Archinect - News

Olalekan Jeyifous' reconstituted 'Unmonument' comes to Brooklyn with the Black Reconstruction Collective

2024-07-30T13:01:00-04:00

Next week, Brooklyn’s Weeksville Heritage Center begins the first of a new imaginative public art installations series from the Black Reconstruction Collective. There, the industrial ‘Unmonument’ will take center stage starting August 8 as the instigator of several other small site activations surrounding it. The aim is to challenge the conventional notions of what the collective says are the most frequently perpetuated ‘myths’ about power, permanence, and the collective experience of the societies that construct them.

As a memorial to the many liberated Black diasporic communities across the country, such as Weeksville, the installation highlights an important narrative within Black history and is augmented by programming from the multidisciplinary oral tradition incubator Black Discourse.

The Crown Heights rendition, reconfigured by Olalekan Jeyifous, precedes Sekou Cooke's Syracuse contribution in September; another from Felecia Davis in Bellefonte, PA, in December; and, next ye...

The Mellon Foundation's Monuments Project expands with $500 million commitment

2023-11-28T14:27:00-05:00

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s influential Monuments Project is about to expand its reach thanks to a newly-announced commitment of $500 million to the now three-year-old initiative that has to date provided 80 projects worth a total of $170 million nationwide.

The amount effectively doubles the available resources from the original $250 million pool that was established at the outset. Reformers targeting America’s “commemorative landscape” have to date provided superlative examples of how to best repair the nation’s psychic wounds, including the forthcoming Memorial to the 1871 Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles and the recent Beyond Granite exhibition for the National Mall in Washington.

The money represents the Mellon Foundation’s largest-ever financial commitment and will be put towards further recognition of the contributions different marginalized groups have made to the United States from the Colonial era on.

Related on Archinect: The Mellon Foundation's Monuments Project aw...

LACMA and Snapchat unveil third Monumental Perspectives AR collection across Los Angeles

2023-09-09T08:00:00-04:00

The third collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)’s ongoing Augmented Reality Monumental Perspectives series has been unveiled to the public, featuring works of five artists that offer insights into the histories of their own unique pockets of LA’s patchwork mosaic of communities.

The series’ final trove includes Victoria Fu, Yassi Mazandi, Rashaad Newsome, Rubén Ortiz Torres, and Alison Saar. Each is accessible through Snapchat’s Lens Explorer tab. The initiative is being funded as part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s larger $250 million The Monuments Project project. LACMA President Michael Govan says each work “challenges us to examine the individual and communal legacies we are leaving today and how we are shaping the future of Los Angeles.”

Rubén Ortiz Torres, Dead Heads (2023). Image courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Yassi Mazandi, The Thirty Birds (2023). Image courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Fu will offer a virtual take on a subject,...

Monument Lab’s thought-provoking sculptural installation opens on the National Mall

2023-08-22T18:04:00-04:00

An important new sculptural installation commissioned by the Trust for the National Mall opened in Washington, D.C. last week to the acclaim of critics and visitors who helped inaugurate the seminal first edition of the Beyond Granite series from Philadelphia-based collective Monument Lab.

Images of the six sculptures designed by artists Wendy Red Star, Derrick Adams, vanessa german, Ashon T. Crawley, Tiffany Chung, and Paul Ramírez Jonas were shared, showcasing the beginnings of what should be one of the year’s most significant public art exhibitions. Written in the Washington Post over the weekend, Philip Kennicott commended the new installation as being both well produced and thoughtful, adding that “this is the first time a serious art exhibition has been staged there” before remarking on the role of the Mall as a protest space.

Paul Ramírez Jonas, "Let Freedom Ring" Image: Courtesy of AJ Mitchell | Monument Lab

Other reviews highlighted the unique ability of each sculpture to co...

Monument Lab announces major new commission on the National Mall in Washington

2023-07-26T15:49:00-04:00

Philadelphia-based studio Monument Lab has been announced as the curatorial leader of a new public art installation on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The pilot exhibition of the Trust’s new Beyond Granite series will be on view for a month (August 18th to September 18th) and feature a response to the program’s thematic question about whose stories “remain untold” at the important site using a selection of six prototype monuments designed by artists Wendy Red Star, Derrick Adams, vanessa german, Ashon T. Crawley, Tiffany Chung, and Paul Ramírez Jonas.

Monument Lab founding Director Paul Farber and last year’s Pulitzer Prize for Criticism winner Salamishah Tillet are co-curating the exhibition and say it will treat the monuments as “a statement of power and presence in public.”

“Beyond Granite: Pulling Together builds out platforms for artist-led civic engagement, historical interpretation, and storytelling as a means for advancing what it means to imagine, build, live, and g...

Activists claim censorship as Mexico City plans to replace feminist 'anti-monument'

2022-08-22T14:16:00-04:00

Residents of Mexico City are decrying a decision by officials to remove a statue protesting gender violence that had been mounted by activists last year. El Universal reported that Claudia Sheinbaum, who serves as Head of Government in Mexico City (a position akin to a state governor), had made the call to remove the feminist “anti-monument.” The statue currently appears in a roundabout in the city, and will soon be replaced by another monument

Sheinbaum has previously announced the commission of artist Pedro Reyes to replace a colonial-era sculpture by Frenchman Charles Cordier that depicted Christopher Columbus in light of the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples protest last summer.

Previously on Archinect: Christopher Columbus statue to be replaced by a monument to Indigenous People in Mexico City

Reyes’ commission was quickly scrapped in favor of an “anti-monument” that debuted in its place on the roundabout in September, prompting officials to almost immediately announce it would be supplanted by a recently-discovered pre-Hispanic relic titled The Young Woman of Amajac. Now the non-hierarchical group behind the protest piece says Sheinbaum is dishonoring what has become a symbolic site for feminist causes nationwide.

“The government trying to take back anti-monument spaces is another way of them trying to silence us,” Ceci Flores, founder of the group Searching Mothers of Sonora, recently told Courtho...

This small Italian town could be the answer to the debate surrounding monuments removal

2022-01-20T15:37:00-05:00

Yet today these two pieces of fascist architectural propaganda are the centrepiece of a bold artistic experiment in addressing the debate around contested monuments, one which offers a template for other communities divided over whether to tear down or keep up monuments with racist, imperialist or fascist connotations.

Bolzano, the capital city of the province of South Tyrol in northern Italy, has become an important case study over its demonstrated ability to thoughtfully frame several of its local fascist monuments in a contemporary light that presents the public with a challenge to improve its own attitudes and look at societal wrongs related to the subject matter of each.

Much of the border community’s original Tyrolean culture was wiped out during the reign of dictator Benito Mussolini, who installed and erected a host of fascist buildings and monuments as part of the establishment of a new ethnic enclave there before the war. The Victory Monument thus became especially potent talismans of Italian identity when set against the prevailing culture of the predominantly German-speaking region, and so they remained untouched until the local administration began its campaign or “recontextualizing” in the last decade following years of dispute and violent episodes which have now gone the way of Il ...

Christopher Columbus statue to be replaced by a monument to Indigenous People in Mexico City

2021-09-07T15:41:00-04:00

As part of an International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples celebration in Mexico City on Sunday, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced a major new addition to a space in the city’s historic Paseo de la Reforma recently vacated by a monument to its colonial past.

Artist Pedro Reyes has now been commissioned for a replacement of a monumental bronze sculpture depicting Christopher Columbus by the Frenchman Charles Cordier that has moved around the city to its eventual place on the historic boulevard since being inaugurated by the controversial President Porfirio Diaz in 1877.

The statue was removed in October of last year in advance of the Dia de la Raza, a holiday that has in recent years drawn protests marking the arrival of the infamous colonizer in the Americas.

Reyes’ commission will depict an Indigenous woman from the Olmec civilization and come with a title that refers to a Uto-Aztecan word for “land.”

Confederate monuments at the center of deadly Charlottesville rally have been removed

2021-07-12T12:43:00-04:00

Charlottesville said in a news release that the equestrian statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as well as a nearby one of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson will be removed Saturday. Designated public viewing areas for the removals will be established in both parks where the statues are located, the news release said.

The city had been planning to take at least the Lee statue down since 2016, which in part prompted the deadly 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally. A number of laws and local ordinances had put the removal in question before a court ruling earlier this year ultimately cleared the way.

The statues were removed on Saturday after a last-minute announcement by the city. NPR has more on the planned removals herer.

Protesters in Canada have toppled monuments to Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II

2021-07-06T21:21:00-04:00

Two statues of queens on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature were pulled down Thursday during a rally aimed at replacing Canada Day celebrations with actions in memory of hundreds of Indigenous children buried in unmarked graves at residential schools across the country. [...] The grounds were the destination of an Every Child Matters walk in Winnipeg on Canada Day afternoon to protest the fallout of Canada's residential schools system.

The demonstrators were part of a Canada Day protest meant to draw attention to issues surrounding the forced removal and integration of 150,000 indigenous school children begun during Victoria's rule of the former UK Dominion. 6,000 of the children are reported to have died, and the recent discovery of the remains of 215 in an unmarked grave at a site near Kamloops in British Columbia has renewed calls for the observance of the holiday to be canceled.

Similar scenes have played out throughout the US and UK recently in light of the George Floyd protests, Charlottesville, and other events that have caused a sea change in societies grappling with their own ugly histories of racism and colonization.

Thousands of people attended the demonstrations in Manitoba's capital, Winnipeg. More details on the protest can be found at artnet.

Fallen Journalists Memorial: AECOM and Paul Goldberger will help materialize a new site of remembrance to commemorate journalists who made the ultimate sacrifice

2021-07-01T08:00:00-04:00

On June 24th, the Fallen Journalists Memorial (FJM) Foundation announced its partnership with global engineering and infrastructure firm AECOM, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger, and the Levinson Group on a new site that pays homage to journalists worldwide. The FJM Foundation commits to memorializing and amplifying the work of these individuals whose lives were lost while in service to pursue the truth.

The memorial is "the culmination of dedicated work by the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation to honor the reporters, photojournalists, producers, editors, and others in the field, who have died while performing their jobs as journalists," shared Claire Sale, AECOM's project manager overseeing the memorial project. "We are honored to have a role in bringing this memorial to life."

The initiative stemmed from the Fallen Journalists Memorial Act that Congress passed in December 2020. The bill authorized the planning and development of "a commemorative work...

Mellon Foundation announces $250M "Monuments Project" to reimagine the way history is told in the U.S.

2020-10-05T16:51:00-04:00

Today, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced a new five-year, $250 million grant effort called the "Monuments Project," which will "transform the way our country's histories are told in public spaces." Grants made under the new initiative will fall under three areas of activity:

Funding new monuments, memorials, or historic storytelling spaces
Contextualizing existing monuments or memorials through installations, research, and education
Relocating existing monuments or memorials

Created in response to the national outcry on racial and social injustice, the Foundation intends to "recalibrate the assumed center of our national narratives to include those who have often been denied historical recognition."

"Monuments, memorials, and other commemorative spaces convey both individual narratives and national values,” said Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander in a statement. “They shape the histories of who we are and influence ongoing discussion about which people in our socie...

Artist wants to transform Chicago dump site into sculpture garden for dismantled monuments

2020-07-13T11:48:00-04:00

Conceptual artist JB Daniel wants to transform a Chicago landfill site near the Calumet River into a sculpture park to house all of the toppled monuments from recent protests, reports The Art Newspaper.

The artist proposes the statues be installed in their topped states with their unoccupied pedestals nearby. According to The Art Newspaper, Daniel added that the park would educate visitors about the country's controversial past and would serve to inform future generations to come.

Philadelphia's Monument Lab revises text of Trump's sculpture garden executive order

2020-07-09T19:58:00-04:00

Last week, President Donald Trump's unveiled the Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes, a measure that sets out to create a new "National Garden of American Heroes" to be filled with statues depicting "historically significant Americans.

The executive order, which comes as a national reckoning over the thousands of confederate and other pro-slavery and anti-Indigenous public monuments continues, has been widely criticized as an outdated and likely problematic concept.

Previously on Archinect: "Trump proposes National Garden of American Heroes sculpture park." Photo courtesy of Wikimedia user Bart Everson.

To this end, Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, a group that has led critical discourse on the nature, history, and significance of public monuments with an eye toward equity and justice since 2012, has rewritten the executive order to reflect the group's more expansive vision for the future of American monuments.

The full text of the re-write is hi...

Trump proposes National Garden of American Heroes sculpture park

2020-07-06T17:43:00-04:00

Over the holiday weekend, President Donald Trump announced the creation of a new "National Garden of American Heroes" that will contain statues depicting "historically significant Americans" and other historical figures like Christopher Columbus.

The order comes as protest movements and activist groups, buoyed by the support of historic preservation groups, destroy or remove memorials dedicated to sordid individuals and causes located around the country, including monuments honoring the confederacy, Christopher Columbus, and other individuals who held racist views or perpetuated violence against Black and Indigenous peoples.

Previously on Archinect: "National Trust for Historic Preservation: 'Removal of Confederate monuments from public places is justified'."Photo courtesy of Wikimedia user Abdazizar

The text of the executive order announcing the sculpture park, states that statues could be dedicated to "the Founding Fathers, those who fought for the abolition of slavery or partici...

London launches commission to review diversity of public realm landmarks, statues, and monuments

2020-06-09T13:02:00-04:00

London Mayor Sadiq Kahn has announced a new commission that will "review and improve diversity across London’s public realm to ensure the capital’s landmarks suitably reflect London’s achievements and diversity."

A press release announcing the creation of the commission states: "The Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm will focus on increasing representation among Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities, women, the LGBTQ+ community and disability groups."

NEW: Today we've unveiled a new commission to review and improve the diversity of London’s public landmarks.

We must commemorate the achievements and diversity of all in our city - and that includes questioning which legacies are being celebrated. pic.twitter.com/dro06UQB7Y
— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) June 9, 2020

The creation of the commission comes as protest movements around the world take aim at monuments celebrating the sordid legacies of slavery and colonialism. In the United States, protesters have taken down prom...

Artists reimagine monuments celebrating the Confederacy

2018-08-17T16:02:00-04:00

After the tragedy, [a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va.] and another honoring Stonewall Jackson were shrouded, but only temporarily. Around the country, similar monuments have been removed. In some cases, only their pedestals remain. We asked artists to contemplate these markers of our country’s racist and violent history — the space they take up, physically and psychically — and imagine what should happen when they are gone.

Around the US many statues and monuments celebrating racism in our country's history have been removed, either partially or fully. The question currently remains on what we as a culture should do concerning the spaces these historical monuments inhabit[ed]. The New York Times asked artists to reimagine these spaces as possibilities for the future.

Reimagined monument by Studio Ijeoma and Michael Yarinsky Design. Image: Studio Ijeoma/Michael Yarinsky Design.

Studio Ijeoma and Michael Yarinsky Design proposed a spiraling structure around the remaining pedestal where a Robert E. Lee monument in New Orleans once stood. The design includes staining the pedestal with colors corresponding to the years of slavery, segregation, and inequity in US history.

Reimagined monument by Studio Ijeoma and Michael Yarinsky Design. Image: Studio Ijeoma/Michael Yarinsky Design.

Located atop the spiraling stairs is a glass sky room where participants are able to stand where the Confederate general's stat...

What some of the world's most famous monuments could have looked like

2018-01-12T09:33:00-05:00

Had things gone differently, France's Arc De Triomphe could have been a massive giant elephant!—at least, that is what architect Charles Ribart envisioned for the landmark back in 1759 before his proposal was rejected by the French Government. Similarly, Sydney's iconic Opera House, known for its distinctive roof, may have never become the masterpiece of modern architecture it is today had the competition opted for the conductor of the Orchestra's entry over that of the Danish architect Jørn Utzon.

Beyond the Arc De Triomphe and Sydney Opera House, many of the world's most famous landmarks could have looked radically different had things gone another way. Here to show what could've been, GoCompare has illustrated the rejected designs of some of these iconic structures.

Arc De Triomphe

45 years before the Arc De Triomphe was built, 18th century architect Charles Ribart proposed to construct a three-story elephant on the very same site. The design was turned down by the French govern...

The New Yorker asks, "Why are so many fascist monuments still standing in Italy?"

2017-10-16T12:57:00-04:00

So why is it that, as the United States has engaged in a contentious process of dismantling monuments to its Confederate past, and France has rid itself of all streets named after the Nazi collaborationist leader Marshall Pétain, Italy has allowed its Fascist monuments to survive unquestioned?

Many monuments and buildings constructed in the late nineteen-thirties, as Benito Mussolini was preparing to host the 1942 World's fair, are still standing in Rome.

"In Germany, a law enacted in 1949 against Nazi apologism, which banned Hitler salutes and other public rituals, facilitated the suppression of Third Reich symbols. Italy underwent no comparable program of reëducation."

How one architect is fighting for diversity in the field

2017-08-22T14:47:00-04:00

The project, called Paper Monuments, will entail a series of posters plastered all over the city that detail the people, places, events, and movements of the city’s 300-year history. “When we make decisions that do embody hatred, whether we mean to or not, it allows for society to grow along those frameworks. Our job should be to acknowledge them and counteract them and produce things that elevate the welfare of the constituents that we serve.”

“It’s not simply about the ways individuals hold onto ideology, but it is more so about the way individuals embed their ideology into the spaces and places we all frequent. For us the Paper Monuments project is still rooted in the fact that these symbols of oppression need to be countered by symbols of those people who’ve fought against that oppression.”

Bryan C. Lee Jr., a New Orleans-based architect, has been working on increasing representation in the field and fighting the inequalities that architecture perpetuates because of that lack of diversity. Formerly the director of place and civic design at the Art Council of New Orleans, Lee formed his own design-firm-cum-nonprofit Colloqate Design to coalesce his efforts to fight the racism embedded in the built environment. In addition to that, Lee started a local chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects in NO and another one at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he received his masters degree in archite...

Montgomery, Alabama plans a memorial to the 4,000+ victims of lynchings throughout the U.S.

2017-08-21T18:08:00-04:00

Slated to open in 2018, the Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama will seek to tell the truth. Six acres of land owned by the Equal Justice Initiative—the legal services nonprofit Stevenson founded in 1989—will memorialize the more than 4,000 victims of what Stevenson calls racial terror lynching in the American South between 1877 and 1950. A nearby museum will tell the history of slavery, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration as a single narrative.

Designed by MASS Design Group—which has previously worked on the Kigali Genocide Memorial—the memorial stems from a comprehensive report on lynchings released in 2015 by the Equal Justice Initiative. The memorial will feature six-foot columns, each representing counties where lynchings took place. For each column, a duplicate will be placed in the surrounding courtyard and eventually relocated to their respective counties as they directly confront their part in this history.

Land surrounding Michael Heizer’s "City" could lose national monument protection under Trump Administration

2017-07-31T14:55:00-04:00

As City—Michael Heizer’s vast Land Art installation in the Nevada desert—nears completion, the fate of the federally protected land surrounding it could soon be decided. Ryan Zinke, the US Interior Secretary, visited the state on Sunday, 30 July, as part of a review of 27 national monuments ordered by President Donald Trump, which could result in some of these lands being reopened to development.

"A number of museums banded together to call for the site’s preservation," The Art Newspaper explains the background of City's current surroundings (previously also on Archinect), "and in 2015, Obama created the Basin and Range National Monument, which covers 704,000 acres in southern Nevada’s Lincoln and Nye counties, including the land surrounding City and several Native American rock art sites. The next year, he created the Gold Butte National Monument, which covers 300,000 acres in Clark county."

A monument to outlast humanity

2016-08-30T12:48:00-04:00

“My good friend Richard Serra is building out of military-grade steel. That stuff will all get melted down. Why do I think that? Incans, Olmecs, Aztecs—their finest works of art were all pillaged, razed, broken apart, and their gold was melted down. When they come out here to fuck my ‘City’ sculpture up, they’ll realize it takes more energy to wreck it than it’s worth.”

Heizer, a pioneer of the earthworks movement, began “City” in 1972. A mile and a half long and inspired by ancient ritual cities, it is made from rocks, sand, and concrete mined and mixed on site.

“ ‘City’ is one of the most important works of art to have been made in the past century. Its scale and ambition and resolution are simply astonishing.” Its unseen status has made the place almost mythic—it’s art-as-rumor, people say—and has turned the artist, who became known for chasing off unwanted visitors and yanking film out of cameras, into a legend, or a “Scooby Doo” villain." -Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

Heizer, who is given to playful lamentation, complains about what New York is turning him into: “A decaffeinated, used-up, once-was quick-draw cowboy, a sissy boy who eats at Balthazar for lunch.” At such moments, he is a cartoon roughneck, swatting at his own amusement like a housefly. “Chemical castration—doesn’t happen all at once,” he sa...

Meet Hossein Amanat, the architect who designed Iran's most famous monument

2016-01-14T15:31:00-05:00

For 45 years, Iran's most famous modern monument, the Azadi (Freedom) Tower in Tehran, has been the backdrop to every major news story coming out of the country...Hossein Amanat was a rising star in Iran's architectural scene when, in 1966, he won a national competition to design the monument...Its historical pull, he believes, lies in the tower's evolution as a 'symbol of Iran'...that is both intensely Iranian and Islamic at the same time.

Heizer's "City" now part of national monument, thanks to POTUS

2015-07-10T15:23:00-04:00

Using his authority under the Antiquities Act, the president created a protected area spanning roughly 704,000 acres in central Nevada’s Basin and Range, as well as smaller ones in California’s Berryessa Snow Mountain and Texas’ Waco Mammoth. [...] Broadly supported by environmentalists, [Basin and Range] is also home to a major earthen sculpture, “City” which the artist Michael Heizer has worked to create over nearly half a century.

All in all, these new monuments cover more land than the state of Rhode Island, adding significant mileage to Obama's public lands legacy. The Basin and Range (Nevada), Berryessa Snow Mountain (California) and Waco Mammoth (Texas) monuments cover lands that are either completely or mostly undeveloped, and their now-protected status will prohibit mining and energy leasing.

The designation also encompasses Michael Heizer's "City", the massive land-art project now in the final stage of its creation, located in Garden Valley, Nevada. "City" was an integral part of a public preservation campaign aimed at getting President Obama to act on the area. Heizer will reportedly attend the White House ceremony when the President will sign the monument proclamations.

Also now off the table are talks of a possible rail corridor through the Basin and Range area, chiefly for shipping nuclear waste to the nearby Yucca Mountain repository.

For more on the history of Heizer's "City":

#ProtectCity campaign l...

A Soviet-nostalgia project

2014-12-24T14:54:00-05:00

This process is cheaper and faster than restoration, and allows developers to make cosmetic improvements as they see fit. Moscow, you are a fake and a fraud.

Masha Gessen penned a "Dear John" letter to Moscow. Exploring the city and its love affair with anthropomorphic monuments, she laments the "barbaric destruction" and hipsterization of the city’s historic architecture and public spaces.

Budget Busters: ranking the world's most overbudget monuments

2014-10-17T18:22:00-04:00

Damningly described as ‘hell on wheels’, ‘malice in blunderland’, and ‘a field of dreams’; welcome to a run-down of some of the world’s most eye-wateringly over-budget projects.

After adjusting costs for inflation and converting into US Dollars, Podio put together a simple, nifty visualization of the world's most over-budget monuments. Unsurprisingly, Olympic and large infrastructure projects rank high, with projects like Healthcare.gov and the International Space Station thrown in the mix for comparison.

Check out the projects below in the interactive infographic:

(via Podio).

The TALL DC: New Monumentalism exhibit questions Washington D.C.‘s building height restrictions

2014-08-04T19:10:00-04:00

The recent "TALL DC: New Monumentalism" exhibition took a critical approach to how outdated urban building standards -- specifically in D.C. -- can affect the built environment and the field of architecture, even as social demands and technology progress. Graduate students of Emerging Technologies and Media at The Catholic University of America proposed three skyscrapers among D.C.'s historical monuments to further encourage the questioning of this notion and the definition of "a monument".

More photos and other details on Bustler.

"The Mound of Vendôme" digs up Paris' dirty revolutionary past

2014-07-02T19:20:00-04:00

Situating The Mound of Vendôme, the current exhibition on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, requires looking back into Paris' history after the French Revolution. For a tumultuous two months in 1871, the city was under the control of the Commune de Paris, a socialist revolutionary government. Their distaste for imperialistic brute force and Bonapartism led to their demolition of the Place Vendôme Column, a monumental column celebrating Napoleon's military victories -- and so on May 16, 1871, the Column was felled, and the statue of Napoleon from the Column's peak melted down for coins. After the Commune was ousted, the Column was rebuilt in 1874, topped by a copy of the original Napoleon statue.

To control the Column's fall and protect surrounding buildings, Communards piled a large mound of sand, straw, branches, and manure at its base, a large architectural intervention that completely disrupted the Column's imposing icon. These days, however, all traces of these events...

Parliament-themed Austrian Pavilion revealed for 2014 Venice Biennale

2014-03-18T19:39:00-04:00

Power to the people is the driving force behind the Austrian Pavilion for the upcoming 2014 Venice Biennale. The pavilion will include an exhibition that explores the concept of parliament and its architectural influence on the world's more than 200 national parliament monuments.

The pavilion was designed by a collective team including Commissioner Dr. Christian Kühn, Harald Trapp, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Auböck + Kárász Landscape Architects, Kollektiv/Rauschen, and the Vienna University of Technology - Institute of Architecture and Design.

Here's a glimpse of the models in the exhibition:

Find out more on Bustler.