Archinect - News

COVID-19’s spatial impacts: Big or small?

2020-04-27T21:00:00-04:00

What will be the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the built environment? Of course, anything can happen and we should be skeptical of anyone offering predictions for what even tomorrow might bring, but that has not stopped architectural thinkers from positing the world as it might come to be.

A case in point, two dueling perspectives were recently published that offer differing visions of how our cities, daily lives, and homes might change in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Writing in The Los Angeles Times, author and architecture critic Sam Lubell highlights six aspects of daily life—modular construction, adaptive reuse, lightweight architecture, healthy buildings, work, and public spaces—that are likely to be impacted by the crisis.

Previously on Archinect: 2,500-bed hospital conversion at NYC’s Javits Center opens. Photo By: K.C. Wilsey, FEMA.

Among the least discussed arenas so far that might find new relevance amid the COVID-19 crisis, according to Lubell, is modular co...

Mimi Zeiger combs SCI-Arc media archive to create lecture playlist highlighting feminist thought in design

2020-03-09T18:02:00-04:00

Los Angeles-based critic and curator Mimi Zeiger has developed Feminisms: 1974 to Now, a curated video playlist of lectures that have taken place at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) over the decades highlighting "feminist thought and dialogue" at the institution.

The playlist, dubbed a "Collection," is hosted on the newly-launched SCI-Arc Channel website, a dedicated online space that makes available videos created over the last 30 or so years from the school's lecture series, collected via the SCI-Arc Media Archive. Zeiger's Collection includes contributions from Design, Bitches, Penelope Spheeris, Dolores Hayden, Phyllis Birkby, Beatriz Colomina, Sheila da Brettaville, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Keller Easterling, Esther Choi, Izasjun Chinchilla, and Cecilia Fajardo-Hill.

The lectures focus on a variety of topics that stake a claim the for "feminist outlooks [that] shape our work and our world," Zeiger writes in an introduction for the collection. Ze...

The Bauhaus: A school of perverts

2019-10-25T13:30:00-04:00

Despite its surface rhetoric of rationality, clarity and efficiency, and smooth surfaces, the Bauhaus was never straightforward. Bauhauslers were engaged with everything that escapes rationality: sexuality, violence, esoteric philosophies, occultism, disease, the psyche, pharmacology, extraterrestrial life, artificial intelligence, chance, the primitive, the fetish, the animal, plants, etc. The Bauhaus was, in fact, a veritable cauldron of perversions.

Beatriz Colomina, history of architecture professor at the Princeton School of Architecture, pens a provocative archival photo essay in Metropolis highlighting some of the lesser-known transgressive histories of the Bauhaus. According to Colomina, who conducted research on the Bauhaus with her students during the Spring 2018, "there is no such a thing as Modern architecture without transgression."

Colomina writes, "What is remarkable about the Bauhaus, and perhaps the secret of its success, is the sheer density of transgressions of every kind. It was like a laboratory for inventing and intensifying perversions as a kind of pedagogical strategy."

How an obsession with illness shaped modern architecture, according to Beatriz Colomina

2019-05-06T18:49:00-04:00

Clean lines, white surfaces and indoor-outdoor living epitomise early modern architecture. Contrary to received wisdom, to Colomina this is less a machine aesthetic than a hospital aesthetic. Through the lens of disease, nervous disorders, sexuality and self-expression, Colomina’s fascinating interpretation of modern architecture suggests the motivating factors behind the architectural revolution were the need for health and cleanliness, hygiene and smooth, calming surfaces.

In light of her recently published book X-Ray Architecture, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina talks about the history of how illnesses shaped the clean aesthetics of 20th-century modern architecture.

‘‘In the 20th century architects from Le Corbusier to Mies van der Rohe to Alvar Aalto are all obsessed with illnesses,’’ Colomina tells The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘‘Corb says the old city has to be destroyed and a new architecture should emerge because it produces tuberculosis.’’

The enduring influence of "Playboy Architecture"

2016-04-14T20:25:00-04:00

Elmhurst Art Museum presents the U.S. debut of Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979, featuring an extensive collection of photographs, films, architectural models and more from Playboy magazine’s inception in 1953 through the 1970s. Curated by Professor Beatriz Colomina and Pep Aviles ... the exhibition showcases how architecture and design played a role in creating the Playboy fantasy as well as how Playboy magazine came to influence the world of architecture and design.

We no doubt have Hugh Hefner and the Playboy empire to thank, in no minor part, for today's standards of architectural photography, and the preeminent role many midcentury designers, featured in their present day in Playboy, enjoy in today's culture.

Got your own take on how sex and sexuality intermingle with architecture? Submit to our open call for our current editorial theme, Sex Aware Design. Click here to submit.

Related on Archinect:

"Are we human?" Curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley announce concept for 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial

2015-12-01T15:05:00-05:00

We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes... Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, the curators of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, announced the conceptual framework for next year's biennial in a press release held today in a library of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums.

Its overlong title, ARE WE HUMAN?: The Design of the Species: 2 seconds, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years, indicates primary conceptual concerns: the omnipresence of design, or the world as a designed object; the category of the human, alongside and contra that of the animal; and an expanded temporal focus that "spans from the last 2 seconds to the last 200,000 years."

"Design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human," the curators state in the press release. "The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species."

Rather than celebrate particular designers or imagine speculative futures, the biennial will be an "archaeolo...

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley will curate 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial

2015-05-27T13:23:00-04:00

In a press release issued today, the Istanbul Design Biennial announced that powerhouse architectural historians, theorists and educators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley will curate the 3rd Biennial, taking place in 2016. Both are based in New York City (and happen to be married) – Colomina teaches and is a curator at Princeton University, and Wigley recently stepped down from his deanship at Columbia University's GSAPP.

The Biennial's agenda is to bring together a diversity of ideas and people within the design community to an international forum, and consider global issues from a design-minded perspective. Colomina and Wigley will announce the Biennial's "conceptual framework" in December 2015.

Their selection also continues the Biennial's trend of selecting international architecture figures for its curators – 2012's Biennial was headed by architects and researchers Emre Arolat (Istanbul) and Joseph Grima (Genoa), and 2014's was led by curator and writer Zoë Ryan (Chicago-based). ...

Build it and they will come: Princeton architecture at the Venice Biennale

2014-08-04T14:39:00-04:00

This year's Venice Architecture Biennale, an international showcase of trends and research, showcases the work of a number of Princeton faculty and students. It marks the greatest number of invitations Princeton has received to participate in the Biennale, reflecting the University's strength in pioneering research. "Much like other art biennales, its purpose is to present the current panorama of the discipline," said Alejandro Zaera-Polo, dean of Princeton's School of Architecture.