham Landmarks Commission, Bruce Wayne has been a key part of this boom, which signals a golden age of architectural ingenuity for the city. And then, the explosions begin.

"Whenever you are, we're already then"

2008-01-07T13:36:00-05:00

826 opens up its second Los Angeles area center, designed and built by archinector, Scott Mitchell. 826 is a "free literacy and writing center for kids that was started by author Dave Eggers in San Francisco," with centers in New York, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Boston. 826 is always looking for volunteers and tutors.