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Take a look at these installations from this year's Coachella Festival

2016-04-21T18:38:00-04:00

Every April, music fans venture in droves to the High Desert outside of Los Angeles for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival – a veritable rite of spring for the selfie era.

And, like with any good spring bacchanal, the musical experience is often enhanced through the consumption of substances, licit or otherwise. But while imbibing may help you maintain stamina for the dance floor, it can also ramp up your internal body temperature (likely already elevated by the grueling desert sun).

Enter the architects and artists responsible for the latter half of Coachella's proper name. Tasked with designing structures that both shade and visually-entertain, the selected designers are given one of the more unusual – and fun – prompts around.

Here's a look at some of the structures that adorned the Empire Polo Club this year:

The Tower of Twelve Stories
Jimenez Lai (Bureau Spectacular)

Described in accompanying texts as a "a cartoonish metropolis of tiny bubble-like spaces populated by ecce...

Editor's Picks #314

2013-05-07T13:14:00-04:00

Over at the LA Times, Christopher Hawthorne reported on LACMA Director Michael Govan’s plan’s for $650-million new building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor...Eric Chavkin commented "New construction has always been fundraising tail that wags the museum dog. Big names to draw bigger money...Now that AMPAS is leveraging it's Oscar prestige to be a part of LACMA, a new name to entice donor dollars is Zumthor, a name that means absolutely nothing to most.

News
Michael Z Wise reviewed the newest edition of Albert Speer, Architecture by Léon Krier for the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Wise concluded his review "Though he is again bemoaning a contemporary inability to regard classicism in a detached manner, it is Léon Krier who is in a delirious thrall to a malevolent aesthetic".

Will Galloway was surprised "wow, i didn't need another reason to dislike krier, but this one certainly seems more than enough to set aside any other complaint about the guy and never revisit them. its amazing that someone could hate modernism so much that even hitler's vision for the world seems palatable to him. nasty". For his part Steven Ward
argued "I'd rather see the swastika redeemed for its original associations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika) than see any redemption of Speer's work. It's not that the style(s) from which he borrowed were bad so much as his intentional bombastic over-scaling of everything. These buildings were meant to communicat...

The Top 10 Pieces Of Folly Architecture

2011-11-14T20:58:04-05:00

Folly architecture, from the French word for 'foolish,' is eccentric and extravagant architecture with an appearance that far overshadows its purpose. Often, its appearance is its sole purpose. The architectural marvels below take many forms, made all around the world from the 19th century to the 90's. There are underground tunnels, an upside down church and a giant banana.