Archinect - News

Kate Wagner goes from McMansion Hell to critic at The Nation

2023-07-03T12:41:00-04:00

The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture, today named Kate Wagner (@mcmansionhell) to its masthead as architecture correspondent. Best known as the brains behind the brilliant and satirical architecture blog, “”McMansion Hell,” and following a wildly successful stint as a Nation guest columnist earlier this year, Wagner will contribute monthly commentary on architecture and the built environment—but not as always conventionally understood.

Wagner succeeds Michael Sorkin, who died in 2020. The new correspondent said the post is “an ideal perch for me to explain how everything we see and everything we build is political.” She is now one of a select coterie of dedicated critics writing for American publications, including Michael Kimmelman, Lee Bey, Carolina A. Miranda, Ingra Safron, and Robert Campbell. Wagner's personal account of her ascent from the widely-acclaimed blog, which she founded in 2016, can also be found here via The Baffler.

Previously on Archinect: Bro, Do You Even Quoin? A conversation with McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner

The Bartlett names Amy Kulper as its next Director

2022-03-30T12:27:00-04:00

A new face will lead one of the UK’s most prestigious design institutions after the announcement that RISD professor Amy Kulper will be the next Director of University College London’s The Bartlett School of Architecture.

Kulper is presently the head of the Architecture department at RISD and has held numerous teaching positions throughout her career including recent stops at UCLA, SCI-Arc, and the University of Cambridge.

Kulper's extensive writing and research primarily focuses on the intersection of history, theory, and design. Her work as an academic has earned her the University of Michigan’s Donna M. Salzer Award for teaching excellence and recently included the oversight of the newly-created combined 4+2 program between Brown and RISD.

Earlier on Archinect: The Bartlett launches new diversity-focused scholarship program

As a critic and curator, she has been published several times in Log, The Architectural Review, Candide, and Architecture and Culture. Her exhibitions have be...

Keller Easterling discusses her latest book "Medium Design" with Failed Architecture

2018-07-09T23:07:00-04:00

In her latest book Medium Design, Easterling turns this idea of disposition to our ways of thinking, and rehearses a set of tools to address unfolding relations in spatial and non-spatial contexts. She rejects the righteousness of manifestos and certainty of ideologies, urging ways of thinking better attuned to complexity and ambiguity.

Keller Easterling, architect, theorist, writer and Professor at Yale University School of Architecture, discusses her new book, Medium Design, with Hettie O’Brien. In this conversation she expounds on the ideas around no new master plans or right answers, tying together concepts from her previous book Extrastatecraft. Easterling asserts, “Culture is good at pointing to things and calling their name but not so good at describing the relationships between things or the repertoires they enact.”

British architectural historian Gavin Stamp has died at age 69

2018-01-02T14:21:00-05:00

Gavin Stamp, the architectural historian, who has died aged 69, was “Piloti” who wrote the “Nooks and Corners” column in Private Eye magazine; a television presenter of great charm and humour; a conservationist who personally saved one of the finest Arts and Crafts buildings in London; a photographer, draughtsman and writer of prodigious talent.

The architecture community lost historian, writer and broadcaster Gavin Stamp on December 30 2017 due to prostate cancer. Stamp had an immense impact on British architecture and authored several important architectural history books. He was also a television series presenter, co-founder of the Twentieth Century Society, and a key player in the Victorian Society.

Here are some noteworthy social-media tributes:

Christopher Gray, wry architecture author/researcher, dies at age 66

2017-03-14T12:48:00-04:00

Rooting himself less in a strictly academic tradition and more in an observed, on-the-street context, architecture author and researcher Christopher Gray catalogued what he considered to be beautiful and surprising for The New York Times from 1987 to 2014 in his "Streetscapes" column. He also started a kind of architectural detective business known as the Office for Metropolitan History in 1975, which would research the history, deeds, old photographs and any other paperwork connected with a particular building in the days before the instant compendium of the internet. His work was often used to add depth and context to the work of other architects/critics including Robert A.M. Stern, who The New York Times quoted as saying about Gray that he "was generous with his time and always willing to share what seemed like his almost infinite knowledge of the city’s architectural and social history.” Gray, who died Friday at age 66 from complications due to pneumonia, leaves behind over 1,40...

For sale: futurologist JG Ballard's old home. In need of modernisation

2011-07-12T18:00:01-04:00

JG Ballard's rather drab semi-detached home in Shepperton is inextricably linked with the life of one of post-war fiction's greatest talents. Many of the country's best writers, often Ballard's disciples, visited the author during the 49 years that he lived in this sleepy suburb, where he crafted the dystopian thrillers Crash and Cocaine Nights.