Archinect - News

“Life Begins at the Apocalypse Monster Club” — a personal tribute to Rem Koolhaas' “Exodus” collage by scholar Enrique Ramirez

2017-09-14T17:45:00-04:00

The pitch-perfect paean to the only city we knew could have been taken straight from Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Avowal (1972) by Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis with Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis [...] No wonder, then, that of all the images from this project, a photocollage of musicians posing in the “strip of intense metropolitan desirability” resonates with my memories of Houston and its eclectic punk scene.

Inspired by the confusing yet formative years of adolescence, Harvard Design Magazine's “Seventeen” issue explores “teens of all sorts—humans, buildings, objects, ideas—and their impact on the spatial imagination”.

In the poetic “Life Begins at the Apocalypse Monster Club” by architectural scholar and historian (and recording/touring bassist) Enrique Ramirez, he reflects on his punk-rock teenage years in the transforming “Space City” of Houston, and his personal connection to Rem Koolhaas' 1972 photocollage, “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Avowal”.

“This is a vision of youthful urbanism. This was us. This was our band. And like the titular dwellers of Exodus, we transformed the city, building a version of it that mirrored our own desires,” Ramirez writes.

The Corner of Lovecraft and Ballard

2017-06-20T17:22:00-04:00

For Lovecraft, the ubiquitous angle between two walls is a dark gateway to the screaming abyss of the outer cosmos; for Ballard, it’s an entry point to our own anxious psyche.

H.P. Lovecraft and J.G. Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, and both made the humble corner into a place of nightmares. Will Wiles delves into the malign interiors of their imagined worlds and the secret history of the spaces where walls meet.

"Constructing Holden Caulfield": Learning to build character through literary architecture

2014-06-12T18:22:00-04:00

The writer and the architect aren't so different from each other when you consider each one as builders of an environment, and what better way to introduce that concept than to a class of high school students. After reading about Matteo Pericoli's "The Laboratory of Literary Architecture" course in The New York Times, English teacher George Mayo was inspired to teach it to his 10th grade class at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD.

Matteo Pericoli created and taught the workshop in the Scuola Holden creative writing school in Turin, Italy and then in the M.F.A. writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Students picked a literary work they closely understood and then broke it down to its core elements, from which they based their architectural designs.

The goal was for students to avoid literal representations and instead design literary representations that symbolize "the essential ideas of the narrative structure in a spatial form," as described in P...