Archinect - News

Your Sea Wall Won't Save You

2018-03-29T09:21:00-04:00

Concepts like “making room for the river,” which works well in the Netherlands, can mean mass evictions in the Global South. Too often, the rhetoric of climate adaptation is doublespeak for the displacement of poor communities, and an alibi for unsustainable growth.

As coastal megacities adapt to climate change, they often bring in outside planning experts who push highly engineered, technocratic resilience programs. Lizzie Yarina looks at how this trend is affecting local communities in Bangkok, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Jakarta, and argues that "resilience is not fundamentally a technical question. It is social and political. Planners and designers must recognize and negotiate the diverse "resilience imaginaries" across the cities in which they are needed."

Mexico Earthquake reminds that California architecture is vulnerable, with 1,500 at-risk buildings in LA

2017-09-26T13:03:00-04:00

After the Sylmar quake, officials quickly updated building requirements to add more steel reinforcement to new concrete buildings. But there was no systematic effort by many governments around the world to address the defect in existing concrete buildings.

California has numerous concrete buildings at risk of collapsing during a serious earthquake. The city of Los Angeles estimates having over 1500 buildings at risk. Structural engineers recommend accelerating the deadline for retrofit requirement.

Investing in risk: How the Gherkin became a British icon

2013-10-23T20:50:00-04:00

Architecture is stuck between past and future -- years of anticipatory planning designs a structure that, once constructed, is stuck referring to all that came before. A building can't actually predict the future, although it seems like the best ones always run the risk of trying. Jonathan Massey's essay "Risk Design", perceives architecture as a mediator and optimizer of risks, using Foster + Partner's fantastically phallic skyliner in London's financial district, known as the "Gherkin", as a case study. Massey turns the Gherkin inside out, mapping details of its design onto local and global concerns such as terrorism and global warming, in an attempt to understand how architecture negotiates risks, and whether it succeeds. That the Gherkin's major tenant, Swiss Re, is a reinsurance company adds no small irony to his study.

Archinect is proud to feature Massey's piece in full, in line with our ongoing investigation of architectural accountability. "Risk Design" was originally ...