COOKFOX to design Bruce Springsteen archive at Monmouth University

2023-10-19T15:47:00-04:00

COOKFOX has announced plans for a new musical archive and education center dedicated to preserving Bruce Springsteen’s legacy on the campus of Monmouth University in New Jersey.

The new Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music (BSACAM) will be realized as a 29,000-square-foot repository of The Boss’s five-decade catalog and includes a space for a 230-seat theater, exhibition galleries, and study center dedicated as a showcase of musical traditions in the country he has so influenced through song.

The project is said to be located not far from where Springsteen penned the lyrics to his breakthrough 1974 album, Born to Run.

Image courtesy COOKFOX/Monmouth University

An homage to Springsteen’s post-industrial ethos is represented by the architect’s material choices for the building, which is comprised of weathering steel, concrete, and timber elements. Visitors will enter the rectangular two-story single volume through a central access path built to resemble the iconic J...

The boring domestic origins of 1980s hardcore music

2015-08-26T17:45:00-04:00

Hardcore Architecture is a project by Chicago artist Marc Fischer exploring the relationship between domestic spaces, urban and suburban neighborhoods, and underground hardcore and punk bands of the 1980s. [...] The results of his media archaelogy are a funny, ironic and intriguing snapshot of American vernacular architecture in the 1980s. It's also a fascinating alternative vision of the places where underground culture has been created and nurtured

"Hardcore Architecture" (which we also posted on back in May) is now available as a limited-edition booklet, featuring 68 Google Street View snapshots of homes that housed punk and hardcore bands in 1980s. Besides their shared genre-base, these homes all have one thing in common: they are pretty boring. Or to be more charitable, perfect examples of "American vernacular architecture in the 1980s".

In this MinnPost piece, Chicago-based artist and creator of "Hardcore Architecture" Marc Fischer spills some details behind the homes. Here's some select bits from his interview:

"...there are definitely sorts of trends in the building styles. If you’re looking at a gigantic, long brick building in Syracuse, New York, in all likelihood it’s student housing for Syracuse University if it’s not a house. And certainly the homes in Chicago that I found all look pretty normal variations on Chicago types of homes – like brick two-flat buildings. Or in New York, of course, it’s predictably either rea...

Archinect - News

COOKFOX to design Bruce Springsteen archive at Monmouth University

The boring domestic origins of 1980s hardcore music