Archinect - News

With Trump's Presidency dawning, the final Jane Jacobs work "Dark Age Ahead" wins new relevancy

2016-12-27T18:12:00-05:00

At a time when pundits and political scientists were celebrating the end of history, pointing to an emerging Democratic majority and extolling the virtues of a flat world of globalization, she ominously predicted a coming age of urban crisis, mass amnesia, and populist backlash in her final work, Dark Age Ahead. Eerily prescient as always, rereading the 2005 book today serves as a survivors’ guide to the Age of Trump.

"Jacobs outlines an increasing distrust of politicians and politics, a burgeoning new urban crisis in cities, worsening environmental degradation, entrenched segregation, and an “enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class” as signals and symptoms of a coming Dark Age."

Olafur Eliasson: "The vast majority of architects are just filling up our society with trash"

2016-04-11T18:09:00-04:00

He seems hungry for a serious discussion on everything from the refugee crisis – “a really bad combination of European arrogance and North African ignorance” – to the state of contemporary architecture – “the vast majority of architects are just filling up our society with trash” – and has a habit of speaking about his art in overwhelmingly conceptual terms. “Are we consumers of space?” he asks himself at one point. “Or are we in fact producers of space?”

Sprawl isn't just bad for cities – it's bad for friendships too

2015-10-29T12:50:00-04:00

Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. [...] in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built. [...] We do not encounter one another in cars. We grind along together anonymously, often in misery.

Frei Otto: "What does society really need?"

2015-05-14T14:41:00-04:00

The Pritzker Architecture Prize, undoubtedly the most prestigious architecture award in the world, is having its ceremony in Miami this week. [...] Otto often questioned how his work could benefit mankind. When speaking with Icon magazine in 2005, he was critical of grandiose structures such as Buckminster Fuller’s vision of an enormous dome over Manhattan, asking to himself: “What does society really need?”

Previously: Frei Otto wins 2015 Pritzker Prize

Challenging the space-age Manifest Destiny narrative, as Elon Musk vies to move humans to Mars

2015-05-08T12:26:00-04:00

It’s a myth almost universally believed, that sits at the core of liberal technocratic thought, and has been embedded in practically every other work of speculative fiction for the last half century. You can sum it up like this: 'When we go into space, we will all magically become nice.'...It’s early days, but if we really want to create a progressive new world then issues like these should be at the hearts of our efforts from the very start.

The longtime space-age Manifest Destiny of humans inhabiting Mars and the prominently white, European male perspective that narrative perpetually emphasizes has become a bubbling multi-faceted discussion among science bloggers as Elon Musk's staunch ambitions to ultimately turn humans into a "multiplanet species" continue to develop. Stemming from that discussion, writer Martin Robbins of The Guardian contemplates whether or not humanity's eventual future on Mars can exist without the earthly issues of sexism and racism.

Being an architect is sexy, according to modern society

2015-02-25T23:08:00-05:00

Nothing screams commitment like something that is built on a concrete foundation and set in stone: literally. Go ahead, then. Design something that will last forever.

While people working in architecture, whether through practice or academia, can give insight into the reality of the field, how does broader modern society perceive architects and architecture as a career?

In one of the more amusing approaches to that topic, sexy has stood as one assumption, especially when it comes to dating or looking for an ideal partner. According to one cringe-worthy heteronormative list aptly titled "Top 10 Sexiest Jobs for Men" by higher-education online database CollegeAtlas.org, Architect ranked as number 1 -- accompanied by some oh-so-thoughtful commentary that is just comical gold (but not really). There's a list for women too, but Architect or anything closely related to the field didn't make the cut. Big surprise.

Quite similarly, Mary Balfour of a dating agency called Drawing Down the Moon conducted a survey in 2012/13 that asked men and women what jobs they considered the most attractive. Those results showed that men working as an Architect or Designer...

Can beautiful architecture inspire Americans to become good citizens?

2014-11-26T14:04:00-05:00

A hundred and some years ago, an aesthetic force called the City Beautiful movement professed the theory that grand public buildings, lovely civic palaces, could inspire Americans to become good citizens. [...] Since the 1960s, though, it seems as if great civic architecture has become an embarrassment. Politicians who love to cut ribbons find it hard to justify paying for beautiful on top of functional. The result is a style I call Sunbelt Stalinism [...].

For the sake of our cities, it's time to make town planning cool again

2014-11-10T14:33:00-05:00

While the cult of the star architect has soared over the decades and property developers have displaced bankers as the new super-rich, the figure of the local town planner has become comic shorthand for a certain kind of faceless, under-whelming dullard. [...] “Planning has become unpopular, disconnected from the public and increasingly beholden to the developer rather than the people it is meant to serve.”

A look at the results of the CANactions 2014 “User-generated Kyiv” competition

2014-07-10T14:27:00-04:00

Ukraine's largest architectural event CANactions held its 2014 ideas competition, whose theme was "User-generated Kyiv". Based on reinforcing the valuable idea that a city is shaped by its citizens, the competition sought architectural ideas to help Kiev further develop towards the ideals of creativity, peace, justice, and of course, happiness.

Here's a look at the three top-prize winning entries:

Pictured above: 1st prize: connecTABLE by Anna Dobrova, Dima Isaiev, Dasha Zaichenko,Daryna Bagachuk, Anna Kamushan (Vienna, Austria).

2nd prize: POP-UP KIEV by Polina Timofeeva, Galyna Tolkachova, Pavel Bartov (Perm, Russia).

3rd prize: Reload the symbols by Kateryna Bokatova and Frederic Vincent (Bordeaux, France).

Head over to Bustler for more details.

André Chiote illustrates the role of iconic buildings in the "urban collective memory"

2013-12-09T13:52:00-05:00

Rendered into clean lines and bold graphic hues, Oporto-based architect and illustrator André Chiote draws some of the world's most iconic contemporary structures designed by their equally iconic architects. He began developing this project by choosing specifically-programmed buildings that became cultural symbols eventually engrained into the "urban collective memory."

Even by only highlighting a particular detail, the building is still recognizable whether one remembers seeing it on TV, online, in print, or in person. The souvenir poster/advertisement-like quality of Chiote's illustrative style further emphasizes the popularity of these structures.

In his last approach, Chiote illustrated famous museums like Renzo Piano's addition to LACMA or the Mercedez-Benz Museum by UNStudio, among others.

Chiote continues exploring the role of these memorable buildings with "Sport's Buildings" -- many that have been seen in past Olympic Games. Here, he describes them as examples of "...

The Psychology of Online Comments

2013-10-25T15:59:00-04:00

the nastier the comments, the more polarized readers became about the contents of the article, a phenomenon they dubbed the “nasty effect.” But the nasty effect isn’t new, or unique to the Internet. Psychologists have long worried about the difference between face-to-face communication and more removed ways of talking—the letter, the telegraph, the phone. Without the traditional trappings of personal communication, like non-verbal cues, context, and tone, comments can become overly impersonal...

When it comes to economic mobility, place matters [Who knew!]

2013-07-24T12:44:00-04:00

Why does the layout of cities matter so much in mobility? Harvard's Raj Chetty says he and the other authors of the study were struck by the amount of variation in mobility across areas.

POST+CAPITALIST CITY 2#Work - Winning Projects

2012-11-12T15:31:00-05:00

Last month, we published the winners of the international ideas competition POST+CAPITALIST CITY, #1Shop. Today we are presenting the two winning projects of the competition's second edition, POST+CAPITALIST CITY, 2#Work, which called for proposals that re-imagine the concept of work, the way we produce, and a city with another system of working culture.

If you are interested in participating in the most current competition cycle of POST+CAPITALIST CITY, #3Live which launched last month, click here for more details. Submissions for #3Live are due by January 15, 2013 (early birds registration: December 1, 2012), and the results will be announced in mid-February on Bustler.

POST+CAPITALIST CITY 1#Shop - Winning Projects

2012-10-18T14:13:00-04:00

Two winning projects and one special mention have recently been announced in the first competition cycle of POST+CAPITALIST CITY, #1Shop. This international ideas competition called for proposals which re-think the concept of the shop, the way we consume, and a city with alternative shopping systems and shopping culture—from small interventions up to global concepts.

If you are interested in participating in the most current competition cycle of POST+CAPITALIST CITY, #3Live which launched earlier this week, click here for more details. Submissions for #3Live are due by January 15, 2013, and the results will be announced in mid-February on Bustler.

Separate and unequal: The neighborhood gap for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians in metropolitan America

2011-08-02T17:42:06-04:00

It’s an ongoing debate in American society whether class or race is a stronger bond. A new study from the US2010 Project shows that race is still more determinant than class when it comes to where you live. The study found that in almost every measurement, the affluent black or Hispanic American in a household earning more than $75,000 lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average white or Asian American living in a household earning under $40,000.