Archinect - News

The Solipsism of Architecture by Ole Bouman

2021-01-04T20:49:00-05:00

Over 20 years since the Kyoto Protocol, over 10 years since the Global Financial Crisis, and in the first year of the global Coronavirus pandemic, there has been no real change in the architecture of architecture itself. That will only happen when it stops connecting everything with itself, stops beginning with itself. When it admits the revolution into its own citadel.

Ole Bouman writes a Volume piece on 'Solipsism of Architecture' where he discusses a revolution will not happen in architecture until...
...Until then, in an inversion of Le Corbusier’s most notorious epigram: Architecture or Revolution. Architecture can be avoided.

Previously on Archinect 1, 2

Startup Katerra wants to revolutionize the construction industry

2018-06-27T15:18:00-04:00

A Menlo Park company called Katerra announced that it had acquired Michael Green Architecture, a 25-person architecture firm in Vancouver, British Columbia. On June 12, the company revealed that it had bought another, larger architecture firm, Atlanta-based Lord Aeck Sargent. This comes five months after Katerra raised $865 million in venture capital from funders led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, which has also invested heavily in the co-working startup WeWork.

Startup Katerra looks to revolutionize the construction industry through streamlining the entire process with their design-build model. The company has acquired Michael Green Architecture, known for designing tall wood buildings, and Lord Aeck Sargent.

With these two firms obtained, Katerra will now consolidate by designing and building its products in house. Michael Green Architecture's influence can be seen as Katerra is developing a catalog of mass timber products for residential and commercial building projects. Uniquely Katerra has also created a system to guarantee price early on, a rarity in the industry.

The architecture of Cuba's revolutionary (and endangered) National Art Schools

2016-09-13T17:43:00-04:00

Designed by three architects, one Cuban and two Italian, the new schools were constructed in flamboyant, sinuous forms deliberately reflecting the local landscape. Built in brick and terracotta as a pragmatic response to the US embargo of imported steel, ... these were a confident repudiation of Western-style International Modernism. But of the five original schools in the complex, only two were completed, as the deepening relationship with the USSR prompted disdain for such exotic forms

AA Athens Visiting School 2014 challenges the static built environment with “Kinetic Haze”

2014-09-12T21:03:00-04:00

Students and professionals had another opportunity to take part in the third cycle of the AA Athens Visiting School program, "Cipher City: Revolutions". Taking place at the National Technical University of Athens this past spring, participants focused on addressing the roles of change, adaptation and interaction through scripting and digital fabricating techniques at large scale models.

The program set out to challenge the motionless built environment in the collaborative creation of a kinetic pathway prototype called Kinetic Haze. Participants applied the basic design elements from their own proposals in creating the project in less than five days.

Here's a glimpse of the project

Find more project photos and details on Bustler.

“Unfinished Spaces” documentary receives 2014 SAH Award for Film and Video

2014-04-18T15:10:00-04:00

Unfinished Spaces by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray continues to gain recognition since its initial release in 2011. In addition to previous grants and awards, the documentary film recently won the 2014 Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Award for Film and Video at the 2014 Annual Conference in Austin, Texas. Established in 2013, the annual award is given to the most distinguished international work of film or video on the history of the built environment.

Reflective of its Cuban Revolution setting in 1961, Unfinished Spaces tells the complex tale of Cuba's historic National Art Schools project commissioned by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to visionary architects Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti, and Roberto Gottardi. Construction of the school complex immediately began and artists from all over the country attended the school. But the project was abruptly halted as soon as the Revolution came to fruition.

Forty years later, the schools continue to operate but have remained unfinished. Castro has invited the exiled architects back to finally complete their unrealized dream.

See the official trailer below.

Also check out Archinect's previous coverage of Unfinished Spaces here.

Egypt’s street artists now risk even more

2014-02-19T15:22:00-05:00

As more journalists are being arrested in Egypt, artists are under threat as well. [...] Political slogans and portraits of people who have died since the January 25 revolution are painted over by the government and replaced immediately by artists. The walls of Mohamed Mahmoud Street leading to Tahrir Square are layers of colorful murals over asymmetrical blotches of white paint. And despite its attempt to silence, the dictatorial white ironically makes a great primer for many of the artworks.

Discovering Khidekel

2012-07-18T09:46:00-04:00

What About the Last Suprematist?

When one speaks of revolutionary art, two kinds of artistic phenomena are meant: the works whose themes reflect the Revolution, and the works which are not connected with the Revolution in theme, but are thoroughly imbued with it, and are Colored by the new consciousness arising out of the Revolution. -Leon Trotsky

October 1917 opened an architectural Pandora’s Box.
During the Russian revolution, the avant-garde exercises of the Cubo-Futurists, Rayonnists, Suprematists, and Constructivists, paralleled to the unmovable inflexibility of the Stalinist “establishment” to reveal the difference between architecture of the revolution and revolutionary architecture.

While architecture of the revolution responds to the iconoclastic demands of the moment and creates a profusion of icons that portray a specific historical period, revolutionary architecture strives to break with the current paradigms, establishing a new architectural language that detac...