Archinect - News

On the mystery and magic appeal of LA's iconic visual language

2022-05-19T16:51:00-04:00

The apartment signs of L.A. announce location through flair, decadence, strangeness, absurdity, signification. When you see an otherwise unremarkable name affixed to a building in your neighborhood, you know — probably to the exact number of paces or miles, if you counted — how much further your intended destination is. That’s the thing about L.A. apartment signs — they point you toward where you need to be: home.

The LA Times has a really cool new series I am personally obsessed with wherein the “architecture of everyday life” is explored in and around the city. In this iteration, the Times’ style editor Ian Blair waxed poetic about LA’s midcentury typographical elements, best embodied on the facade of Paul Revere Williams’ iconic Beverly Hills Hotel, that are now synonymous with the visual imagination of Southern California feted by David Hockney and so many others.

Image courtesy Joe Wolf via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Blair spoke to the alien nature of the language contained in apartment typeface, commenting on their need to communicate intimations of luxury and class in a way in which words alone become a most effective means of conveying the interiority of space (no matter how illusory).

“Apartment signs affect us because of the amount of effort put into the premise: Please stop, look, come inside, see if you desire to belong here. There’s innuendo baked into the concept; the main selling poi...

Dash Marshall's Global Architect Card is an essential item for the world-traveling architect

2019-04-10T17:02:00-04:00

If you're an architect - or even simply a fan of architecture - you probably try to poke your head into every building that catches your eye. As difficult as it can be trying to get away with this in your home country, it becomes exponentially more so when traveling abroad.

Global Architect Card

Enter the Global Architect Card, an essential item for the traveling architecture enthusiast. With a lightweight steel body that provides legitimacy any time it's shown to authorities, the Global Architect Card was designed by Dash Marshall to do the legwork when you're hoping to gain access to the most impressive buildings around the world. It announces your intentions in the top 14 most widely used languages: "I am an architect. I am here to see this significant building."

The Global Architect Card is now available at Archinect Outpost - online and in our brick-and-mortar.

Eye dont not understand?

2017-11-13T13:17:00-05:00

In order for that kind of writing instruction to occur, what is needed is a culture shift toward an environment where all teachers — not just English teachers — believe they have permission to devote meaningful amounts of class time to writing instruction.

The romanticized view of the Architect, sitting, drawing and creating is a beautiful one indeed, but all too often are the words, the text that pulls the sketches together, that make sense of the whimsical strokes stay forgotten. Without the written history of Architecture, we would not have isms, movements, or orders — we would have no Architecture to talk about at all.

Is Architecture at a loss for words? Is it at a loss of the ability to speak, record its concepts, ideas and philosophies? With grand and verbose statements such as Architecture is Dead, The End of Theory, Make New History, and Imagine a world without Architecture making their rounds, how is Architecture to respond? Can it? Are these declarations only possible because of the diminishing role of parole in the discipline at large? When mass communication is limited to 40 characters, ten images, hashtags and lol, how do we allow Architecture to speak with words if our future generations are not focused on them?

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Original 176 emoji join MoMA's permanent collection

2016-10-26T20:28:00-04:00

Who would have thought that emoji would be revered within the same museum walls that display the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso? [MoMA] recently added NTT DoCoMo's original set of 176 emoji to their permanent collection as a gift...In early December, MoMA will debut an installation detailing the evolution of emoji and “will present them in a new light (and no doubt inspire a few selfies)”, says Paul Galloway, MoMA Collection Specialist in the Department of Architecture and Design.

Thanks to a licensing agreement between MoMA and NTT DoCoMo, the museum's permanent collection now includes the original 176 emoji that altered digital communication as we know it today. Read more on Bustler.

"Take the 10 to the 110 to the 101": Why Southern Californians say "the" before freeway numbers

2015-11-11T13:14:00-05:00

Southern Californians have a distinctive — 'Saturday Night Live's' Fred Armisen and Kristen Wiig might say funny — way of giving directions. To get from Santa Monica to Hollywood, take the 10 to the 110 to the 101. Burbank to San Diego? The 134 to the 5. And, if you can, always avoid the 405. Why the definite articles?...Most of North America, in fact, omits the 'the' before route numbers.

More about L.A. freeways on Archinect:

Christopher Hawthorne on repairing L.A.'s long-broken relationship with its freeways

Largest wildlife overpass in U.S. proposed for L.A.'s 101 Freeway, could ease area's roadkill problem

Ode to the Stack, Los Angeles's iconic infrastructure

Southern California not so sprawling after all

LA's Unbuilt Freeways

Archinect's Lexicon: "Anthropocene"

2014-10-30T15:34:00-04:00

Welcome to Archinect's Lexicon. Architecture notoriously appropriates and invents new language – sometimes to make appeals, sometimes to fill conceptual gaps, sometimes nonsensically. But once a word is used, it's alive, and part of the conversation. We're here to take notes.

Anthropocene [ænθrəˈ poʊ sin], noun: "the era of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of the earth" (Oxford English Dictionary).

The term "Anthropocene" first appeared on Archinect in April of 2007, in a news post recommending a series of lectures by economist Jeffrey Sachs. In June of 2014, the Oxford English Dictionary officially adopted it:

The -cene suffix, derived from the Greek for ‘new’ or ‘recent’, has been used since the 1830s to form names denoting the epochs and strata of the present Cenozoic era of geological time, ranging from the Palaeocene to the Holocene. The Holocene epoch covers roughly the past 10,000 year...

Why don't architects speak English?

2012-03-28T13:47:00-04:00

Grand plans for Seattle Center evoke hovering "Jelly Beans," "dematerialized urbanism," and "catalyzing atmospheres." That's just what Seattle needs: more gobbledygook.

Knute Berger, of Seattle-based Crosscut, opines on the long-pondered use of "gobbledygook" in archispeak, in reference to the architect's project descriptions from the recently announced results in the Urban Intervention Design Ideas Competition.

CLOWNS, CHAIRS AND DUTCH FOREIGN AFFAIRS

2011-09-13T17:31:14-04:00

In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there’s only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice... While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering.