Archinect - News

Editor's Picks #423

2015-07-13T00:47:00-04:00

Julia Ingalls explored how a firm the size of Gensler manages to maintain a cohesive studio culture. midlander wondered "when did Gensler get so big? I feel like I never heard of them until 10 years ago, then suddenly they were everywhere? Was it organic growth or have they been buying up local firms to expand?"

News
The NYT reported the Studio Museum in Harlem, will construct a new $122 million home designed by the British architect David Adjaye on West 125th Street.

SALT released Global Tools 1973-1975 (a free downloadable book) which compiles/archives the lessons of the "non-school", founded by members of a radical Italian pedagogy group from the 1970s.

One year after Operation Protective Edge, Haaretz examined what (if anything) has changed since the 50-day conflict between Israel and Hamas, and asks "If we don't learn from our wars, are we doomed to repeat them?" +A ziz thinks "Gaza might as well be the saddest place on Earth…"

Anna Daugherty penned a eulogy for Francis Tsai, previo...

Francis Tsai, previously featured on Archinect's Working Out of the Box, passes away

2015-07-07T13:28:00-04:00

“Ever since I was a kid, I knew I wanted to draw,” he said in late March, just before his death. “Architecture was the foundation that I ended up using in design work. I had to fill in the gaps.”

At the time he was diagnosed with ALS, Francis Tsai had reached a highpoint in his career. Trained as an architect at the University of Texas at Austin, Tsai had established a successful freelancing career creating the fantasy and sci-fi worlds he loved, pivoting his architectural skills into contributing artwork to the likes of Marvel Comics, Dungeons & Dragons, the film Sucker Punch, and games like Myst and Tomb Raider. The ALS diagnosis, when Tsai was only 42, was devastating – patients on average live for only two to five more years, and the disease's encroaching whole-body paralysis threatened to take away what Tsai loved most: drawing.

By 2012, a couple years after his diagnosis, ALS had left Tsai completely paralyzed, save for the ability to smile. Determined not to stop making his art, Tsai began drawing using the "Eye Gaze" system, that uses infrared cameras to track eye movements and translate them into commands on his computer. He pioneered the technology's application for...

Editor's Picks #381

2014-08-19T20:36:00-04:00

Nicholas Korody penned, Shitting Architecture: the dirty practice of waste removal. Therein drawing lessons; from Slavoj Zizek on the toilet and Timothy Morton (of Object-Oriented Ontology [OOO]) on sustainability as the preservation of the status quo, he argues that "Under the weight of the ecological crisis, the world has been flattened. There is no exit".

In response, Orhan Ayyüce offered up an image of the sublimely absurd, "I am always baffled by big houses that are marketed with +5.5 bathrooms (very common in wealthy neighborhoods) and so on. And of course these host extremely hi end living styles. It is kind of funny to think all these people do all day is shit and shit and shit everywhere in the house".

For the latest edition of Working out of the Box: Archinect featured Francis Tsai, of Francis Tsai Illustration and Concept Design, who received a Master's degree in 1993 from University of Texas in Austin.

Xenaxis "worked with Francis Tsai at Rockstar games and he was one of t...