Archinect - News

Zaha Hadid and New York Review of Books/Martin Filler resolve legal dispute

2015-01-27T12:05:00-05:00

After a highly publicized five-month battle, the dust has finally settled on the lawsuit that Zaha Hadid filed against New York Review of Books (NYRB) and critic Martin Filler.

The following announcement was released:

On January 22, 2015, following extensive settlement negotiations, Ms. Zaha Hadid withdrew her lawsuit against the New York Review of Books and Mr. Martin Filler. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, which remain confidential, Ms. Hadid has accepted the apology of the New York Review of Books and Mr. Filler, and is pleased to announce, in conjunction with the settlement, the donation of an undisclosed sum of money to a charitable organization that protects and champions labor rights.

Previously:

Zaha Hadid sues architecture critic Martin Filler over book review - Aug 22, '14
Martin Filler issues a retraction regarding his "mistake" in his critique of Zaha Hadid - Aug 25, '14

NIMBYs go to court over "modern" home; Zaha gets an apology; global warming rages on: News Round-Up for August 25, 2014

2014-09-02T20:07:00-04:00

Friday, August 29:

MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bike: The prototype is currently being used to create a mental-map and guidebook for NYC, and an upcoming Kickstarter campaign will attempt to fund the project for commercial sale.
In Beirut, a grassroots push for more grass: Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war made much of Beirut's green space inaccessible or dysfunctional. The Beirut Green Project is trying to bring at least a modicum of green space back to the city's residents.

Thursday, August 28:

Norwegian artists plan to open art academy in North Korea: Nothing's final yet, but the school is committed to its disbelief in sanctions or boycotts on art.
Alvar Aalto gets a close look from Google's Cultural Institute: Google's cameras go inside the famous Finnish architects studio, as well as a selection of his works, for a curated photo-exhibition.

Wednesday, August 27:

China considering drastic ban on coal: Chinese news outlets claim that work is underway to ban coal in Bei...

Martin Filler issues a retraction regarding his "mistake" in his critique of Zaha Hadid

2014-08-25T18:53:00-04:00

The critic Martin Filler has acknowledged a significant error in a scathing article he wrote for the New York Review of Books about the architect Zaha Hadid.

Full statement to New York Review of Books...

In my review of Rowan Moore’s “Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture,” I quoted comments by the architect Zaha Hadid, who designed the Al Wakrah stadium in Qatar, when she was asked in London in February 2014 about revelations a week earlier in The Guardian that hundreds of migrant laborers had died while working on construction projects in Qatar. I wrote that an “estimated one thousand laborers … have perished while constructing her project thus far.”

However, work did not begin on the site for the Al Wakrah stadium, until two months after Ms. Hadid made those comments; and construction is not scheduled to begin until 2015. There have been no worker deaths on the Al Wakrah proiect and Ms. Hadid’s comments about Qatar that l quoted in the review had nothing to do with the Al Wakrah site or any of her projects.

I regret the error.

Previously: Zaha Hadid sues architecture critic Martin Filler over book review

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Zaha Hadid sues architecture critic Martin Filler over book review

2014-08-22T12:40:00-04:00

Hadid, who was born in Baghdad and is now a British citizen, claimed that Filler falsely implied she was indifferent to the alleged difficult working conditions of migrant workers on high-profile construction projects in the Middle East, including her own. She also claimed Filler used large portions of his June 5 review of Rowan Moore's "Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture" to question her success and fault her personality, although she was not a prominent character in the book.

Rating the New Museums: The Best (and Worst) of 2007

2008-04-16T10:17:00-04:00

Martin Filler offers his highly opinionated personal picks for the best new museum architecture of the year just past, followed by a selection of the year's worst.

SANAA @ the New Museum

2008-04-11T12:19:00-04:00

The trouble with most architecture exhibitions is that, unlike shows on other, readily transportable art forms, it's almost impossible to display actual examples of this immovable medium within a conventional gallery context. Models, photographs, videos, drawings, plans, and even mock-ups of architectural details can only approximate the real thing. A refreshing exception to the museological problem of conveying the essence of architecture is SANAA: Works 1998-2008, now on view at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art through June 15. Check out Martin Filler's review @ CultureGrrl

The Bilbao Effect Debunked; A Counterpoint to the Bilbao 12

2008-03-28T12:07:00-04:00

Martin filler explores how cities and musuems hoping for the Bilbao effect are being slightly disingenous towards their constituents. Arch Record
He writes;
I applaud cities that subsidize museums rather than stadiums, but officials should just level with taxpayers, admit that spending on culture is a noble thing, and forget the sham rationale of financial return from what ought not to be touted as an “investment.” Before today’s casinolike art market, principled dealers and auctioneers used to discourage the notion of collecting as speculation. Buy what you love, they used to advise, and if you make a profit, good for you. If not, good for you, too, because you’ll have been enriched by living with a thing of beauty. The same caveat applies to the sponsorship of cultural architecture.

Calatrava: The Specter of Disney

2006-01-16T14:36:00-05:00

The New York Review of Books

analyses the work of Santiago Calatrava in a stinging critique by Martin Filler.
l Via l Related l

Calatrava: Flying High

2005-12-06T23:38:00-05:00

A fair (and edgy) write-up of Santiago "Bird Man" Calatrava's trajectory to date by the succinct Martin Filler in the NY Review of Books. | nyrb
a sampling:

Some of Calatrava's coprofessionals have cast a skeptical eye on what they see as his tendency to overelaborate his designs and obfuscate the underlying structure. This is hardly typical in engineering, a discipline whose practitioners consider it more a science than an art, much less a form of magic. Any engineer or architect will attest that it is hard to keep a design simple. On the other hand, the duplication of design in order to enhance visual effects, detectable in some of Calatrava's bridges, is also not easy to produce. Not all of his eye-catching gestures are useful functionally; they must be augmented by less apparent components that actually do the heavy lifting. As Marc Treib, an architect who teaches at Berkeley, remarked to me: "With Calatrava there is the bridge, and then there is the real bridge."

The architect Ren...

America's Freedom Tower?

2005-02-22T15:45:00-05:00

Another freedom tower piece. This one summarizes the tower's many technical issues and accuses Pataki of paying off officials to ensure Daniel Libeskind's design was the winner. From MSNBC