Archinect - News

Two new documentaries shed light on the life of children of star architects at the Architecture and Design Film Festival

2024-09-24T11:07:00-04:00

According to Kyle Bergman, the founder and director of the Architecture and Design Film Festival, “Kids who grow up with architects as parents mostly fall into two groups. Some want to become architects and some want to run away, to get as far away from architecture as possible. But then there’s this middle ground, people who are intrigued by what their parents do but want to do their own thing.” That third group is where the future documentarians come from, Bergman said.

Christopher Hawthorne writes in preview for this month's Architecture and Design Film Festival in New York, where Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's son Jim will premiere his gleaning biographical treatment Stardust: The Story of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Nathaniel Kahn’s equally elucidatory My Architect has been hugely popular, even garnering an Academy Award nomination. Another documentary about the life of Israeli architect Ada Karmi-Melamede made by her daughter Yael (who gave up a career in architecture to pursue filmmaking) closes the festival.

The four-day event begins tomorrow, September 25th, and runs through Saturday, September 28th. The full schedule of screenings can be found here.

In the face of post-pandemic habits, U.S. cities turn to vernacular design traditions for answers

2024-09-12T07:00:00-04:00

Gone are the days when the easiest way to make an architectural splash was with a shimmering and photogenic stand-alone building, fancy forms torquing this way and that. Along with exploring new takes on regional or vernacular design traditions, the field’s top talents are taking on projects that reimagine existing institutions or public spaces — or forge new links among them.

In a new piece for The New York Times, Yale School of Architecture senior critic Christopher Hawthorne explores how architects are striving to rejuvenate downtown areas across the U.S., where hybrid work schedules and negative perceptions have led to reduced vibrancy.

While converting commercial buildings into residential spaces is a popular strategy, it's not always feasible due to structural constraints, Hawthorne argues. Architects are therefore exploring strategies to entice activity downtown by reimagining existing structures and incorporating regional aesthetics.

Related on Archinect: Foster + Partners' Three Transamerica redesign wins approval in San Francisco. Image credit: dbox, courtesy of Foster + Partners/SHVO

Throughout the New York Times piece, Hawthorne cites examples such as the Seattle Aquarium's Ocean Pavilion by LMN Architects which reconnects the city to its waterfront, the revitalized Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco by Foster + Partners aimed at attracting ...

Christopher Hawthorne previews the restoration of Philip Johnson's Brick House ahead of May reopening

2024-04-29T11:49:00-04:00

The reopening returns a certain architectural equilibrium to Johnson’s estate. The original paired structures, said Kirsten Reoch, who was named executive director of the Glass House campus last summer, “are two parts of a whole. Neither was conceived without the other. So the idea that we’ve been showing and interpreting half the story, it kind of blows your mind.”

The Glass House is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year with a special Paper Log House installation from Shigeru Ban and other public programs through the end of December. Yale’s senior critic Christopher Hawthorne visits the New Canaan, Connecticut, campus for a preview and says, “Bringing visitors back to the Brick House, with its resolute insistence on privacy, is an opportunity to explore the relationship of its architecture to Johnson’s homosexuality,” as well as an opportunity to reexamine its designer’s fraught politics.

The restored Brick House (whose work was overseen by the National Trust’s Mark Stoner) reopens to the public this Thursday, May 2nd.

Christopher Hawthorne goes 1-on-1 with Peter Zumthor in LACMA makeover preview

2023-10-06T13:12:00-04:00

Zumthor describes the wing as “a concrete sculpture,” with floors, walls and ceilings of exposed concrete. There will be bronze surrounds on the window and door openings throughout the building. When I visited Haldenstein, he and his colleagues were weighing final choices for the color palette of the walls at the base of the new wing, inside the various legs. “Lively, not dark colors, to give identity to different spaces,” he said. “And then you come up into this world of concrete.”

Ahead of next year’s anticipated completion, Peter Zumthor says his sculptural new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA will be bereft of the most recognizable traces of his Pritzker-winning design signature — a claim the museum's director Michael Govan then refuted. The man who once said, “the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction,” pointed to a faulty concrete pour at the outset and difficulties with the site’s foundation as factors that forced his design to be streamlined. The paring down of the overpass-like wing connector that covers Wilshire Boulevard was another point of contention.

Critics like Mimi Zeiger have described the project as “environmentally tone-deaf.” Hawthorne has thus far withheld any criticisms of his own, preferring to cover the project through a more explanatory journalism.

Construction on the new building is now 65% complete as of October 1st. The article mentioned the new wing may not be fully opened to the public until 2026.

...

Jacques Herzog previews the Royal Academy exhibition with Christopher Hawthorne

2023-07-11T13:42:00-04:00

Actually, the reason we curate the shows ourselves is not because we want to control how people think, but quite the opposite. I don’t want to be too defensive. I’m not a moralist. If I would to try to control everything, I would have chosen the wrong job.

Back in May, Hawthorne met with Jacques Herzog at the opening of the Venice Biennale to discuss the upcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London as well as several prevailing industry trends that have impacted his firm’s size and projects in the United States and abroad. He says that, among other project types, “neglected” hospital design offers architects the most potential. The 73-year-old Herzog then offers some insights into the firm’s reluctance to work in Russia after last year, the limits of adaptive reuse, curation, and the perception of his counterpart's role as a firm leader vis-à-vis his own.

Previously on Archinect: Herzog & de Meuron’s first London exhibition in 20 years to be hosted by the Royal Academy of Arts

“Pierre has always organized the business, going back to when we were starting out. But it’s not fair to say that Pierre is the business guy and I’m the artist,” he tells the former LA Times critic. “Ideally, we look into projects together and we di...

The lessons we’re still ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ after 50 years

2023-01-27T16:32:00-05:00

What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, “Learning from Las Vegas” argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be—and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture.

Yale’s new visiting critic Christopher Hawthorne considers the lasting inspirational qualities and history of Steven Izenour, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi's seminal 1972 text, whose origins can be traced to a studio the young newlyweds taught in New Haven in the fall of 1968. Hawthrone places it alongside Reynar Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies — published the year before — in an antiquated canon but says its impartial tone should be emulated by a new generation of high-minded designers hoping to dismantle or improve the pernicious social and environmental ramparts of our young century.

Related three-part feature series on Archinect: Learning from 'Learning from Las Vegas' with Denise Scott Brown, Part 1: The Foundation; Part 2: Pedagogy; Part 3: Research

“'To tear down Paris and begin again' is not so far, in spirit, from the current mood, even if the political goals of many young architects are quite different from those of the right-leaning Le Co...

Catherine Opie will join Christopher Hawthorne and Carolina A. Miranda at The Broad for a discussion on memory and public space

2022-01-19T18:38:00-05:00

Who gets to be remembered in a city, and why? That will be one of the questions on the dais when artist Catherine Opie joins current and former LA Times architecture critics Christopher Hawthorne and Carolina A. Miranda for a conversation on the topic at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles tomorrow evening.

The conversation will take as its focus the works of Opie as they tie-in with the mission of the city’s Civic Memory Working Group that Hawthorne helped found. The museum will also present Opie’s recently-acquired work monument/monumental, which documents a 2020 road trip from Richmond, Virginia and the attempt by Black Lives Matters activists there to reclaim a noteworthy statue that depicted Robert E. Lee. Opie’s work will be presented in the context of how commemoration can best be processed through the built environment in the 21st century using lessons from the past as a critical guide.

From left to right: Catherine Opie, Christopher Hawthorne, and Carolina Miranda. Image cour...

Ian Volner on the changing face of Los Angeles

2021-09-07T18:21:00-04:00

The rude stop-start of the pandemic economy has meant that scads of new marquee developments—new infrastructure, new performance venues, new housing, new museums, new everything—are now hurtling toward completion almost simultaneously. Five days spent crisscrossing from the hills to the beach and back, occasionally by car but also by bus, by train, and, yes, by bike, revealed a city seized by startling, epochal changes. For Los Angeles, it has been a long time coming.

The city is starting to ramp up for a development spree spurred on by attendant social and environmental issues that will fundamentally change the urban landscape of the city in a building boom which may also herald the end of Christopher Hawthorne’s “Third Los Angeles.”

Recently published on Archinect: Reyner Banham Is Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies at 50

LA has set very ambitious goals for development during the coming decade of transition. Ian Volner gives us a scope of some of the architectural changes coming to the city here.

Christopher Hawthorne, LA's architecture czar, breaks down the city's problems

2021-09-02T12:55:00-04:00

No other city has understood its connection to mobility the way Los Angeles has. There’s a longstanding view that the city is most legible through motion. You read it by moving through it.

Christopher Hawthorne, LA Mayor Garcetti's architecture czar, and previous LA Times architecture critic categorize the city's problems into two groups. One is housing, housing, and housing. The other is housing, mobility, and equity.

In the interview, these challenges are explained and some solutions are offered in an objective and sober language which advocates its creative approaches.

Los Angeles has started its parley into the next iteration of itself in the early 80's by rebuilding its mass transportation system. The changes to its societal breakdown and the urban environment becoming more accelerated and visible.

Hawthorne explains the changes necessary and gives a loose timeline to achieve some of the solutions. Considering, the current political makeup of the city will remain in similar lines.

Winning designs for the City of LA's Low-Rise Design Challenge explore new opportunities for housing through research and community engagement

2021-05-17T19:46:00-04:00

To improve and explore housing solutions in the city of Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Chief Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles, Christopher Hawthorne, organized the "Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles." While the design challenge is "not a competition" in the traditional sense, explains its organizers, "this design challenge is part of a larger research initiative [...] to explore new paths to homeownership and new models of affordability in low-rise neighborhoods across Los Angeles."

In support from sponsors and partners such as the James Irvine Foundation and Urban Institute, to name a few, Low-Rise offers an expanded version of housing discourse for the city. What makes this particular challenge different is by "engaging community experts in housing and asking them, in a series of listening sessions organized by theme, how they and their fellow residents would like to see their neighborhoods evolve," shares Low-Rise in their design challenge overview. The ...

Los Angeles hopes to cut housing red tape with preapproved ADU designs

2021-03-08T19:00:00-05:00

More than a dozen designs for accessory dwelling units, known as ADUs, will be offered through the city’s ADU Standard Plan Program [...]. The small-scale, stand-alone residences are generally tucked into properties zoned for single-family homes. The idea, says the city’s chief design officer (and former Times architecture critic), Christopher Hawthorne, is to take a weeks-long permitting process and “turn it into an approval that is over-the counter.”

Notoriously plagued by a shortage of housing stock, Los Angeles has launched a new initiative that aims to drastically shorten the approval process — and promote good design — with preapproved accessory dwelling unit (ADU) plans.

The ADU Standard Plan Program will start out with designs by 14 architectural firms, ranging from well-known practices to emerging studios: wHY, SO – IL, Design, Bitches, LA Más, Jennifer Bonner/MALL, sekou cooke STUDIO, Fung + Blatt Architects, Escher GuneWardena Architecture, Connect Homes, Amunátegui Valdés, IT House, First Office, Abodu, and Welcome Projects.

Below is a small selection from the initial roster of plans.

LA Más: 1-story, studio with options (3D-printed home)

SO – IL: 1-story, 1 bedroom with options (693 sf)

Amunátegui Valdés: 1-story, 2-bedroom with covered roof deck and options (934 sf)

IT House: 2-story including mechanical room with options (660 sf)

Design, Bitches: 1-story, 1 bedroom with options (454 sf)

wHY: 1-story, 1 or 2 bedroom with...

Hawthorne and Wagner on Robert Venturi's theory impact

2018-10-01T14:01:00-04:00

The idea of the “both-and” suggested a new pluralism, and maybe a new tolerance, in architecture. But the phrase turned out to have its limits. To the extent that Venturi was making an argument in favor of a kind of big-tent populism in architecture, it was a space for new styles instead of new voices, new forms rather than new people. In fact, tucked inside Complexity and Contradiction is an argument for a renewed insularity in the profession [...].

Christoper Hawthorne, former LA Times architecture critic and now Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles, dissects Robert Venturi's 1966 book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (which famously scoffs at the Miessian classical Modernism with the "less is a bore" tagline), and argues in his piece in The Atlantic that the array of new choices the book offered also limited architecture's broader access to the public and diversity in the profession.

Meanwhile in another publication of the Atlantic network, McMansion Hell blogger Kate Wagner is out with a CityLab article on how Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour's 1972 Learning from Las Vegas influenced an entire generation of architects, and her personally: "I came from Anywhere, U.S.A., far, far away from any great works of architecture," she writes. "Venturi’s elevation of everyday buildings made me feel seen, made me feel like the places I had observed, and my appreciation for them, were valid and me...

Christopher Hawthorne leaves LA Times to become Chief Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles

2018-03-12T14:15:00-04:00

After 14 years as the Los Angeles Times' resident architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne is moving on to become chief design officer for the city of Los Angeles. Announced this morning, Hawthorne explained that "beginning next month, [he'll] be working in the mayor's office to raise the quality of public architecture and urban design across the city—and the level of civic conversation about those subjects." His position will be housed in the city's Office of Economic Development.

Created by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the position has been something he has openly proposed over the years as he's discussed the future of the city. In a story for the New York Times last year, Garcetti described the role as "a guru who can marshal the forces of the city and look at every bus stop, curb, utility box, every facade, every subway portal.” Beyond bus stops and subway portals, Hawthorne will collaborate on a wide range of public projects, oversee design competitions, and enlist talent...

Christopher Hawthorne's Frank Lloyd Wright documentary “That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles” to air next week

2018-03-01T19:19:00-05:00

Why focus on Wright, American architecture’s equivalent of Abraham Lincoln, the giant who casts a shadow over his field big enough to blot out smaller and underrepresented figures? [...] Because the architect’s brilliant if forbidding Southern California houses, the most important of which were designed in a burst of creative energy during the first few months of 1923, remain mysterious, their meaning and inspiration as opaque as their heavy, richly patterned concrete-block facades.

Christopher Hawthorne's documentary, “That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles”, focuses on aspects of the infamous architect's work which remain enigmatic. Filming inside eight Wright buildings, the project interviews around 20 people to present new insights around these mysterious works.

Hawthorne explains, "My overarching goal was to bring some new, sustained attention to a group of houses that have lingered too long, given their importance to the American architectural canon, in the relative shadows." The title “That Far Corner" originates from a phrase Wright used to describe Southern California in his autobiography.

As part of a new ARTBOUND season, the documentary airs next Tuesday March 6, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on KCET-TV. The episode will also stream online at KCET, as well as on Amazon, YouTube, Roku, and Apple TV following its broadcast. Tune in and decide what you make of Hawthorne's theory. As a bonus, several of the interviews occur inside residential designs by ...

Los Angeles keeps expanding its freeway "Autopia"

2018-02-23T17:42:00-05:00

If no one in 2018 would argue, as a young writer named David Brodsly did in 1981, that the "L.A. freeway is the cathedral of its time and place," or that it's the spot where Angelenos "spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives," as British architectural historian Reyner Banham put it with almost laughable enthusiasm a decade earlier, there's no doubt that both the practical and metaphorical meanings of the freeway continue to preoccupy Southern Californians.

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne reflects on Southern California's ongoing love-hate relationship with its freeways.

0 for 25? Christopher Hawthorne challenges the 25 Year Award

2018-01-23T12:45:00-05:00

In that spirit I set a challenge for myself: Could I come up not just with one but with 25 buildings that might have deserved the award this year? It took me a few days — and I was helped by some terrific suggestions from architects, critics and historians on Twitter and elsewhere online — but in the end finding 25 wasn't that difficult.

LA Times journalist Christopher Hawthorne has penned, or passionately typed, an inquiry into the fact that this year's 25-Year-Award was awarded to—no one.

In the article, Hawthorne walks us through the importance and aim of such an award and how to him, there are more than a few projects that could have claimed the award this year. Hawthorne even goes as far to produce a personal 25 for 25 list that emphasizes the lack of clarity and potential rigor that might have gone into this year's decision. The Hawthorne list is as follows:

Temporary Powell Library, UCLA, Hodgetts & Fung, 1992 (dismantled 1997); Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore, HOK Sport, 1992; restoration of Majestic (now Harvey) Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, 1987; Hayden Tract, Culver City, Eric Owen Moss, begun 1986; Hollywood Duplex, Los Angeles, Koning Eizenberg, 1987; Temporary (now Geffen) Contemporary, Los Angeles, Richard Meier, 1983; Fire Station No. 5, Columbus, Ind., Susana T...

"Accidental minimalism": An architecture critic's take on the Trump border wall

2018-01-03T15:48:00-05:00

The slabs in front of me seemed at once the most and least architectural objects I’d ever seen. They were banal and startling, full and empty of meaning. Here were the techniques of Land Art, medieval construction, marketing and promotion, architectural exhibition and the new nativism rolled uncomfortably if somehow inevitably into one.

LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne takes a trip down to the U.S.-Mexican border in San Diego to attempt the challenge of critiquing Trump's border wall prototypes, "alternating bands of substance and absence, aspiration and impossibility".

Image: U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

"Harry Potter effect": Christopher Hawthorne on America's Neo-Neo Gothic college architecture trend

2017-12-21T14:52:00-05:00

So what does the taste for Hogwarts-style dormitories say about the Yale or the USC of 2017? It says that the primary job of residential architecture on campus is to provide a sense of consistency and familiarity for donors and incoming students alike — to soften the edges of the college experience.

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne looks back at 2017's resurgence of Neo Gothic and Neo-Gothic-ish college architecture and compares the newly completed USC Village and Yale residential complexes with architectural references of the manifestation of nostalgic Anglophilia, the wizard school Hogwarts, as found in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

"High school graduates on their way to college are hardly responsible for the architecture they find there, of course," Hawthorne writes. "Yale, USC and other wealthy and ambitious schools seem to be counting on a kind of double nostalgia, on the hope that this revival of the Gothic Revival will appeal both to incoming students and to wealthier alumni, who after all are the ones paying for and often helping dictate the architectural sensibility of new campus buildings."

Architecture — Tools of Capital: Iconic, Boring, and for the Happy Few

2017-11-23T17:30:00-05:00

This week, Donna and Ken are joined by Indianapolis architect and ARE Sketches author, Lora Teagarden. Lora is an architect with RATIO Architects and L^2 Design. On this podcast, we'll be discussing three news items from the website. First up is the controversy around the proposal for the "Tallest Building in Portland" by the architecture firm William Kaven. Second is the Op-Ed on "Boring Architecture" by LA Times architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne. Last is a provocative interview with OMA partner, Reinier de Graaf, by the folks at Failed Architecture called, "Architecture is in a State of Denial".

Listen to episode 113 of Archinect Sessions, “Architecture — Tools of Capital: Iconic, Boring, and for the Happy Few”.

iTunes: Click here to listen, and click the "Subscribe" button below the logo to automatically download new episodes.
Apple Podcast App (iOS): click here to subscribe
SoundCloud: click here to follow Archinect
RSS: subscribe with any of your favorite podcasting apps ...

Are you bored yet?

2017-11-17T15:10:00-05:00

Its forms are basic, totemic: Euclidean shapes dredged from the long memory of the field. It sometimes relies on modules or grids. It’s often monochromatic. It’s post-digital, which means it rejects the compulsion to push form-making to its absolute limits that overtook architecture at the turn of the century. As a result, it sometimes looks ancient or even primordial. It never looks futuristic.

Famed LA Times architectural critic, Christopher Hawthorne, released his view of contemporary architecture that culminates in it being classified as boring, and yet, that might be exactly what the architectural discipline ordered. As a reaction to 'hyperactive form-making,' Hawthorne argues that contemporary architects are getting 'boring.'

One could understand that as an insult or derivative comment, but Hawthorne states that their work is well considered and measured and that the 'Room Temperature' of the work is just right but is also aware of the viability of such a project to be under question and scrutiny.

Renzo Piano on his Academy Museum of Motion Pictures: "It may work. We shall see."

2017-10-26T14:49:00-04:00

"I cross a bit my fingers,” Renzo Piano told me. “It may work. We shall see.” We were standing inside the concrete shell of the main auditorium of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, an ambitious but troubled project that after a series of delays is expected to open in 2019. [...] Construction workers hammered away all around us, producing a ring of noise that occasionally made it tough to hear Piano, who at 80 speaks more softly than he once did.

LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne dissects Renzo Piano's third Southern California project, the troubled Academy Museum of Motion Pictures which — plagued by delays and controversy — is currently under construction right next to his other two completed buildings, the 2008 Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the 2011 Resnick Pavilion (both for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and both not living up to Piano's expected excellence as a museum designer, Hawthorne writes).

Just last month, the Academy released new renderings that document minor updates to the museum plans in the hopes of laying to rest quarrels about the project's flawed design.

Johnston Marklee: Newness becomes a disease

2017-09-21T15:18:00-04:00

Christopher Hawthorne interviews Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee about this year's Chicago Architecture Biennial. The two reflect on the theme of the biennial—'Make New History'—and their role as curators.

Hawthorne: What attracted you to history as a guiding idea for this biennial?

Lee: We’re at a moment when we’re just coming out of this fascination with the new. I remember Rem Koolhaas, in [an interview] in the ’90s, somebody asked him, “Where do you think we are now?” And he said, “I think we’re waking up from the semantic nightmare of the ’80s.” So I was thinking, “What is the nightmare that we’re waking up from, if we had to think of the equivalent?” And at least from our point of view, being in L.A., in the schools, there has been a complete fascination with newness — new for new’s sake. To the point where there are architects who do really interesting projects and I would say, “You should also look at [German architect Erich] Mendelsohn,” suggesting it’s something they would b...

Christopher Hawthorne: Apple and Amazon's architectural visions "owe nothing to the American city"

2017-09-14T17:58:00-04:00

It has also been remarkable to watch Amazon pursue a dramatically different strategy. Its plans for a second headquarters suggest that in terms of architecture and campus planning it wants to be everything Apple is not. It wants to lean into the city — and thorny questions about gentrification and housing prices, to the extent that they will be a natural byproduct of this process — rather than away from it.

"Though he took a very different path to get there," Hawthorne writes in his LAT opinion piece analyzing Apple & Amazon's lofty headquarters ambitions with a focus on urban integration (or the complete lack thereof), "Bezos ultimately reached the same conclusion Jobs did: that the wealthiest and most powerful tech companies owe nothing to the American city."

Woodbury's Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter talks ethics and culture with LAT

2017-08-22T18:47:00-04:00

Very rarely does ethics become a selling point for a client or a selling point when you’re talking about a studio project. It’s very rarely the idea generator. I think most practitioners traditionally came from a comfortable or upper-middle-class. It’s the Jeffersonian ideal: the gentleman designer. Architects in this country tend to have clients who are in the upper income level. And I think that has really been a problem. Our students, many of them, come from underserved communities.

Back in July, Archinect featured Woodbury's new dean, Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter, as a part of the Deans List series, in an interview about the importance of economic diversity and the school's commitment to egalitarian and practical education. The Los Angeles Times recently conducted a similar interview, in which Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter discusses her priorities as the new head of the school, Woodbury's culture and ethics.

Where do you hope to take the school? What are your priorities?

One of the things I’ve been focusing on over the last 10 years is our institutes. Our civic engagement institute started as Architecture and Civic Engagement. It was incubated in the school of architecture. Now the rest of the university is seeing this conversation as something they want to participate in, and it’s called the Agency for Civic Engagement, with Jeanine Centuori as director. The Julius Shulman Institute [on architectural photography] is another, with Barbara Bestor as the executive direc...

Christopher Hawthorne reviews LA's newly opened USC Village development: "Equal parts Disneyland and Hogwarts"

2017-08-21T18:37:00-04:00

At a ceremony last week to mark the opening of the $700-million USC Village, C.L. Max Nikias, the university’s president, spoke at some length about the architecture of the new complex and what he called “USC’s extraordinary physical metamorphosis” in recent years. [...] Then came his ringing conclusion: “And let’s always remember, the looks of the University Village give us 1,000 years of history we don’t have. Thank you, and fight on!”

"Even delivered in a vacuum it would have been a remarkable statement," Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne remarks. "The president of the leading private university in Los Angeles taking up, as a rhetorical cudgel, one of the laziest clichés about the city, that it has no history to call its own."

Christopher Hawthorne on when architecture and performance intersect

2017-06-30T12:06:00-04:00

This interest in performance among architects is less a style or a fledgling movement than a register, a way of working. It’s a means of sketching out a new set of priorities — and giving up older ones that are tarnished or compromised. It’s also open-ended, challenging the idea that a building can ever really qualify as finished. It makes room for perspectives that come from other fields.

According to Hawthorne, this new trend—seen in the work of architects from Andrés Jaque to Bryony Roberts—evidences the appeal of "impermanence and often...informality," putting the work in contrast to the ritzy architecture that seems to dominant these days.

Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times architecture critic, reviews Harvard's first online architecture course

2017-05-04T14:42:00-04:00

[K. Michael Hays] represents an approach to teaching architecture and architectural theory that has held sway in the American academy for at least a generation. This approach doesn’t simply treat architecture as a discipline separate from the rest of the world, with its own passwords and protocols. It guards that separation with its life.

A spirited Christopher Hawthorne reviews Harvard GSD's first online course as taught by K. Michael Hays, who appears to prize obfuscation and condescension as teaching methods (Hawthorne does explain the history behind this autonomous pedagogy, which resulted from architects of the 1970s needing to break away from corporate/political control). Still, the question of whether online courses are actually any different than the level of instruction you would receive in a classroom appears to be trending toward no, at least in substantive terms. The medium isn't the message, especially if you're taking instruction from a lecturer who thinks speaking at you, rather than engaging with you, is the way to go.

SO-IL's new museum for UC Davis: "a building to boost your faith in the future of American architecture"

2016-12-08T13:28:00-05:00

The museum is not a singular or path-breaking work of architecture; its design goals have more to do with manipulating light and shadow and with physical substance [...] Yet taken as a whole the museum offers a range of encouraging signs about the priorities of architecture’s up-and-coming generation. These include a genuine interest in shifting definitions of public space in a digital age and — most important of all — a preference for measured and layered effects over operatic ones.

UC Davis' new Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of art opened in November, and will function as a teaching museum with spaces for studios, galleries, and classrooms, including a courtyard for performances and installations.

According to Hawthorne, SO-IL's design (done in collaboration Karl Backus of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, an SF-based firm known for its multiple Apple stores), "flows primarily from [SO-IL leaders] Idenburg, 42, and Liu, 37, whose work tends to be porous and substantial at the same time, with cubic forms often cloaked or veiled by snug, semi-transparent skins." Hawthorne also refers back to SO-IL's YAP-winning "Pole Dance", as a tone-setter for the firm's aesthetic.

Check out Iwan Baan's photos of the museum below.

Get the backsotry on SO-IL and the Shrem museum here:

Listen to 'Next Up: The LA River' Mini-Session #1 with KCRW's 'Design and Architecture' host Frances Anderton and LA Times architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne

2016-11-16T12:44:00-05:00

When Frank Gehry's office was first attached to the L.A. River's master plan and redevelopment, the river began attracting fresh attention over a project that had already been evolving for decades. This October, in an attempt to do justice to the river's complexity and history (and the accompanying urbanist discourse), Archinect hosted 'Next Up: The LA River'—a live podcasting interview series with an array of architects, planners, artists, and journalists with varying perspectives on the subject.

We're now eager to share those conversations with everyone as eight Mini-Sessions, released as part of our Archinect Sessions podcast. Myself, Paul Petrunia and Nicholas Korody moderated the conversations, which took place at the Los Angeles Architecture + Design Museum on October 29, 2016. While we reached out to them, unfortunately no representatives from Gehry's office were able to take part.

Our first Mini-Session was moderated by myself, with Frances Anderton (host of KCRW's 'Design and...

Join us this Saturday for Next Up: The L.A. River, ft. Mia Lehrer, Christopher Hawthorne and more!

2016-10-26T12:57:00-04:00

The L.A. River's redevelopment is one of the most challenging, and exciting, projects currently underway in Los Angeles. Accounting for the River's 51-mile stretch, and all the neighborhoods it runs through, is a mammoth endeavor—and one that will necessarily involve contention and compromise. As a toast to this XXL project, Archinect is hosting Next Up: The LA River—a live podcasting interview event featuring perspectives from all along the river's edge.

On Saturday, October 29 at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles, we'll be discussing the River and its redevelopment in a fast-paced format of quick interviews and panels, featuring the following:

Mia Lehrer (Mia Lehrer & Associates)
Christopher Hawthorne (architecture critic for Los Angeles Times)
Deborah Weintraub (Chief Deputy City Engineer Bureau of Engineering)
Frances Anderton (Host of KCRW's Design and Architecture)
Steven Appleton (LA River Kayak Safari)
Marissa Christiansen (Friends of the LA River)
Elizabeth Timme (LA-Más)
Renee Dake Wil...