Archinect - News

2015 ~ A Year in Architecture, A Year in Archinect: December

2015-12-31T09:13:00-05:00

The most influential, controversial, historic and puzzling news items of December, 2015:

↑ "7,000 construction workers will die in Qatar before a ball is kicked in the 2022 World Cup," new ITUC report finds

This staggering statistic brings much needed attention to the dire human rights violations that too often accompany rapid urban development. While labor conditions in Qatar's construction industry are so onerous that they have come, at times, to effectively qualify as slavery, Zaha Hadid's 2022 World Cup stadium is not being implicated specifically in these predictions. Hadid has repeatedly had to rebuff false accusations of worker deaths on the stadium, rooted in a "mistake" published by the New York Review of Books.

↑ Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture reaches fundraising goal of $2M, working towards independence from foundation

The school began fundraising for independence back in December 2014, so that it could operate outside of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Indep...

What's trending at architecture student shows this summer?

2015-07-06T19:00:00-04:00

At best, the work in the student shows is committed, hard-worked, brave, skilled, thoughtful and/or imaginative. At worst, the exhibitions offer bad sci-fi, lazy politics (“Let’s all hate America”) and cod poetry. There are cliches that have been going round the schools for decades, such as the idea that the student’s work is a quasi-science (a “surgical operation”, a “laboratory”). Certain buzzwords float around (there’s a lot of “liminal”).

Architecture critic Rowan Moore goes on to ask: "At root is the central question of architectural education: is it about preparing students for the realities of practice or is it about taking a freedom they will never have again, to dream and speculate?"

This has been discussed on Archinect before, but what's your personal take in light of the latest student shows architecture schools around the world presented to the public this summer? Any highlights everybody still HAS to go and see? What disappointed you?

The Most Relevant News of 2014 (for Architects)

2014-12-30T14:02:00-05:00

Sometimes it's easy to pretend that architecture exists outside of this world, erupting instead in the blank of a 3D space governed only by the laissez-fair laws of software. But sometimes a news headline will penetrate through this fog of imagination, appearing as a blazing light shining forth from an image of some distant row of houses hollowed by mortar fire and colored with the blood of a strangers' body. "This is the real of architecture," the news seems to silently implore.

As gravity serves as the counterweight to the feverish, technofuturism fashionable to today's students, news events seem to ground architecture just at the moment it seems like it may finally escape into the vapors of idealism. While it may seem that architecture is increasingly consigned to the building of institutions or expensive residences, the demand for buildings and dwellings simultaneously grows louder and more desperate with every unfolding disaster.

A year-end round-up is as fraught as a ranking. If...