Archinect - News

Copying is good for design

2012-02-06T13:59:29-05:00

In pre-industrial days, copying used to be a positive act. It was seen as a skill. Artists were looked upon as handworkers. Copying became a negative notion with the cult of the individual artist and the arrival of mass production, which made replication extremely cheap and easy. Copyright and intellectual property laws were created to protect the original. In those days, the amount of new products reaching the market was relatively small.

Open House: What a Concept

2011-05-12T19:08:34-04:00

Most ills in this world (and we know there isn’t a shortage of them) require massive change on systematic and ideological levels. Indeed, it is a capacity—and many say, a responsibility—of design to address the many pressing problems facing the world today. But is this the only role for design? Is design solely a form of crisis management and problem solving? Or can design also offer a different perspective on a problem, without having the aim of solving the problem entirely?

Renny Ramakers responds to the NYT Opinionator piece by Allison Areiff, published last week.

Conceptual Suburbia: A Design Project Descends on Levittown

2011-05-06T19:22:35-04:00

There is no more iconic suburb than Levittown, the postwar planned community built by the developer William Levitt in the late 1940s, so it is understandable that in launching Open House, a collaborative project to imagine a “future suburbia,” the Dutch design collective Droog in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects would make it the focus of their inquiry.