Archinect - News

Michael Kimmelman on Public Squares

2016-04-01T14:40:00-04:00

Squares have defined urban living since the dawn of democracy, from which they are inseparable. [...] I don’t think it’s coincidental that early in 2011 the Egyptian revolution centered around Tahrir Square, or that the Occupy Movement later that same year, partly inspired by the Arab Spring, expressed itself by taking over squares like Taksim in Istanbul, the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, and Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan.

Editor's Picks #408

2015-03-16T11:50:00-04:00

Nicholas Korody profiled the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). jla-x was excited as has "been looking for a way to get involved with something like this".

News

- The world lost visionary Frei Otto and his death moved up the announcement of his winning the 2015 Pritzker Prize. Plus, the renowned Michael Graves died and his firm promised to "continue to honor Michael’s humanistic design philosophy".

While EKE thought Otto was "a spectacular choice. Bravo.", Eric Chavkin noted "Frei Otto's work inspired Glen Small's BIOMORPHIC BIOSPHERE and much of early SCI_Arc student work". RJ Magoon also opined "No matter your opinion on the man or his work, it's hard to deny Graves' enormous influence on the practice and education in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century".

Ayesha Ghosh reported in from the first of the Architectural League of New York 2015 Emerging Voices lecture series, with firms Aranda\Lasch and MANUEL CERVANTES CESPEDES / CC ARQUITECTOS. There Aranda claimed "we like th...

“Serra Gate” salutes to Taksim Square protests in Istanbul, will tour city next year

2014-11-24T18:37:00-05:00

Nodding to the Taksim Square political protests in May 2013, the Serra Gate installation by Istanbul practice GAD Architecture artistically interprets and also invites passers-by to examine the influence of urban interventions in the public realm. Serra Gate, which was inspired by the large-scale sculptures of artist Richard Serra, highlights how protesters created makeshift living spaces inside the park and the streets...

Learn more about the project on Bustler.

An urbanist's guide to Istanbul: ‘We live in a giant construction site’

2014-07-21T13:08:00-04:00

Istanbul is the city of transformation and contradiction. As an urbanist, I am trying to keep record and make sense of this transformation and am especially interested in its winners and losers. At the moment we live in a giant construction site, where skyscrapers, mega projects and urban renewal projects are taking place all around. There is a gold rush to real-estate development.

Does America Need a Tahrir Square?

2014-04-17T18:24:00-04:00

Maidan Square in Kiev. Taksim Square in Istanbul. Tahrir Square in Cairo. Recent democratic movements around the globe have risen, or crashed and burned, on the hard pavement of vast urban public squares. [...] But too few observers have considered the significance of the empty public spaces themselves. [...] If public squares are essential to democracy, is their relative absence in modern American life bad for our democracy—or a sign that we’re not as democratic as we imagine?

Gezi Park: Architecture and the Aestheticization of Politics

2014-02-14T13:39:00-05:00

Our task — and we should well speak as architects — must be making the invisible visible, uncovering and retracing the concealed limits of the city. We must construct barriers and counter-spaces within and against the processes that tame and dissolve the crucial loci of democracy.

Within a few years, rapidly growing Istanbul will overtake London and Moscow as Europe’s largest metropolis. Not coincidentally, Turkey is undergoing a profound shift toward privatization, as seen in the government's plan to redevelop Taksim Gezi Park into a shopping mall with a nostalgic Ottoman facade. On Places, architect Pedro Levi Bismarck examines the plan as a reflection of a larger democratic crisis, following Siegfried Kracauer’s observation: “Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself.”

Gezi Park Monument by Studio Vural

2013-07-22T18:56:00-04:00

New York-based Turkish architect Selim Vural, founder of architecture and interior design firm Studio Vural, has shared with us his design for a Gezi Park Monument. The memorial commemorates the recent protests on Istanbul's Taksim Square against the planned construction of a shopping mall in place of the historic Gezi Park — which sparked the nationwide 2013 protests in Turkey (previously on Archinect).

Project Description from Selim Vural:

Beyond commemorating important events, monuments come to being through significant ideas. Their bodies are usually aesthetic, dynamic, communicative and distinctive yet beyond all, they are clear embodiments of their generative ideas.

It is also significant that all monuments of liberty in history are made of or derived from female figures. There is a soft power, an illuminated fearlessness in their stance, which is not evident in the singularly powerful male figures. On the one hand they are complex, conflicting, and plural and on th...