Archinect - News

Reinier de Graaf: "The western architectural ivory tower has become a theatre of the absurd"

2015-11-05T18:02:00-05:00

As the evening progresses, the event turns into a painful X-ray of the current state of American academia: a strangely insular world with its own autonomous codes, dominated by some antiquated pecking order with an estranged value system and no hope of a correction from within. The often grandiose character of the debate stands in stark contrast to the marginal nature of that which is being debated.

Reinier de Graaf, partner at OMA, delivers a scathing takedown of the current state of architecture academia as represented by the participants of the ArchAgenda Debates, a panel in which he was also a participant. Alongside Jeff Kipnis, Patrik Schumacher, Peter Eisenman, and Theodore Spyropoulos, de Graaf was meant to discuss "a potential agenda for 21st-century architecture." The panel was a periphery event of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

But for de Graaf, the all-male panel of architects "from a part of the world to which – unless all current indicators are completely misgiven – the 21st century will not belong" failed to deliver an agenda or achieve relevance. Check out the op-ed on Dezeen.

Question of the Year and SCI-Arc 2011 Thesis Reviews by Glen Small

2011-10-06T14:28:00-04:00

“HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE FORTY YEARS TOO SOON?” Question of the year from Jeffrey Kipnis to Glen Small at a rooftop bar.

SCI-ARC SCREEN TEST, I SHALL RETURN is a fun to read blog post with behind the scenes imagery. It includes an honest review of SCI Arc 2011 Thesis Projects as told by one of school's founding fathers, a visionary green architect and great critic, Glen Howard Small.

Art Review; Moss, Kipnis and the Box

2009-07-30T06:53:00-04:00

A brief snapshot of last night's Gallery Talk event in SCI Arc.
'Conversation Under the Box'

CONVERSATION UNDER THE BOX
By Orhan Ayyuce

I almost didn't go if it wasn't for a business meeting I had near SCI Arc right before the much anticipated gallery installation talk between Eric Owen Moss, architect and school's director and his friend and critic Jeffrey Kipnis about ; architecture related, grid related, art related, poetry related, related over the top and 'what's inside of me' personal installation of aluminum produced cube, precariously hanging from the ceiling above, bondaged with finite, centered circular flat bars, fighting a war against orthographic and infinite grid.

An integral part of the visual concept, the exhibition incorporated a boxing ring or some other theatrics influenced seating arrangement, demanding your focused attention to the work uber alles. If you were sitting in the gallery, you were either an actor or an audience, a part of the performance piece t...