Archinect - News

"Clarity and Contradiction": Part II of our conversation with Kevin Roche, and a discussion about Patrik Schumacher's latest Facebook rant on Archinect Sessions #25

2015-04-16T18:30:00-04:00

Paul's back from Peru, just in time for our 25th episode! And thanks to Patrik Schumacher, it's mostly about criticism. We respond to a polemic/rant left by Schumacher on his Facebook page, "In Defense of Stars and Icons", and consider not simply his argument, but its presentation – how publishing these ideas on a personal Facebook page ultimately says more about celebrity and criticism than Schumacher's exorbitant word count can. In the end, we applaud Schumacher – not for his argument necessarily, but for his performative act of posting such. Now, more than ever in the saturated critical sphere of new media, the medium is the message.

We also finish up the interview Amelia did with Pritzker Prize winner Kevin Roche, and hear his thoughts on sprawl and the undeniable human instinct to gather. Roche is a quiet heavyweight in architecture, amassing an incredible extent of work across multiple eras of architectural history, all without paying any heed to "starchitecture", in any form....

"American Disruption, at Home and Abroad": Gehry's Facebook HQ opens and Airbnb comes to Cuba on Archinect Sessions Episode #24

2015-04-09T17:39:00-04:00

Whatever becomes of Facebook’s corporate future – and therefore the consequential Internet – will play out in the world of Frank Gehry. The architect’s new HQ for Facebook in Menlo Park, MPK20, opened earlier this week with plentiful Instagrammed fanfare, and Facebook recently submitted plans to build two more Gehry buildings in the area. As we discuss on this week’s podcast, MPK20 is refreshingly old-school FOG, designed to embrace Facebook's “work in progress” feel that Gehry’s rougher materiality embraces. It’s Facebook’s and FOG’s world; we’re just living in it.

This episode, we also discuss the arrival of Airbnb in Cuba – whether this style of tourism could encourage architectural preservation, and what the company’s disruptive cachet means when there’s no status quo to disrupt. We’re also featuring part 1 of an interview I did with Kevin Roche, the Pritzker Prize winning architect who got his start over sixty years ago, working with Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen. The 92-y...