Archinect - News

DOCOMOMO prepares for coming decade as 1970s architecture turns 50

2020-08-31T15:23:00-04:00

With the start of another decade comes the opportunity to highlight a new crop of historic architecture. Many who haven taken part over recent years in the sometimes insufferable debates over the merits of Brutalism, or in earlier conversations arguing for the legitimacy of midcentury modern architecture, will perhaps find a new conversation piece: Architecture from the 1970s.

As the 1970s themselves turn 50 years old, the age that is typically allows for buildings to be considered "historic" from a legal and regulatory perspective, architecture from this era is due for a lengthy reconsideration.

Writing for Docomomo US, Flora Chou, a Senior Associate and Cultural Resources Planner for Page & Turnbull's Los Angeles office, explains that "like the previous decades, there will be places from the 1970s that are important and worthy of preservation. Our eyes and personal tastes will gradually adjust to see the beauty in what many now consider to be outdated, ugly, and mundane."

"We are ...

Adolfo Natalini, co-founder of Superstudio, has passed away at age 78

2020-01-24T20:24:00-05:00

Adolfo Natalini, who, along with Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, co-founded the visionary architects' collective Superstudio, has passed away at age 78.

Natalini was born on May 10, 1941 in Pistoia, Italy. He attended the University of Florence, graduating in 1966. That year, he and di Francia, who passed away just last year, founded Superstudio. The designers Piero Frassinelli and Alessandro and Roberto Magris joined in short order and the rest is history.

View of Superstudio’s iconic “Continuous Monument” proposal. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, Howard Gilman Foundation.

Together the design collective worked to extend architectural imagination to include the so-called radical architettura movement that the team helped to propel into being through visionary works like The Continuous Monument collage series, among many others. The group dissolved in 1978.

Torre Natalini (Roermond) in The Netherlands. Image courtesy of © Raimond Spekking.

In the years following, Natalini ...

“In which the solid buildings would be replaced by the accumulation of foam”

2019-08-19T14:30:00-04:00

Prada Poole conceives the city of the future through what he calls “the three stages of a nonexistent architecture.” In this conception, the traditional city would, in successive transformations, morph into an immaterial city, without inertia, in which the solid buildings would be replaced by the accumulation of foam that would “appear and disappear, converge and disperse according to the different needs.”

Antonio Cobo examines the revolutionary work of Hippie Modernist architect and theorist Jose Miguel Prada Poole for Mas Context.

Can 1970s sustainability practices enhance Canada's 2017 architecture?

2017-01-03T15:45:00-05:00

Did architects have sustainability figured out in the 1970s, and can the lessons they learned help contemporary architects design for the challenges of climate change? In an attempt to answer this question, Canada is taking a closer look at its previously built sustainable architecture during the energy crisis in the 1970s in the form of two museum exhibitions. The Globe and Mail explains that:

The 1970s has much to teach us as we face the reality of climate change and the changes that it will bring about. That insight drives two thoughtful museum shows up this winter, the PEI exhibition [curated by Dalhousie University professor Steven Mannell] and "It's All Happening So Fast" at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

For the latest on climate-change oriented architecture:

Book Launch: "L.A. [TEN]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture 1970s-1990s" author in conversation with Aaron Betsky, Sylvia Lavin

2014-02-06T12:34:00-05:00

Last Tuesday's book launch for L.A. [TEN]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture 1970s-1990s at the A+D Museum brought author Stephen Phillips in conversation with the book’s publisher, Lars Müller, and architecture critics (among other things) Aaron Betsky and Sylvia Lavin. The book is a collaborative effort, culling work from students in Cal Poly’s L.A. Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design, Wim de Wit and Christopher Alexander of the Getty Research Institute, and Phillips himself. As an initiative that pits students alongside practicing professionals, combining oral history with journalistic investigation, L.A. [TEN] is both the artifact of an educational performance and a signpost in the continuing attempt to historicize L.A.’s messy architectural identity.

Lavin and Betsky kicked off the launch with miniature lectures, riffing on L.A.’s environmental and cultural context during the book’s era. Lacking the institutional validation of a strong publishing culture, archite...