Archinect - News

MoMA exhibition on 20th-century Latin American design is a 'gem' says Michael Kimmelman

2024-04-05T13:31:00-04:00

The show is a gem. It focuses on domestic design from six countries (Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela), produced between 1940 and 1980. Latin America had entered a period of transformation, industrial expansion and creativity. Across the region, design was becoming institutionalized as a profession, opening up new avenues, especially for women.

Critic Michael Kimmelman has heaped praise on the 'Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980' MoMA exhibition in a new piece for The New York Times. As we reported in December of last year, the show looks at the growth of modernism through an industrial and entrepreneurial lens, using a selection of examples from well-known and revered architects and designers such as Joaquim Tenreiro, Lina Bo Bardi, and Oscar Niemeyer.

"The role that women and immigrants played in shaping professional design and developing a national design vocabulary in Latin America will be emphasized, including the work of designers such as Clara Porset in Mexico, Cornelis Zitman in Venezuela, and Susi Aczel in Argentina," MoMA said about their exhibition at the time.

Review of MONU #30 - Late Life Urbanism

2019-06-17T18:03:00-04:00

I first came across MONU while searching for relevant literature for my master’s thesis on participation in urban planning. Every issue of the biannual magazine covers a unique topic and issue #30 is as the title suggests, about urbanism in relation to our later years in life. The definition of urbanism here is broad, and the magazine includes topics from anthropology and art to architecture.

These topics are presented through a curation of texts and images, produced by a wide range of contributors and experts in the field. This diversity is put together in a collage-like manner, where each part maintains its own identity through a distinct typeface and graphical organization. The risk of clutter is prevented, simply by keeping a coherency in page numbering and margin size.

The opening text of the magazine is an interview by MONU founder Bernd Upmeyer with professor Deane Alan Simpson, focusing on his research of the "young-old". This is part of a classification that appears throu...

Toward a Concrete Utopia reviewed

2019-03-11T15:03:00-04:00

The North American layman tends to consider the Eastern bloc as a homogenous chunk of misery. It falls to the curators then to differentiate the USSR from Yugoslavia, and they are not off to a good start. Simultaneously, they are obliged to titillate concrete-loving Instagrammers with images of Brutalist hulks. Only once these two aims are achieved can they pose the salient question: does Yugoslav architecture merit more study than a social media scroll?

In his piece for The Observer, George Grylls reviews MoMA's highly publicized exhibition, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, which recently came to a close in New York.

Miodrag Živković, Monument to the Battle of Sutjeska, 1965-71, Tjentište, Bosnia and Herzegovina. View of the western exposure. Photo: Valentin Jeck, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017.

"In truth, the exhibition has been teasing us for its big finale," Grylls writes. "And just when you were about to ask for your money back, you get what you came for – spomeniki, lumbering onto stage like the Rolling Stones dutifully returning for an obligatory encore."

Is the Embr a true personal HVAC system?

2018-10-25T13:49:00-04:00

Five years ago we reported on a device invented by a group of students at MIT. This device, originally called "Wristify", was a small bracelet designed to heat or cool the wearer to achieve customized comfort, regardless of the surrounding environment. Today, after a few years of R&D, and with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, we have Embr, the newly designed and branded "Thermostat For Your Body".

The original "Wristify" prototype from MIT

The new hardware looks like a (very) large, faceless watch. The unit itself is an aluminum heat sink with a carved fingerprint-like series of waves on the outer surface, topped with a thin button/light bar indicating the current heating/cooling status. The strap is a steel mesh bracelet, very similar to Apple's Milanese Loop watch band (or a less expensive knockoff).

I've been trying out a review model for a few weeks, mostly testing out the cooling features since I live in LA. I've also given the heating feature a few opportunities t...

Michael Kimmelman in praise of NYC's new garage-and-salt-shed complex: "Best examples of new public architecture in the city"

2015-12-22T14:14:00-05:00

After years of noisy protests, the New York City Department of Sanitation’s new garage-and-salt-shed complex has opened in Hudson Square, on the northern edge of TriBeCa. [...] The garage and shed have ended up being not just two of the best examples of new public architecture in the city but a boon to the neighborhood, whether the wealthy neighbors have come around to it or not. I can’t think of a better public sculpture to land in New York than the shed.

A closer look at the current exhibition "The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley"

2015-04-23T13:33:00-04:00

“The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley,” an exhibition at the Center for Architecture, shows how modern landscapes often make a better case for modernism than the architecture itself. Over a span of 60 years, Kiley (1912-2004), a founding father of modern landscape design, worked for the best architects around, among them Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He was fully versed in architecture’s modernist strategies and overriding focus on form and abstraction.

The Year 2014 in Architectural Activism

2014-12-29T10:00:00-05:00

Let's admit it, we architects much too often get lost in narcissistic own-horn-tooting, passionate ego-inflating, disillusioned navel-gazing, vile shit-flinging or simply in the mundane day-to-day operations for the paying clientele.

But all is not completely lost thanks to the tireless work and burning passion of individuals and groups around the world seeking the greater good, putting humanity first, improving this planet one initiative at a time.

Topics we had the honor of reporting about on Archinect & Bustler this year ranged from the Israel-Gaza conflict, Syrian refugee crisis, Ukrainian revolution, climate change, historic preservation, #folkmoma, abortion clinics and affordable housing all the way to still very recent issues like the Ebola epidemic and Ferguson protests.

Following is my personal (and hopelessly incomplete) list of noteworthy and much-discussed examples of architectural activism on Archinect & Bustler in 2014:

Exhibition Explores the Design of Protest Movements...

Architecture Won’t Save the World: “Tactical Urbanisms” at MoMA (...or will it?)

2014-11-26T14:18:00-05:00

“Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities” is, at least nominally, about urbanism and architecture. [...] The problems, not the solutions, presented in “Uneven Growth” are very real. Before Gadanho and his teams of architects, planners, and researchers can suggest productive solutions, they would do well to acknowledge that their fellow practitioners hold responsibility for the very state of urban affairs they seek to remedy.

Previously: MoMA's “Uneven Growth” case studies conclude with exhibition this month

Three Lost Days at the Biggest Architecture Show in the World

2014-08-19T15:14:00-04:00

Architecture’s largest and most public event needs to do more than just go through the motions. The Biennale, unfortunately, seemed to be driven not by passion or a desire to communicate, but by a sense of obligation. [...] Perhaps an ornamental city is simply an ill-omened venue for an event celebrating the most functional of arts. Venice may always be trapped in the past, but the Biennale should be at the forefront of a conversation about architecture’s future.

Archinect test drives FiftyThree's Pencil and Paper app for iPad

2014-07-25T10:57:00-04:00

Ever since I spotted FiftyThree's beautifully designed iPad pen, aptly called “Pencil”, I couldn't wait to get my hands on one (like literally).

Made by the creators of the award-winning “Paper” drawing and sketching app for the iPad, Pencil is promised to be “the most natural and expressive tool for getting ideas on Paper.” Archinect reached out to FiftyThree, and a few days later, we received a Pencil in the mail – pretty packaging and all – for a test drive.

The first impression is thoroughly impressive: my Pencil's body is milled from a solid piece of premium-grade walnut (there's also a "Graphite" model sporting a handsome seamless brushed aluminum body) with an eraser tip on one end and a tapered rubber-coated tip on the other end. No cheap plastic here, no buttons to push, no distracting LED diodes flashing. Inspired by the iconic form and dimensions of the carpenter pencil, the design and engineering team of Pencil really set out to turn a cutting-edge high-tech device into a ...

Exhibition Review: 'Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Paintings'

2014-07-10T12:57:00-04:00

"Buildings in paintings have too often been viewed as background or as space fillers which play a passive or at best supporting role, propping up the figures that carry the main message of the picture. By looking afresh at buildings within paintings, treating them as active protagonists, it becomes clear that they performed a series of crucial roles."

Six British "Hi-Tech" architects

2014-02-19T13:38:00-05:00

What they wanted to do was a building which you could prefabricate. It wouldn't weigh much, it would be quick, distinctly hi-tech...Nick Grimshaw in particular became a kind of brand ambassador for Britain.

Hugh Pearman, reviews the new RIBA exhibit The Brits Who Built The Modern World, 1950-2012. The exhibit which celebrates the work of Sir Michael Hopkins, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Lord (Norman) Foster, Lady Patricia Hopkins, Lord (Richard) Rogers and Sir Terry Farrell, opened February 13th and runs through May 27.

Sensing Spaces indulges architecture's vaulting ambition

2014-01-21T13:59:00-05:00

Architecture is usually the product of multiple, conflicting constraints, so how does it fare in the context of a gallery? Shielded from the realities of climate and context, client and user, planning and building regs, what of architecture is left? Liberated from the obligations and contingencies of a real building, can it jump free and take on a greater sensory power – or is it hollowed of all meaning and left to fall flat?

"The results in the Sensing Spaces exhibition lie somewhere between these two camps."

A new L.A. identity takes shape in 2013 as city embraces urban life

2014-01-02T20:01:00-05:00

Notes on the Year: This year Los Angeles entered fresh civic territory as a range of initiatives across the city helped fuel an urban reawakening.

LA Times' Christopher Hawthorne calls MOCA's revamped architecture show "a model of insularity"

2013-07-01T17:26:00-04:00

Now that the exhibition has opened at the museum's Geffen Contemporary branch in Little Tokyo, where it will limp along through the middle of September as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents series, it's clear that it is the product of an architectural ruling class in Los Angeles that is not so much dysfunctional as increasingly insular.

Architecture in 2012: review of the year in buildings

2012-12-18T15:06:00-05:00

In a year that saw severe funding cuts to schools, libraries and arts buildings and the delivery of new housing rattling along at its lowest level since records began in the Twenties, there weren’t too many rays of light for British architecture. And yet one, at least, shone brightly.

MONU #14 Review: Editing Urbanism by Brendan Cormier

2011-05-23T04:55:35-04:00

On a more general note, I feel it necessary to stress the valuable role that MONU has played in the past few years, specifically for the architecture and urbanism community. As the biggest (to my knowledge) indie publication focused explicitly on urbanism, MONU has provided a voice for many emerging young professionals — a chance to be published and have their ideas heard in print format.

The latest issue of MONU Magazine — an independent biannual publication devoted to writings on urbanism — has hit newsstands. Always theme-based, this particular issue centres on the idea of ‘Editing Urbanism’.

When the term was first raised in MONU’s call for proposals, I immediately thought of the kind of editing that involved addition — small-scale, clandestine changes to the urban environment that often get reported about on The Pop-Up City. Instead much of the focus on ‘Urban Editing’ is not about addition but about what not to delete — or in more familiar terms, preservation, renovation and adaptive re-use.

Along these lines, the issue features an interview with UNION3 — a collective of architects devoted to preservation projects in Rotterdam (perhaps the least preservation-oriented city in Europe), a look at OMA’s UNESCO-busting exhibit CRONOCAOS, and STAR’s own manifesto against the preservation crusade that is increasingly occupying a significant portion of t...

In the School Blogs: A SCI-Arc Review Review

2011-04-21T13:55:12-04:00

Our research studio prof Jason Payne invited us to the final review of his studio at “crosstown rival” SCI-Arc last week, and as the discussion turned out to be pretty interesting I thought I’d relate some of it here.

Design + Build reviews the new Archinect website

2011-04-14T15:22:00-04:00

Overall - this is a triumph for Archinect - a redesign that serves it's users and, in my opinion, sets a new bar for the design and functionality of architecture related blogs.

We are totally blushing over the glowing review we got from the wonderful Design + Build blog, "a site trying to map where the worlds of Architecture and Visual Design meet and collide." Thanks! And thanks to all of the other people who have sent us feedback. We're still working out a LOT of little bugs. We really appreciate your patience.