Archinect - News

Archinect rounds up critical reactions to Koolhaas' biennale

2014-06-19T11:42:00-04:00

This year's Venice Biennale of Architecture, curated by Rem Koolhaas, officially opened on June 7, under the theme "Fundamentals". The deluge of criticism and reporting coming out of the Biennale will surely continue until it closes November 23, but so far reactions from the architectural journalism community seem pretty consistent. Critics seem at once relieved that the biennale is not given away to preening and doting upon architectural personalities, but instead focused on "architecture, not architects", as per Koolhaas' design. The flip-side of this could be seen as replacing objects of starchitectural value with a too-safe generalism, imbued with the self-importance of Koolhaas' cult of personality. Responses seem largely concerned with interpreting the man at the same time as his Biennale, rather than investigating the interplay of national pavilions' personalities under a unifying theme. But we've got many months to go, and this is only the beginning.

But with the sheer mass o...

It is a euphemistic urbanism and overlay

2012-07-11T21:14:00-04:00

In view of recent events, I have found myself asking whether it is a good thing to make a piece of city where rioting is impossible. The Olympic Park, even in legacy mode, seems to be built for this purpose.

Kieran Long revisits Olympic Park a year later and looks ahead to it's “legacy”. Long finds that all the "regeneration" and "overlay" while positivist and successful in providing amenities is more a "carpet of statistical generalisations and demographic assessments" and clarifies something about how the British (ed. and I might suggest society at large in the 21st century attempts) to make cities.

The ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower

2011-12-13T19:58:00-05:00

The name of the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower is a real mouthful, a hybrid title for a mongrel artwork. The contorted steel “sculpture-cum-tower-cum-engineering feat,” in the inelegant phrase of Tate director Nicholas Serota, is the totem of our Olympic games, rising more than 375 feet out of the central plaza of the park, on former light industrial land equidistant between Stratford and Hackney Wick in east London.

Bye bye to Eighties architecture?

2011-08-31T12:28:02-04:00

Designed by developer/architect Ian Pollard, it's a brash, grandiose office building on Queenstown Road facing Battersea Park that was completed in 1987... In short, it's an architectural dog's dinner, one of a very few buildings that can actually make me laugh out loud on the rare occasion I pass it on the bus.