Archinect - News

Paulette Singley helps us understand 'How to Read Architecture'

2020-03-06T12:58:00-05:00

On this episode of Archinect Sessions Donna, Ken and I are joined by Paulette Singley. Paulette is a respected architectural historian, educator and author. Her writing and editing expands beyond the world of architecture, looking at connections within the culinary arts and film. In today's conversation we’re focusing on her latest book "How to Read Architecture: An Introduction to Interpreting the Built Environment,” a must read for architecture students, architects, designers and admirers of the built world.

The book's publisher, Routledge, describes the book as exploring three essential ways to help understand architecture: reading a building from the outside-in, from the inside-out, and from the position of out-and-out, or formal, architecture.

Consistent with Singley's approach to looking at architecture from outside of the traditional compartmentalization, this book coalesces related fields of interior design, landscape design, and building design, exploring concepts of ter...

Authorship dispute erupts over Europe's tallest skyscraper in St. Petersburg

2018-08-08T15:57:00-04:00

A row has broken out between former RMJM international group design director Tony Kettle and a Russian architect over who designed Europe’s new tallest building – an 87-storey skyscraper near St Petersburg. Staff at Moscow-based firm Gorproject have accused Scottish practice The Kettle Collective of trying to claim ‘authorship’ over energy giant Gazprom’s mammoth tower, currently nearing completion on the Gulf of Finland.

As Europe's tallest skyscraper nears completion, a dispute has erupted over the authorship of the completed project. The Moscow-based firm Gorproject claims design authorship over the Lakhta Center, while Tony Kettle claims the delivered design is his concept while working at RMJM. Letters on the issue were sent to the RIBA, the RIAS, and the Union of Architects of Russia. A statement from the client, Gazprom, asserts the design was RMJM’s original 2011 concept with Tony Kettle as design director.

The quiet legacy of the late architect Gin Wong, who helped shape L.A.'s postwar cityscape

2017-09-11T19:43:00-04:00

In other ways — in almost every other way — Wong’s career was a study in complexity. Political and ethnic complexity, mostly. And the complicated question of credit in architecture: Who gets it, who doesn’t and who has the authority to hand it out. [...] If not for the persistence of that narrative, Gin Wong’s contribution to postwar L.A. would be far better understood. It’s that simple.

In a recent column, Christopher Hawthorne highlights the quiet legacy of architect Gin Wong, who passed away September 1 at the age of 94. Wong worked as director of design for William Pereira in the 1960s before opening his own firm in 1973. Some of his projects include LAX's original design in the 1950s, the swooping Union 76 gas station in Beverly Hills, the ARCO Tower, and the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, to name a few. In stories like Wong's, Hawthorne questions the “tricky conversation of authorship, which remains stunted in architecture”.

What better sparring partner than a spouse?

2013-06-20T17:04:00-04:00

Back in the real world, the married-partner model has proved powerful, not because it fosters a homey atmosphere of concord and compromise but because it allows two loyal but opinionated people, with compatible levels of obsessiveness and drive, to feed off each other’s energies

In the latest issue, Justin Davidson uses the recent discussion regarding Denise Scott Brown's Pritzker Prize or lack thereof, to examine the myth of the solitary auteur and the growing reality of the married-partner model.