Archinect - News

Beloved architectural historian, scholar, and academic Anthony Vidler passes away at 82

2023-10-20T15:16:00-04:00

Princeton University has shared news of the passing of beloved longtime School of Architecture faculty member Anthony Vidler yesterday, October 20th, after a short battle with illness. He was 82.

Vidler was known throughout academia as a formative mentor and thought leader who shaped the development of architecture from within the apparatus of higher education, inspiring thousands of students into both teaching and professional practice during his over 50-year career.

Born in England, Vidler studied at the University of Cambridge and Delft University of Technology before coming to the United States to teach as Princeton's William R. Kenan Jr. Chair of Architecture. It was there, in 1965, that he became the SoA’s first-ever History and Theory Ph.D. program director, steering it for a period of 30 years before he departed to serve as the Dean of Cornell University's College of Art, Architecture and Planning. He would later go on to be appointed Dean of The Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin...

Influential Italian postmodernist architect Paolo Portoghesi passes away aged 91

2023-05-31T15:04:00-04:00

An important driver of postmodernism in Italy has been lost following the death of Italian architect, theorist, and historian Paolo Portoghesi in his native country this week at the age of 91.

The author of the 2000 title Nature and Architecture enjoyed a long and influential academic career in Italy while simultaneously working to complete several important religious and cultural commissions such as the Mosque of Rome, Strasbourg Mosque, Casa Baldi, and Theatre of Cagliari as an architect following his graduation from the Sapienza University of Rome in 1957.

Portoghesi also served as President of the Venice Biennale from 1979 to1992 and was a notable participant in the Documenta 5 exhibition and other key artistic exhibitions across Europe during the same time period. His teaching career began the previous decade at his alma mater, where his renowned expertise in Baroque architecture was further enabled via a collaborative relationship with his friend and mentor, Bruno Zevi.

The C...

Influential urban theorist Christopher Alexander has passed away at 85

2022-03-21T17:46:00-04:00

The world of architectural theory is in mourning after news that architect, urbanist, AIA Gold Medalist, and former UC Berkeley professor Christopher Alexander passed away peacefully in his home in the south of England Thursday following a long illness.

Alexander was a pioneering theorist and early proponent of the New Urbanism movement who authored several crucial texts including The Timeless Way of Building and 1973’s seminal A Pattern Language.

Born in Austria in 1936, Alexander read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge before immigrating to the United States to attend both MIT and Harvard in 1958. Alexander joined the faculty as Professor of Architecture at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design in 1963.

As a theorist, he was instrumental in developing still-used planning methods first published in The Oregon Experiment in 1975 and known for influencing the development of a software engineering concept that eventually led to Wikipedia. As an architect, he demonstrated ...

The Solipsism of Architecture by Ole Bouman

2021-01-04T20:49:00-05:00

Over 20 years since the Kyoto Protocol, over 10 years since the Global Financial Crisis, and in the first year of the global Coronavirus pandemic, there has been no real change in the architecture of architecture itself. That will only happen when it stops connecting everything with itself, stops beginning with itself. When it admits the revolution into its own citadel.

Ole Bouman writes a Volume piece on 'Solipsism of Architecture' where he discusses a revolution will not happen in architecture until...
...Until then, in an inversion of Le Corbusier’s most notorious epigram: Architecture or Revolution. Architecture can be avoided.

Previously on Archinect 1, 2

How an obsession with illness shaped modern architecture, according to Beatriz Colomina

2019-05-06T18:49:00-04:00

Clean lines, white surfaces and indoor-outdoor living epitomise early modern architecture. Contrary to received wisdom, to Colomina this is less a machine aesthetic than a hospital aesthetic. Through the lens of disease, nervous disorders, sexuality and self-expression, Colomina’s fascinating interpretation of modern architecture suggests the motivating factors behind the architectural revolution were the need for health and cleanliness, hygiene and smooth, calming surfaces.

In light of her recently published book X-Ray Architecture, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina talks about the history of how illnesses shaped the clean aesthetics of 20th-century modern architecture.

‘‘In the 20th century architects from Le Corbusier to Mies van der Rohe to Alvar Aalto are all obsessed with illnesses,’’ Colomina tells The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘‘Corb says the old city has to be destroyed and a new architecture should emerge because it produces tuberculosis.’’

Hawthorne and Wagner on Robert Venturi's theory impact

2018-10-01T14:01:00-04:00

The idea of the “both-and” suggested a new pluralism, and maybe a new tolerance, in architecture. But the phrase turned out to have its limits. To the extent that Venturi was making an argument in favor of a kind of big-tent populism in architecture, it was a space for new styles instead of new voices, new forms rather than new people. In fact, tucked inside Complexity and Contradiction is an argument for a renewed insularity in the profession [...].

Christoper Hawthorne, former LA Times architecture critic and now Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles, dissects Robert Venturi's 1966 book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (which famously scoffs at the Miessian classical Modernism with the "less is a bore" tagline), and argues in his piece in The Atlantic that the array of new choices the book offered also limited architecture's broader access to the public and diversity in the profession.

Meanwhile in another publication of the Atlantic network, McMansion Hell blogger Kate Wagner is out with a CityLab article on how Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour's 1972 Learning from Las Vegas influenced an entire generation of architects, and her personally: "I came from Anywhere, U.S.A., far, far away from any great works of architecture," she writes. "Venturi’s elevation of everyday buildings made me feel seen, made me feel like the places I had observed, and my appreciation for them, were valid and me...

Keller Easterling discusses her latest book "Medium Design" with Failed Architecture

2018-07-09T23:07:00-04:00

In her latest book Medium Design, Easterling turns this idea of disposition to our ways of thinking, and rehearses a set of tools to address unfolding relations in spatial and non-spatial contexts. She rejects the righteousness of manifestos and certainty of ideologies, urging ways of thinking better attuned to complexity and ambiguity.

Keller Easterling, architect, theorist, writer and Professor at Yale University School of Architecture, discusses her new book, Medium Design, with Hettie O’Brien. In this conversation she expounds on the ideas around no new master plans or right answers, tying together concepts from her previous book Extrastatecraft. Easterling asserts, “Culture is good at pointing to things and calling their name but not so good at describing the relationships between things or the repertoires they enact.”

Spires and Gyres: Contemporary Architecture in Jakarta

2017-11-28T14:56:00-05:00

Jakarta is perhaps the truest realization of a post-colonial cosmopolis. Many former colonial capitals stage a rivalry between quaint traditional centers and desperation-driven peripheries. But Jakarta can be understood not as a dialogue with its former foreign overlords but rather as a fiercely insistent projection of Indonesian independence.

In his latest article for Places, Joe Day examines the contemporary architecture of Jakarta through the framework of the utopian terms of the Five Pancasilas, the founding principles of modern Indonesia.

Day traces the development of Indonesian architecture from founding president Pak Sukarno's “modernism with Indonesian characteristics” to the new architectures heralded by the Arsitek Muda Indonesia (AMI) generation of the 1980s and '90s and their contemporary successors.

It's Archigram's Future: We are just living in it

2017-11-17T12:39:00-05:00

Archigram can be seen as part of several trends that influence metropolitan life to this day. One was the Pop Art movement, where color, dynamism, fashion, and disposability were presented in graphics as understated as a passing billboard.

While history may be said to define us, it could also be that history paves the roads in which we will ultimately walk. Archigram, known for being an avant-garde architectural group formed in the 1960s and for its neo-futuristic, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist theoretical projects, may, in fact, have been more prophetic than theoretical. While their work has been the precedent for endless variations of conceptual and realized projects, it may also ultimately end up being the destination as well.

Eye dont not understand?

2017-11-13T13:17:00-05:00

In order for that kind of writing instruction to occur, what is needed is a culture shift toward an environment where all teachers — not just English teachers — believe they have permission to devote meaningful amounts of class time to writing instruction.

The romanticized view of the Architect, sitting, drawing and creating is a beautiful one indeed, but all too often are the words, the text that pulls the sketches together, that make sense of the whimsical strokes stay forgotten. Without the written history of Architecture, we would not have isms, movements, or orders — we would have no Architecture to talk about at all.

Is Architecture at a loss for words? Is it at a loss of the ability to speak, record its concepts, ideas and philosophies? With grand and verbose statements such as Architecture is Dead, The End of Theory, Make New History, and Imagine a world without Architecture making their rounds, how is Architecture to respond? Can it? Are these declarations only possible because of the diminishing role of parole in the discipline at large? When mass communication is limited to 40 characters, ten images, hashtags and lol, how do we allow Architecture to speak with words if our future generations are not focused on them?

...

Moneo & Frampton In Dialogue

2017-11-06T14:42:00-05:00

Therefore it ought to be recognized that even in the entire second half of the 20th century, the true way to try to find out what architectural theory means ought to be figured out by reading historians. In a way, historians are depositaries, they have defined the paradigm of what could be considered ‘modernities,’ something that has changed radically in this new century.

"The ever diminishing role played by theory and thought in professional practice is, according to Frampton and Moneo, one of the principal challenges that contemporary architecture is faced with. Add to this the great transformations taking place in society, the economy, and architecture itself, thanks to which the traditional discourses, based on concepts like Zeitgeist, rationalism, and faith in progress, are ineffective. Not to mention the precarization of the labor market, with its terrible effects on young people. In this situation Frampton and Moneo call for a more critical reading of globalization, and also an ethic of resistance grounded upon the principles of the architectural discipline."

Federica Buzzi's critique on the Le Corbusier Modulor

2017-05-31T14:20:00-04:00

The Modulor Man is a healthy white male enhanced by mathematical proportional gimmicks ‘of nature’, such as golden ratio and Fibonacci series. He represents the normative and normalised body around which Le Corbusier conceived his designs. As a result, most modern architectural forms are all tellingly calibrated on a similar standard, the healthy white male body.

"Given the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s groundbreaking research regarding medicalisation in architecture and its extensive Le Corbusier collection," the author Federica Buzzi writes, "I think it is time to address the role of norm and standard in Le Corbusier’s work and its legacy."

Top Features: Our Favorite Feature Articles of 2016

2016-12-26T10:00:00-05:00

These are the articles that made big waves in 2016 – not just in traffic, but in defining the discussions architects were having. From professional practice issues to academia to interviews and showcases, we present to you our favorite original editorial of the year:

One student's solution to the permanent limbo of refugee camps

There are more refugees in the world right now than since World War II—and the world is woefully unable to shelter them. This student imagines a refugee camp that would be both livable and high functioning.

Frank Gehry, Liz Diller, Rem Koolhaas and Others Share Crucial Moments in Their Education

Ever wonder how some of the biggest names in the industry—the 'starchitects'—got to where they are? Julia Ingalls gathers snippets of big name architects' memories of their halcyon (or not) years spent in the academy.

If Only I Had Known: Advice for Prospective Architecture Students, from Former Students

Architecture school is a costly enterprise. It's also really hard. So...

Open Call : MASKS the Journal // FAUX FAMI(lies)

2016-08-11T18:56:00-04:00

MASKS is an independent journal of dissimulation in art | architecture | design founded in 2015 by Clemens Finkelstein and Anthony Morey while being graduate students in the History and Philosophy of Design at Harvard University.

Faux Families exploits our insatiable longing for be-longing. It infiltrates our conscious and unconscious disciplinary behavior. Conceived at a time that has been dubbed the age after-belonging, the upcoming issue of MASKS will take a closer look at the structures of connectivity and the patterns of disconnection at work …

MASKS is a questing spirit for everything exploring the aggregate of present, past and future disciplinary structures in and between the fields of art, architecture and design.

MASKS challenges the basic assumption of the dialectic reality/fiction. Fictional narratives become reality through ritualistic events. MASKS is the shaman that performs these rituals.

MASKS believes in the performance of appearance, not the predetermined disciplin...

Editor's Picks #386

2014-09-25T11:58:00-04:00

Sean Smith continues his series, in which three architects discuss their transition from student to professional. Therein, Eric Höweler of Höweler + Yoon makes the point that much of running a firm is about finding work;

"In school everyone wants to be designers and have their own practice, but what most students don't connect is that having a practice is also being a businessman or woman – that you have to run a business which includes finding work, negotiating contracts and building consensus among people from different fields".

In Material Witness #4, Julia Ingalls explores how "In cinema, signage plays a duplicitous role".

News
NYC's historic 190 Bowery was part of a massive buy-up by developer RFR Holdings. Amelia Taylor-Hochberg, re-published a piece from 2008, for historical context. Fred Scharmen remembers "reading this when it originally posted. Thanks for putting it up again. Very sad that this unique space will be chewed up so that something not unique at all can take its p...

Joanna Warsza Curates Architecture Between East and West

2014-07-10T13:23:00-04:00

Buildings perform a variety of functions: They shelter, illuminate, and obscure surrounding people and landscapes. The fundamentally pragmatic purpose of architecture endows edifices with a wide range of functions, but rarely does architecture speak. Curator Joanna Warsza, however, organizes performances and interventions that implore architecture to speak back.

When does the architecture begin?

2014-05-12T17:57:00-04:00

MIT Prof. Mark Jarzombek on the notion of primitive, the worldwide evolution of the housing, and the fate of the native populations in the modern environment When does the architecture begin? How the pit house can explain the global migrations and links between the Navahos and first men in Europe? MIT Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture Mark Jarzombek clarifies the essence of the problem.

Kenneth Frampton to receive Lisbon Triennale Lifetime Achievement Award 2013

2013-12-18T18:43:00-05:00

Architecture critic, historian, and professor Kenneth Frampton was named as the 2013 laureate for the Lisbon Triennale Lifetime Achievement Award on Dec. 15.

The award recognizes a person or practice whose work and ideas have had a lasting influence on architectural theory and practice today. This year, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale commissioned Portuguese artist Fernanda Fragateiro to design the prize.

Frampton will accept the award at a ceremony taking place at Lisbon’s Centro Cultural de Belém in early January 2014. He will also give a featured lecture at the event.

"The jury composed by Beatrice Galilee, Gonçalo Byrne, Guilherme Wisnik, Juhani Pallasmaa, Mónica Gili, Taro Igarashi and William Menking chose Kenneth Frampton for his outstanding contribution to architectural theorization and critical reflection, both as as lecturer and author of countless articles, essays and monographs.

A graduate of the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, Ke...

Editor's Picks #332

2013-09-10T11:11:00-04:00

Orhan Ayyüce penned a remembrance to his friend architect Larry Totah, titled Slow Weather of Architecture. Therein he describes "The House"...overlooking Pacific Ocean rather edgewise and build like a long drawing depicting a horizontally composed architecture. The fog, roof and the walls are more of Chumash hiring Hopi to build on their mountains for few exquisite basket full of shellfish to adorn the wedding dresses in Hopi villages like the ones a Don Juan dreamed of, a fair exchange"...

Amelia Taylor-Hochberg interviewed architectural photographer Bilyana Dimitrova, formerly Metropolis Magazine’s photo editor. The two discussed Architecture Photography in the 21st Century ahead of the exhibition 'Beyond the Assignment: Defining Photographs of Architecture and Design' which will be presented by the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University, October 5 - November 1, 2013.

Orhan Ayyüce penned a remembrance to his friend architect Larry Totah, titled Slow Weather of Architecture. Therein he describes "The House" which "continuously frames and de-frames itself in three or four sets of axis minded passages. In the front, overlooking Pacific Ocean rather edgewise and build like a long drawing depicting a horizontally composed architecture. The fog, roof and the walls are more of Chumash hiring Hopi to build on their mountains for few exquisite basket full of shellfish to adorn the wedding dresses in Hopi villages like the ones a Don Juan dreamed of, a fair ...

Project 1984: What About the Possibility of a Kynical Architecture?

2012-08-24T12:11:00-04:00

For an architect, in the instant that he has undivided attention of a patron with the power to realize his designs, literally nothing else matters; not a fire alarm, not even an earthquake; there is nothing else to talk about but architecture.

-Dejan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex

The fully developed ability to say No is also the only valid background for Yes, and only through both does real freedom [begin] to take form.

-Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

City
Four towers rise above the city like muscular trunks in a grass field. Their scale obliterates any possible question about the intentionality of their disproportionate size. The exaggerated disparity between them and the urban fabric could not have been accidental. The towers were unquestionably built to be the main focus, the sole object of attention. They are by lengths the most important buildings in the city. The towers deliver an explicit message of datum and order. Visible from any point in the ci...

Drawing Architecture - Conversation with Perry Kulper

2012-08-05T11:50:00-04:00

If “action painting” is produced by the dynamics of dripping, smearing, and sweeping brushstrokes of paint to reveal the complex character of abstract art, then “action drawing” would be something like juxtaposing lines, planes, volumes, typographical elements, photographs, and paper cutouts on a drawing that aims to uncover the intricate universe of architectural ideas.

Each of Perry Kulper’s architectural drawings is a cosmos of information and possibilities that resist the banal and simplistic reductionism so typical of contemporary architectural representation. Series after series, his drawings display objects as background, and background as object in a constant visual journey of an architecture that doesn't settle and always evolves: an architecture of ideas.

WAI Architecture Think Tank discussed with Perry Kulper the concept, intention, and potential of drawing architecture.

WAI: There was a moment in our academic experience in which we became very interested in the potential...

Discovering Khidekel

2012-07-18T09:46:00-04:00

What About the Last Suprematist?

When one speaks of revolutionary art, two kinds of artistic phenomena are meant: the works whose themes reflect the Revolution, and the works which are not connected with the Revolution in theme, but are thoroughly imbued with it, and are Colored by the new consciousness arising out of the Revolution. -Leon Trotsky

October 1917 opened an architectural Pandora’s Box.
During the Russian revolution, the avant-garde exercises of the Cubo-Futurists, Rayonnists, Suprematists, and Constructivists, paralleled to the unmovable inflexibility of the Stalinist “establishment” to reveal the difference between architecture of the revolution and revolutionary architecture.

While architecture of the revolution responds to the iconoclastic demands of the moment and creates a profusion of icons that portray a specific historical period, revolutionary architecture strives to break with the current paradigms, establishing a new architectural language that detac...

Pure Hardcorism

2012-07-11T19:15:00-04:00

Hard-Core: characterized by or being the purest or most basic form of something. [1]

Manifesto
In the kingdom of architecture the shapes reign supreme. Centuries of the continuous search for a transcendental architecture serve as evidence that a pure shape is the ultimate aesthetic utopia. Hardcorism is the theory of architecture as pure geometric shapes. The first endless architectural manifesto, it announces the advent of an architecture of already known looks. Hardcorism is form as ideology. Ideology as form.

Architects have been searching for the pure shapes ever since they started registering icons on a monumental scale. The pure shapes have become an endless obsession. A Platonic fetish. A recurrent topic. The pure shapes represent the ultimate aspiration of mankind. A direct connection to the gods. Form as temple. Religion as geometry.

Hardcorism is pure form unconcealed. It is blunt, straightforward, explicit, up front. It presents itself as it is, and represents ...

WAIzine 2 Coming Soon (Reserve your copy!)

2012-06-21T13:32:00-04:00

What About It? Part 2 to be released on July 7, 2012

The second issue of the graphic narrative in magazine format by WAI Architecture Think Tank includes essays, Manifestos, Projects, Collages and a series of Conversations with:
Simona Rota (Madrid)
Zhang Ke / standardarchitecture (Beijing)
Bernd Upmeyer / MONU (Rotterdam)
Perry Kulper (Michigan)

To order a printed copy (numbered limited edition of 100) of the WAIzine part 2 please email your order contact@wai-architecture.com (Subject: waizine) and you will receive a reply with the shipping details and an invoice through PayPal. If bank transfer is preferred please let us know.

WAIzine part 2 Information
What About It? Part 1
Soft cover, 100 pages , Black / White, Colour
Dimmensions: 205mm by 275mm
Publisher: WAI Architecture Think Tank Publishers
Language: English

For pricing and more information go to: www.wai-architecture.com

and www.waithinktank.com

Megastructures are the Shopping Malls of the Avant-Garde

2012-03-27T12:51:00-04:00

What About ideal cities, and counter revolutionary master plans?

Avant-Garde
The avant-garde is a paradoxical state. In order to exist, it relies on its incongruous condition of being both fundamentally contemporary and ahead of its time. A conceptual palimpsest, the avant-garde requires writing its history over its own past keeping a vulnerable balance between present problems, and possible future solutions. All about contextualizing the perfect timing, what happens when the avant-garde goes out of sync; when its solutions are overlooked for being too premature, or ridiculed for being delayed?

In the past century alone, the avant-garde was victim of two untimely appearances. In the first one, its proposals arrived too early; the world was taken aback by the boldness of its ambitions, by the audacity of its delirium. In the second coming, the avant-garde was too late. Here its stratagems were on a futile mission of inventing a program that already existed.

These consecutive...

The Shapes of Hardcore Architecture

2012-03-16T11:02:00-04:00

hard–core

adj \-ˈkȯr\

1: a : of, relating to, or being part of a hard core
2: of pornography : containing explicit descriptions of sex acts or scenes of actual sex acts
3: characterized by or being the purest or most basic form of something

Modernism

Modern Architecture was a fashion statement. Coated with an ideology of social impromptu and urban reconstruction, it seems undeniable and remarkable that the dominant gene of the Modern Movement’s DNA was its aesthetics.

Everything, from the “hygienic” appearance of its white villas, to its revolutionary materials—glass, steel and concrete, to its grid-restricted urban plans and its desolated tree-less plazas, was a trend; a stylistic straightjacket fiercely defended through an almost endless list of manifestoes and catalogues that prophesied how the modernist Zeitgeist should be portrayed.

Modernism’s plan was to become alchemistic through fashion; it was trying to transform positivism, rationalism, and Cartesianism i...

Alien, Immigrant, Refugee: The Architecture of Hospitality

2012-01-30T18:52:00-05:00

Passage across a border wrenches us from a space of citizenship — where our individual being is cloaked in layers of legal protection — to a space where we experience at once freedom and nothingness. As architects and planners, we lack the language for describing this shift in the perception and socio-political dimension of place; for distinguishing between the place of the citizen and the place of the stranger within the space of the state.

In an essay on Places titled "Hospitality Begins at Home," architect and Pratt Institute professor Deborah Gans explores the spatial and political dimensions of being a stranger, particularly an immigrant or refugee. She reviews Maya Zack's Living Room exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York and the In-House Festival at the Jerusalem Season of Culture.