Archinect - News

How Canadian designer Eric McMillan redefined the way we play through the Ontario Place Children's Village

2019-08-01T19:33:00-04:00

Watching the way children used his equipment, often in ways he could never have anticipated, made him more and more certain: play wasn’t a frivolous distraction from learning, but something essential to childhood and indeed humanity. [...] According to his design philosophy, each park wasn’t just a place to jump on a shockingly large air mattress. It was “a place where a child can ask questions of what it means to be human.”

Journalist Nicholas Hune-Brown profiles Canadian designer Eric McMillan, who started out his career as an exhibition designer and was then thrown into the spotlight after he designed the Ontario Place Children's Village in Toronto. Suddenly becoming the expert on children's design, McMillan incorporated elements that aimed to help kids learn through play — which includes helping create the world's first ball pit.

In the piece, McMillan looks back on those years — from the thought process behind the iconic Toronto playground, to how changing attitudes towards playgrounds led to the end of those glory years, to what he thinks should be done with the now-defunct site.

“The key was to build things that sparked interaction, between kids and the equipment, but especially between the kids themselves,” Hune-Brown writes in the piece.

"Harry Potter effect": Christopher Hawthorne on America's Neo-Neo Gothic college architecture trend

2017-12-21T14:52:00-05:00

So what does the taste for Hogwarts-style dormitories say about the Yale or the USC of 2017? It says that the primary job of residential architecture on campus is to provide a sense of consistency and familiarity for donors and incoming students alike — to soften the edges of the college experience.

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne looks back at 2017's resurgence of Neo Gothic and Neo-Gothic-ish college architecture and compares the newly completed USC Village and Yale residential complexes with architectural references of the manifestation of nostalgic Anglophilia, the wizard school Hogwarts, as found in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

"High school graduates on their way to college are hardly responsible for the architecture they find there, of course," Hawthorne writes. "Yale, USC and other wealthy and ambitious schools seem to be counting on a kind of double nostalgia, on the hope that this revival of the Gothic Revival will appeal both to incoming students and to wealthier alumni, who after all are the ones paying for and often helping dictate the architectural sensibility of new campus buildings."

14 to 1: Post-Katrina Architecture by the Numbers

2016-07-13T15:44:00-04:00

The thousands of new old houses in New Orleans reveal the ethos of a people in a place nearly destroyed. New Orleanians have embraced their city’s architectural heritage as they’ve rebuilt for an uncertain future.

What does post-Katrina architecture look like in New Orleans? And what does it reveal about its society? In their survey in Places, Richard Campanella and Cassidy Rosen discover that historical styles are 14 times more popular than contemporary styles in the rebuilt city, despite the focus of media coverage on experimental projects like Make It Right. The retro revival pays homage to 19th-century New Orleans and a past that has become both a refuge from the present and a cicerone to the future.

Protecting our views is simple – in architecture, new must mean better

2014-03-14T14:38:00-04:00

There is an argument, however, that view anxiety is just indulgent, naive sentiment. Nostalgia, after all, was originally defined as an illness. The English may have invented the idea of the picturesque, which gives us a special attachment to an 18th-century notion of visual delight. [...] And what exactly is the difference between the hated wind turbine [...] and the delightful 18th-century windmills that John Constable painted? His were industrial scenes. Constable was a modern man.

Chicago Past

2012-04-12T12:42:00-04:00

Chicago Past collects large photos of historic Chicago.

This is a great tumblr blog to follow if you're feeling Chi-town nostalgic.

Is Nostalgia Dead? Retro-Futurism, Architecture & Film

2011-07-28T19:18:01-04:00

There is a certain quality about the 60s dream of the future that strikes a chord in everyone's heart. The melancholy and beauty of these dreamlike creations have survived not only in architecture, but also in fashion, product design and - most vividly so - in cinema. It is through cinema that the unique feel of this nostalgic breed of buildings could be experienced with the most powerful effect.

Tom Mallory, of our good friends over at OpenBuildings.com, refuses in an article on Huffpost to say 'goodbye' to retro-futurism and explains why it makes us feel so warm and fuzzy inside.