Archinect - News

Alexandra Lange on the (ever)green potential of American dead malls

2022-06-08T20:20:00-04:00

Malls represent heavy investments in infrastructure, construction materials and place making that should not be discarded. The popularity of dead malls as sites for Covid testing and eventually vaccinations underlines these essential qualities: Easy road access, unencumbered indoor space, instant name recognition. Contemplating the mall’s roots in the garden is an opportunity not for picturesque nostalgia but for new solutions.

The author of the forthcoming title Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, out next week from Bloomsbury, Lange crafts a nice rundown of dead mall spaces’ possible reuses as public gardens, apartment complexes, and even health care centers in a country where more than 250 such shopping centers are expected to shutter in the next three to five years.

“Some should be demolished and returned to nature, but more should be rethought from an ecological point of view. While malls are a wasteful use of land, replacement with new stand-alone buildings with space-hogging parking lots only compounds that wastefulness […]”

Alexandra Lange discusses the film "Where'd You Go, Bernadette" and what it means for women in architecture

2019-08-19T08:00:00-04:00

I want this to be me and my friends, most of us in our mid-40s, and many of us looking around, now that our kids are tweens, and thinking, Hmmmmm, am I doing what I want? Am I saying what I need to say? The new midlife crisis is a career crisis, not a marital crisis.

It is rare for individuals in creative fields to be accurately portrayed in film, especially women. With the release of the film adaptation of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Curbed architecture critic, Alexandra Lange, writes to express her anticipation for the film's portrayal of the lead character, Bernadette Fox. According to Lange, as a mother, wife, architect, and woman, this character is someone many women in the profession can potentially empathize with. In her review, Lange shares what this fictional character provides for her and other female architects as well.

Lange explains, "Bernadette Fox was a wish fulfillment [...] Most women, most people, don't have a cheerleader waiting in the wings for us to get our shit together. We either mentor ourselves or, more often than not, our talent is absorbed by other people and other lives. We never get to be on a first-name basis with the world, the subject of a solo profile."

It's the details that make this film all to...

Revisiting "A Pattern Language"

2019-07-12T13:09:00-04:00

“A Pattern Language” is not about architecture, but about how specific design choices can help us build better relationships. By fitting a series of those choices—the patterns—together, you get a room, a house, a neighborhood and eventually a city.

Curbed architecture critic Alexandra Lange takes us on a journey through some of the key lessons from Christopher Alexander's seminal work, A Pattern Language.

The book, originally published in 1977 has long been out of fashion in architecture schools, but, Lange argues, with the rise of smart cities and other quick-fix approaches to contemporary urban and global design problems, now is perhaps a good time to revisit Alexander's earnest, methodical, and people-centered tome.

Lange writes, "As New York, Toronto, Singapore, and more places around the globe build so-called smart cities, maybe we need to read “A Pattern Language” again in that context," adding, "Who is the audience for the smart city? Who has access to the data? Who has the ability to make design decisions based on that data? Is this city going to build better relationships? People are the scoring system, whether you’re deciding on a rug for the living room, or a light rail system for the city."

...

A case for Brooklyn YIMBYism

2018-09-12T17:09:00-04:00

At its current rate of growth, Brooklyn is about to be more populous than the entire city of Chicago. Saying “we need more housing” is a given, but no one agrees on where, how high, and for whom. And New York has been later to that discussion than San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles: While the city is building housing, technically, it is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of 144,000 new Kings County residents since 2010.

Alexandra Lange takes a closer look at Brooklyn's contested 80 Flatbush mixed-use development and argues why it's good for the borough.

Defy gravity in the works of FLW, Tadao Ando, Louis Kahn in this upcoming video game

2016-06-27T20:44:00-04:00

Frank Lloyd Wright, level designer? That’s what artist William Chyr was thinking, from the moment he crossed the threshold at the Robie House...It was a rare IRL architectural excursion, as Chyr has been immersed in building the digital levels of Manifold Garden, his first-person 3D exploration game in which you defy gravity in order to walk up walls, fall through windows, and launch yourself from one side to the other of an infinite stepwell, [while] solving increasingly difficult puzzles.

Alexandra Lange interviews video game designer William Chyr on his upcoming game, “Manifold Garden”, which is due for a January 2017 release on PlayStation 4. “Chyr has slowly incorporated more architectural references,” Lange writes, ”stretching back through the centuries and including built works by Frank Lloyd Wright and Tadao Ando, and unbuilt works by Louis Kahn, Anne Tyng, and Arata Isozaki.”

You can also watch a 16-minute gameplay demo right below. (Just be careful if you have motion-sickness.)

Why are Heatherwick's proposals succeeding in New York but tanking in London?

2016-05-26T18:25:00-04:00

“The Garden Bridge is a land grab,” says Michael Ball of Thames Central Open Spaces. “That is, a major piece of public space and amenity – the South Bank, the River Thames, and the views across central London – would be sequestered for private interests, albeit cloaked in some appearance of charity and beneficence. When I saw Pier 55 I realised it was an even more blatant example of the same idea.”

In this piece design critic par excellence Alexandra Lange analyzes two similar Thomas Heatherwick designed-projects, London's Garden Bridge and New York's Pier 55, in the hopes of discovering why one seems to be resonating with the public while the other has inspired satiric contests to replace it. Murky funding issues, misleading renderings, Absolutely Fabulous tie-ins: it's all here.

For more on the saga of the Garden Bridge:

"Stop the unpermitted demolition": Roche Dinkeloo's shiny UN Plaza Hotel lobby might be remodeled

2016-01-21T14:35:00-05:00

The more period commentary on these spaces you read...the more you see the hotel's owners are falling into the very trap the interiors were engineered to escape: banality, anywhere-ness, the flimsiness of changing fashion...Are the current going to rip out the mirror and replace it with barn wood and mason jars? Just wait. Stop the unpermitted demolition. Landmark this interior and, in doing so, remind people of its undated and undateable wonder.

Alexandra Lange writes about the Ambassador Grill & Lounge and Hotel Lobby at the United Nations Plaza Hotel (now known as ONE UN New York), which is currently planned for reconstruction and where illegal exploratory demolition has reportedly begun. The remodeling plan has sparked outcry from advocates, who recently filed a Request for Evaluation with the Landmarks Preservation Commission to grant landmark status to the iconic Roche Dinkeloo-designed interior.

Saving Buildings with Social Media (Or Not)

2014-11-19T14:56:00-05:00

We call it “destructoporn” (since 2007, according to Urban Dictionary) and it comes, unbidden, via digital media. Where did I see that Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s Folk Art Museum, just thirteen years old, was down to steel and rubble? The art critic Jerry Saltz’s Instagram. [...] The dailiness, even hourliness, of social media makes it a perfect vehicle for documenting each thump of the wrecking ball, each crunch of the backhoe. Its visual slant is ideal for activism wrapped up in pictures.

Dreams Built and Broken...

2013-04-22T15:00:00-04:00

Analysis, rather than the promotion of starchitects, was her aim, and a prodigious amount of research underlies her early, punchy pronouncements as well as her late, magisterial style...Her death removes a passionate and particular voice from the shrinking ranks of full-time architecture critics, but also represents a loss of institutional memory for architecture culture...She didn’t offer compromise positions

In the May 6th edition of magazine Alexandra Lange authored a paean, in which she explores the legacy of Ada Louise Huxtable. Ms. Lange identifies how Ada Louise Huxtable's life and career make the case for architecture criticism "as an essential beat for a metropolitan newspaper" as well as for an appreciation of architecture.

Image via Laurie Olin's tribute to Ada Louise Huxtable here

The Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, Reviewed by Alexandra Lange

2012-09-26T19:31:00-04:00

The arena was always a Trojan horse: its stars (Jay-Z), its original starchitect (Frank Gehry), and its semi-public function (bringing pro basketball to Brooklyn) have been used to make the development of the Vanderbilt rail yard seem like a reward rather than an imposition. In 2009, Gehry left the project, adding his arena and tower designs to the long list of New York’s famous unrealized buildings.

The Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, Reviewed

2012-09-20T16:50:44-04:00

I do not think the arena’s architecture should relate better to the context. The immediate context is the developer Forest City Ratner’s two cheaply clad, faux-historicist malls across Atlantic Avenue. The larger context is the lowrise brownstone neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. To relate to the first would be depressing; to relate to the second, impossible. The real building is an exact analogue to the renderings of this site, which... blur and dematerialize the neighbors.

How to Be an Architecture Critic

2012-03-01T15:50:00-05:00

We are rarely roused by the day-to-day, brick-by-brick additions that have the most power to change our environment. We know what we already like but not how to describe it, or how to change it, or how to change our minds. We need to learn how to read a building, an urban plan, a developer’s rendering, and to see where critique might make a difference.... We need more critics — citizen critics — equipped with the desire and the vocabulary to remake the city.

Places features an essay from Alexandra Lange's new book Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012).

Lange takes on a classic text by Ada Louise Huxtable — a review of SOM’s 1967 Marine Midland Bank Building — and shows us why it's so good and what we can learn from it by following in the footsteps of a master.

Editor's Picks #250

2012-02-12T23:32:00-05:00

Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay suggested some ways of Designing a Fix for Housing, beginning with rethinking our historic commitment to detached, single-family homes and segregated Euclidean zoning. Louis Arleo agreed that we need to redesign suburbia but argued "however suburbia will never be improved until architects embrace the idea of a developers business model."

Anthony Carfello, analyzed Los Angeles media’s failings in their role as "the de facto voice" of AEG’s development plans for Farmers Field in Farmers Field: Bringing Football Back on a Need-to-Know Basis. Carfello contended "The existing biases, the assumptions in play, the prized status of CEQA exemption, the traffic, the legitimate fiscal drawbacks weighed against any foreseeable benefits (to the non-AEG public), and greater questions of diversity of primary uses in downtown’s future buildings all beg for further dialogue."and then offered up (323) Projects as an alternative model of citizen discourse.

In the latest addition to the CONTOURS: series Sherin Wing touched on some of the ways various changes taking place in architecture firms with regards to compensation and valuatization, are a result of the "realization that employees are people, not just ‘workers’ or ‘laborers’." in On Business and Bosses.

Gregory Walker commented he would like Sherin to "come on here and enga...

Tell Me a Story, 'Urbanized'

2011-11-07T18:59:37-05:00

As he has moved through the design professions, Hustwit has scaled up from a single typeface (Helvetica) through industrial design (Objectified) and now to cities. Each one has followed essentially the same structure, talking heads interspersed with images, one person and one idea leading to the next. No voiceover. No narrative. No critique. And not a lot of style. As Hustwit told Adam Harrison Levy, that’s the way he wants it.