Archinect - News

An art critic's soul-sucking experience visiting several “Instagram Museums”

2018-09-27T19:06:00-04:00

The central disappointment of these spaces is not that they are so narcissistic, but rather that they seem to have such a low view of the people who visit them. Observing a work of art or climbing a mountain actually invites us to create meaning in our lives. But in these spaces, the idea of “interacting” with the world is made so slickly transactional that our role is hugely diminished. Stalking through the colorful hallways of New York’s “experiences,” I felt like a shell of a person.

In this snarky piece, New York Times critic-at-large Amanda Hess recounts what it was like visiting as many of these hyped-up Instagrammable "museums" that have popped up around the U.S. in recent years.

“What began as a kicky story idea became a masochistic march through voids of meaning. I found myself sleepwalking through them, fantasizing about going to a real museum. Or watching television. Or being on Twitter,” Hess writes.

Projects Making Headlines in 2017

2017-12-28T11:00:00-05:00

2017 saw a multitude of new projects from proposal to completion. A floating roof for Apple, San Francisco's tallest building, semi-transparent "Concrete"... Here are the 14 most attention grabbing projects of 2017, in case you missed the headlines.

A “hyper-democratic” housing complex in Copenhagen combines community input with contextual design

Krøyers Plads, a five-story housing project in the center of Copenhagen, was completed by Danish architects Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects and COBE. The building was designed with site-specific considerations and neighborhood input.

Bjarke Ingels compares the shape of the just-opened Tirpitz Bunker Museum to a freshly sliced hot potato

The Tirpitz Museum saw the completion of its new design by Bjarke Ingels. The site is an uncompleted bunker turned museum, which now houses exhibitions in its underground spaces.

Perfectionists versus contractors: the details of building the Apple Campus

Imagine building Apple's own campus for them. If archi...

“The world is an Instagram ad” — how the social media app is influencing consumption of art and culture

2017-08-11T17:13:00-04:00

Spaces like the Museum of Ice Cream and the Paul Smith Pink Wall offer a perfect setting for a highly shareable image—and that’s it. What happens to art, or travel, or the outside world in general when taking a photograph becomes an experience itself? As photo-driven social networks continue to grow more powerful, they are both transforming boutique economies and exercising visual influence over our modern day cuisine, travel destinations, clothing labels, and makeup trends.

From museums to music festivals to that cool-looking, brightly colored wall there, this article looks into how image-driven social media like Instagram is increasingly changing the way people are consuming art and culture in practically identical ways.

In one interesting part of the article:

“...these critics’ concerns get to the heart of larger questions that arise when a network of 700 million monthly active users congeals into one vaguely unified, often-sponsored aesthetic. ‘Instagram is one of many arenas where professionalization, or the democratization of professionalization, is playing itself out in a very very visible way,’ [CUNY Professor Lev] Manovich said. His most recent project analyzes the brightness, saturation, and hue of Instagram photos from 81 separate cities, and he has found they’re becoming more similar. ‘We have this suggestion that visual variability is decreasing.’ The whole world is starting to look like an Instagram ad, and we are all willing participants....

Architecture as Child's Play

2013-05-01T19:31:00-04:00

At university, students from other courses felt that we in architecture weren’t really studying at all; to them the studio seemed like some kind of uber-kindergarten, legitimated for academic credit.... The architecture profession seemed from the outside, and perhaps even to us on the inside, to promise an idyllic eternal childhood of balsa and glue and gee-whiz drawings on computers.

On Places, Naomi Stead discusses the popular conception of architecture as a kind of "child's play."

What do dollhouses and architectural models have in common? Why should we care about Lego Architecture and Architect Barbie and the romantic depiction of architects in Hollywood movies?

She concludes: "If the profession of architecture is constructed from the outside as an escapist daydream, available for the idle fantasizing and wish-fulfillment of all, then this leaves the whole profession operating inside a doll’s house: idyllic, hermetic and controlled, but largely powerless to act in the actual world."