Archinect - News

Blue Check Homes installs Twitter-style blue checks on houses for "authentic public figures"

2021-02-09T14:02:00-05:00

According to its satirical official website, BLUE CHECK HOMES offers clients a verified blue badge on their homes. "The blue verified badge on your house lets people outside know that you're an authentic public figure. To receive the blue check crest, there must be someone authentic and notable actively living in the house," the site explains.

Simply provide your first name and all of your social media accounts and BLUE CHECK HOMES wait for a review and interview with the company's board. If you are approved, pay the fee and get a crest installed.

Pricing? For verified homeowners, "the BLUE CHECK HOMES installation team will secure your home's very own plaster baronial crest for a fee of $2999.99."

The jokester behind this is artist Danielle Baskin. In a postscript on the website, she writes, "If you thought this was a full-fledged service, please investigate the things you read on the internet! And if you're an artist making jokes on the internet, we should consider adding disclaim...

A satirical look at the homelessness and housing crises by McSweeney's

2018-05-10T16:09:00-04:00

Homelessness in America has reached crisis levels and I am determined to do everything in my power to fix the problem as long as it doesn’t involve changing zoning laws or my ability to drive alone to work or, well, changing anything, really. I’m more than happy to give a hungry man a sandwich once a year and then brag to my friends about it as long as he doesn’t sit down anywhere in my line of sight to eat it. Same goes for hungry women because I’m also a feminist.

A superb piece satirizing the homelessness and housing crises by McSweeney's writer Homa Mojtabai. From a privileged and entitled point of view, Mojtabai highlights extreme issues on how problems are being "solved". This is of course an exaggeration—but by how much?

New Competition from Archistophanes: Complicity and Defiance in Architecture

2017-03-16T17:50:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by Reality Cues.

Architecture is historically complicit with the policies of those in power, both symbolically and functionally. It offers not only representations of power, but also vehicles for enacting power in its most grandiose, oppressive, and physically enduring expressions, from palaces and corporate skyscrapers to border walls and prisons.

Art that opposes power, on the other hand, is more fluid. Graffiti, protest songs, and written manifestos cost nothing and are easily disseminated–all things that architecture has historically never been. As such, there is no canon of activist built architecture. And while there have been revolutionary movements and utopian visionaries in the history of architecture, only now through Photoshop and the internet can an architecture of protest and revolution truly form and proliferate, through imagery that is arguably more provocative in imagined scenarios than built projects in their real-life executions.

We are on...

Watch the trailer for the new film 'the Architect'

2016-06-07T18:11:00-04:00

When a couple sets out to build their dream house, they enlist the services of a visionary modernist architect, whose soaring ideas are matched by only his ego. The woman is swept away by the uncompromising creative artist whose personality provides a stark contrast to her practical husband's. She is so taken she hardly notices the Architect is building HIS dream house.

The latest film to satirize the profession, the Architect stars Parker Posey, James Frain, and Eric McCormack and was written and directed by Jonathan Parker.

It's not immediately clear if the architect is modeled after anyone in particular. The character's appearance resembles a certain British designer a bit, while the work looks a bit like a more curvilinear Richard Meier project.

What do you think? An unfair portrait of architects or a spot-on satire of the discipline's more hubristic tendencies?

The Architect - Trailer (2016) from Parker Film Company on Vimeo.

ClickHole's magnificent spoof on starchitects' unbuilt buildings

2015-07-24T17:44:00-04:00

“a barbershop, a beautiful barbershop formed by curves of alabaster stone. It would resemble an albino slug that’s eating a pile of white towels. Instead of sitting on swivel chairs during your haircut, you’d rest on a big egg that rises out of an indoor reflecting pool. [...] Every day, I open the phone book and call a handful of random barbershops to see if anyone is interested, but I have yet to find a barber with the vision and bravery required.” – Zaha Hadid

I had dreamed of the day when the visionary and hysterical ClickHole would lampoon starchitects. Now that day has come, and the resulting listicle does not disappoint.

Here's Frank Gehry's lost project for the "Evil Concert Hall":

"Instead of holding music, the evil hall would just house endless screaming and clanking chains, establishing an intriguing duality that exists not just in the Disney universe but throughout the entirety of the cosmos. The Disney family only approved the good building.”

And poor Santiago Calatrava, disappointed to realize his design wasn't so original after all:

“My best design ever was actually the Taj Mahal, but I found out that it had already been made. It was extremely humiliating, because I learned that while pitching it for a museum in Barcelona. When I unveiled the model, the clients said, ‘This is the Taj Mahal. India has one,’ and I told them I was pretty sure they didn’t, because I had just invented it. We looked up the Taj Mahal, and sure enough, it...

Satirical “Folly for London” competition mocks Garden Bridge project

2015-06-12T19:22:00-04:00

As controversy carries on over the notorious Garden Bridge by Heatherwick Studio proposed for London's South Bank, some opposers of the project are expressing their discontent with good ol' British satire in the soon-to-be-launched "Folly for London" competition. If you have a cheeky sense of humor, you'll have fun in this one.

Previously on Archinect

UPDATE, June 15, 2015: Will Jennings, artist and initiator of the "Folly for London" competition, sent us this statement to further explain the cause until the design ideas contest officially opens for entries.

Details of the competition will be announced in due course and we will seek entries from across professional architectural and design circles, established and amateur artists, citizens of London and anyone else with an interest in the capital - adults and children alike - before a panel of judges, including architecture writer Owen Hatherley, will meet to decide the best follies.

The website is not only intended as a ‘home’ for the competition, with details being added as we get closer to the launch, but will also have writings and responses to the many issues around the city, politics, finances and architecture which are raised by the problematic Garden Bridge project.

While we will invite crazy, ridiculous and satirically nonsensical projects and ask p...

San Francisco is quick to poke fun of Snøhetta's new One Van Ness tower design

2015-01-05T14:02:00-05:00

The new design for One Van Ness, which will rise 37 stories at the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Market Street, is the work of Snøhetta [...]. A journalist and illustrator, Susie Cagle tells me in an email that she covered San Francisco real estate in 2008, and the Snøhetta project reminds her of ambitious residential projects planned for Market Street that never happened. "I think it's a place where dense construction makes sense," she says.

Previously: Snøhetta to take over SF development project near Civic Center

If We Talked About Architecture Like We Talk About Writing

2014-05-14T13:45:00-04:00

“Where do you get your ideas for buildings?” “Oh, I could never do what you do — you know, get up in the morning and go to my job and do my job there.” “Sometimes I feel like I have a building in me.” “What’s your favorite building to re-look at?” “Oh, I’d love to design an office complex, but I’m just so busy.”

Yo, Where my red lines at?

2013-06-27T18:29:00-04:00

Crank the A/C in the office just to stay awake, Espresso and Red Bull till I got a stomach ache. With our cotton blazers high, we have a sense of style, But to the rest of the world we just point and smile I read code books, while I'm on vacation Take pictures of, my latest creation We wear black and gray, with no logos on our threads So many sleepless nights we're like the walking dead

15 Mid-Century Modern Dream Homes that will Kill Your Children

2013-04-08T13:36:00-04:00

Do you know what I love more? My children. And that is why I will never live in my MCM dream home. Because mid-century modern architecture is designed to KILL YOUR CHILDREN. (Also, moderately clumsy or drunk adults).

Red arrows show the direction of travel of children’s bodies

It is pretty certain that none of these children reached adulthood intact.

Ask The Concept Of Phenomenology In Architecture As Developed By The Norwegian Theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz

2012-06-12T13:46:00-04:00

Architecture (insofar as architecture is an art) should contain within it the potential for the revelation of that which is unknown. Changes in our physical environment, particularly in the structure of our cities following the Second World War, have resulted in a loss of a sense of place, as well as a subsequent "empty space" within our perceived experience of our world. This can only be remedied by a renewed sense of human settlements as urban foci...

The Onion has an advice columnist! Found via Archinect member The Great Northern in this discussion thread.