Archinect - News

The Corner of Lovecraft and Ballard

2017-06-20T17:22:00-04:00

For Lovecraft, the ubiquitous angle between two walls is a dark gateway to the screaming abyss of the outer cosmos; for Ballard, it’s an entry point to our own anxious psyche.

H.P. Lovecraft and J.G. Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, and both made the humble corner into a place of nightmares. Will Wiles delves into the malign interiors of their imagined worlds and the secret history of the spaces where walls meet.

Book Review: Katrina Palmer's "End Matter"

2015-06-09T20:02:00-04:00

On September 2, 1666, a fire began in a bakery on Pudding Lane in London. By the next day, the flames had fanned out north and west, engulfing much of the city’s medieval center. The fire, later knowns as the Great Fire of London, destroyed much of the old cathedral of St. Paul as well as the overcrowded, narrow streets that surrounded it. In the aftermath of the fire, a period of social unrest was followed by a large-scale reconstruction, helmed by the noted architect Sir Christopher Wren. He built a new cathedral in the English Baroque style and supervised, to some extent, the city’s larger reconstruction. Today, St. Paul’s Cathedral and much of the city’s core owes its appearance in part to Wren’s preference for a particular variety of white, soft stone hewed on the Isle of Portland. The restitution of London spurred the industrial development of Portland’s quarries. For every monument that rose up, such as the looming Doric column that memorialized the fire itself, a hole was e...

CITY OF HUMAN, CITY OF MACHINE

2013-08-21T17:16:00-04:00

The most distinctive trait of the machine city is the lack of human beings. Other animals live within its limits. Not the rats and pigeons of human cities—the scavengers feeding on our remnants—but animals that can thrive in such particular conditions: algae on the water-cooling ponds, lichen and moss on the unadorned walls, flowering plants within the dirt that invariably builds up along the edges of the roadways and in the cracks of the buildings, and, of course, the insects that come to feed.

THE MACHINES BUILT THEIR OWN CITY, FULL OF SPACES FOR THEIR SECRET PASSIONS. AN ARCHITECTURAL FICTION.

By Adam Rothstein. Read the full story on OMNI REBOOT.

Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria, And 3-D Printers

2013-05-08T12:43:00-04:00

*This screed is awesomely entertaining and full of cool links, even though it’s almost entirely implausible..There’s also the occasional built-from-scratch Brasilia. So, some people might build a city like this in some central-planned, high-tech rush, before realizing that urban drones, bacteria, and 3DPrinters are fated to become as old-fashioned and pokey as swoopy, Space Age Brasilia is right now. - Bruce Sterling

As part of the Futurist Forum series, Chris Arkenberg composed some vignettes, suggestive of how urban architecture(s) could transform from than the rigid construction methodologies of today, the result being that "Architecture will lose its formal rigidity, softening and flexing and getting closer to the life we see in plants".

h/t Bruce Sterling here