Archinect - News

Jennifer Bonner's award-winning Office Stack reimagines the perception of mid-rise office design

2019-02-27T13:51:00-05:00

A growing household name within the profession and in academia, Jennifer Bonner's whimsical and highly technical design approach has enabled her to create and re-work traditional design methods. Her creative practice, MALL, is a compilation of playful approaches to "ordinary architecture." The name itself is an acronym with its own flexible meaning, similar to Bonner's design process. By focusing on everyday materials and familiar architecture motifs, the Alabama native architect seeks to perceive and portray architecture through whimsical discourse.

Best Sandwiches by Jennifer Bonner, MALL. Image by Adam DeTour

Office Stacks - Picnic Model by Jennifer Bonner, MALL. Image by Adam DeTour

Recently a winner of the 2019 Progressive Architecture Award, Bonner used her original project study, Best Sandwiches to help create her award-winning project Office Stack. The architectural stack may seem like a conventional building process. However, Bonner allows for each layer of the structure to ...

Oliver Wainwright on OMA's new Copenhagen Blox building: "missed opportunity for Denmark"

2018-05-02T14:25:00-04:00

OMA’s Blox project stacks a museum, offices, gym, restaurant and housing in a provocative attempt to condense the thrilling energy of a city into a single structure – but the result is a gloomy glass monolith [...] It is OMA’s first ever playground, and it doesn’t look as if having fun comes naturally.

Photo: Rasmus Hjortshøj – COAST

The Guardian architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, reviews OMA's new 'Blox' building in Copenhagen, and it's easy to see that he isn't a fan. Like at all.

"From the outside, it doesn’t look promising. Far from suggesting unpredictable intrigue, the building exudes the off-putting sense of a generic corporate office block," Wainwright writes and concludes his critique of this "missed opportunity for Denmark" with a nod to a similarly sized—but bright and joyous—stacked-big-blocks building by Danish OMA offspring, Bjarke Ingels' Billund Lego House.

Ode to the Stack, Los Angeles's iconic infrastructure

2015-04-15T15:40:00-04:00

The Four Level, or Stack as it’s sometimes known, was the first interchange of its kind when it fully opened in 1953. [...] It may seem a cliche to simply associate LA with its freeways, but the connection between the infrastructure and the city’s image is strong. It’s not just about driving, it’s about a new form of urban living in the postwar era [...] “LA kind of emerged at the forefront of that development and it became recognised as a freeway metropolis”