Archinect - News

Countryside: The Future and the Past

2021-01-26T20:48:00-05:00

It is no exaggeration to say that our present is the future that Dorothea Lange’s images foretold. The crisis of agriculture in the face of toxic capitalism and climatic disaster that is at the center of her famous photographs might also have served to focus and sharpen "Countryside: The Future," where it is occasionally a subject but more often merely an unstated subtext.

In "Countryside: The Future and the Past," Deborah Gans reviews Countryside: The Future, at the Guggenheim Museum, the multimedia culmination of years of interdisciplinary, globe-spanning research led by OMA's Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal, director of its think tank, AMO, alongside Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures, curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister at the Museum of Modern Art, the first solo show devoted to the celebrated documentary photographer in more than half a century.

Although the exhibitions are very different in scale, ambition, and emotional tenor, each is propelled by the efforts of vastly different urban artists and professionals to document and comprehend historical transformations in rural life. Together they offer an intriguing counterpoint: one body of work is determined to remain detached; the other is driven by political commitment.

Architecture educators weigh in on the new remote learning paradigm

2020-04-15T14:17:00-04:00

This is the first installment of a narrative survey of educators around the globe on the challenges of the massive move to online teaching. Some challenges are practical and logistical; others are more conceptual, political, and even philosophical, involving the importance of campus community, the role of schools in providing for the wellbeing of students, and passionate convictions about the nature of learning and the transmission of knowledge.

Places Journal, which recently took a hiatus from its regular publishing schedule in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has gathered perspectives from leading architectural educators offering their takes on what some of the challenges and concerns are for the period moving forward as design education necessarily becomes more online oriented.

The piece includes comments from Dr. Harriet Harriss, Dean of the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute, Reinhold Martin, Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, and Susan Piedmont-Palladino professor of architecture at the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech, among others.

The Crumple and the Scrape: Two Archi-Textures in the Mode of Queer Gender

2020-03-05T20:59:00-05:00

Texture is the condition of possibility through which our bodies meet environments; like gender in its relationality, texture is palpable only in becoming. So did the blue carpet in my childhood bedroom enmesh gender between my toes? And if we alter texture — including how we talk about it — might we transform gender in both minute and brash ways?

Whether or not they realize it, architecture critics generally build a body into their writings. And we must allow ourselves, and others, to write bodies other than cis, straight, white, able ones into the affect of our analyses. Changing words — say, crafting new architectural metaphors for trans and queer embodiments — can alter our perceptions of bodies and buildings alike.

Lucas Crawford, the latest recipient of the Arcus/Places Prize for innovative public scholarship on gender, sexuality, and the built environment, explores how the language of architectural criticism influences the ways that we discuss the design of built space.

The Arcus/Places Prize is an ongoing collaboration between Places Journal and the Diversity Platforms Committee of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fairy Tale Architecture: The Butterfly Dream

2018-12-20T12:08:00-05:00

Fairy tales have transfixed readers for thousands of years, and for many reasons; one of the most compelling is the promise of a magical home. How many architects, young and old, have been inspired by a hero or heroine who must imagine new realms and new spaces — new ways of being in this strange world? Houses in fairy tales are never just houses; they always contain secrets and dreams.

"The Butterfly Dream" by Bernheimer Architecture is the third and final installment of this year's Fairy Tale Architecture series, curated by writer Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer. ⠀

The team imagined the butterfly in Zhuangzi's famous parable as a drone, collecting data which can be abstracted to explore the transformation of things. The drawings of this story consist of data from the flight of the drone. These data were converted into a flight path, and then a flight-space. This space was then extruded into shapes and volumes, illustrating both the act of flying as well as the act of (detached, remote) seeing.

Fairy Tale Architecture: The Death of Koschei the Deathless

2018-12-20T10:08:00-05:00

It was the theme of nesting that primarily fascinated us about the Koschei tale, as it corresponded with ideas of sectional nesting that we have exploited as an architectural technique for generating spatial intricacy - LTL Architects.

Our holiday series on fairy tale architecture returns this week with three new features, curated by writer Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer. ⠀
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First up: in "The Death of Koschei the Deathless," LTL Architects examine the strange habits of a fearful man who sought to escape his death through an obsessive nesting of forms within forms and spaces within spaces. Their beautiful rendering of this very strange tale focuses on Koschei's buried reliquaries and how they function in space and in time. The madness and beauty seen in precise details help us access the hopes and fears encoded in the story. ⠀

Concrete Utopia

2018-11-14T09:22:00-05:00

In the construction of the new Yugoslavia, modernist thinking and design were deployed to guide the country’s rapid urbanization and industrialization as well as to unify the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse population.

In columnist Belmont Freeman's latest article for Places, he examines the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and finds a rigorous and revealing survey of Yugoslavia’s extraordinary built legacy that until now has been neglected by mainstream architectural historians.

Unbuilding Gender

2018-10-05T18:16:00-04:00

Gordon Matta-Clark’s inventive site-specific cuts into abandoned buildings demonstrated approaches to the concept of home and to the market system of real estate that were anarchistic, creatively destructive, and full of queer promise.

In "Unbuilding Gender," Jack Halberstam extends the ideas of unbuilding and creative destruction that characterize Gordon Matta-Clark's work to develop a queer concept of anarchitecture focused on the trans* body.

Halberstam is the 2018 recipient of the Arcus/Places Prize for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. The biennial prize is a unique collaboration between the Diversity Platforms Committee of the College of Environmental Design at University of California, Berkeley, and Places, supported by the college’s Arcus Endowment.

What You Don’t See

2018-09-18T19:06:00-04:00

Follow the intricate supply chains of architecture and you’ll find not just product manufacturers but also environmental polluters. Keep going and you’ll find as well the elusive networks of political influence that are underwritten by the billion-dollar construction industry.

In "What You Don't See," Brent Sturlaugson examines the supply chains of architecture to make the case that designers must expand their frameworks of action and responsibility for thinking about sustainability.

Unraveling the networks of materials, energy, power, and money that must be activated to produce a piece of plywood, Sturlaugson argues that "any full accounting of environmental, economic, or social sustainability has got to consider not merely individual buildings and sites but also the intricate product and energy supply chains that are crucial to their construction."

When in Rome

2018-07-10T22:46:00-04:00

"Along with their monumental role in Rome's urban fabric, the architectural status of fountains has long been uncertain. It can be hard to determine when they ceased to be viewed as public water utilities, and came to be regarded as purely artistic objects."

In the same week in 2016, a group of tourists were denounced as trespassers for splashing around in one of Rome's historic fountains, while Fendi was praised for its tribute to Italy's artistic legacy by staging a fashion show across another. Anatole Tchikine is prompted by these contrasting reactions to examine the complicated relationship between architecture, water, and the body in the city — from early modern laundresses to La Dolce Vita.

The Flexible Heart of the Home

2018-05-31T12:44:00-04:00

For too long, the issues of gender, disability, and user-centeredness have been relegated to the far margins of architectural history.

Places columnist Barbara Penner uncovers a parallel narrative to the rise of flexible home design — often attributed to a handful of progressive postwar designers — in the history of home economics. She explores the flexible domestic spaces created by designers such as Lillian Moller Gilbreth to accommodate what we now call "non-conforming" bodies, and shows how their work laid the foundations for the Independent Living and universal design movements.

End Stages: The Future of Hospice Design

2018-05-15T16:38:00-04:00

As hospice design becomes more formally ambitious — and standardized — we should remember there is no universal model for ‘dying well.’

What is the ideal setting for the end of life? The dominant templates of the mid-century mega-hospital and the domestic hospice set the rational spaces of medical institutions against the familiarity of home. Yet, we are increasingly seeing hybrid forms that deviate from these two distinct models. Nitin Ahuja looks ahead to the future of palliative architecture, and argues that in one's final needful hours, the most comforting hearths are those that feel serendipitously constructed.

Into the Uncanny Valley

2018-04-24T15:17:00-04:00

Architectural representations often embody the tension between familiar and unfamiliar. In an effective rendering, the new buildings or landscapes share the same illusionistic space with images of existing buildings or landscapes, producing an almost exquisite confusion between real and unreal.

Architectural renderings are not photographs; or are they? Susan Piedmont-Palladino examines the hyper-real imagined worlds of contemporary architectural drawings through theories of the uncanny, and considers the disconcerting effect that occurs when "we can't quite sort out the relationship of an image to the world."

Beyond the Map: Spikescapes and Wild Strawberries

2018-04-10T15:30:00-04:00

Geography is getting stranger: the map is breaking up. Now we need to attend to the unnatural places, the escape zones and gap spaces, the places that are sites of surprise but also of bewilderment and unease.

Negotiating the hostile architectures of the modern city — from the anti-pedestrian cobbles of a median strip to the unloved landscape of a traffic island — geographer Alistair Bonnett reflects on the increasingly disciplinarian nature of public space, and by crossing roads and planting strawberries, experiments with modes of resistance.

Naoya Hatakeyama: The Photographer and Architecture

2018-04-03T15:34:00-04:00

Taking a photograph of architecture by using a camera is tantamount to placing a small architecture against another large architecture and having the small one swallow the larger one.

The Japanese word for buildings, tatemono, means “things that are standing.” On the occasion of a major career retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Naoya Hatakeyama considers the meaning and the practice of photographing the built environment, and the distinction between the architecture of standing things and lying things that can be made to stand up.

Your Sea Wall Won't Save You

2018-03-29T09:21:00-04:00

Concepts like “making room for the river,” which works well in the Netherlands, can mean mass evictions in the Global South. Too often, the rhetoric of climate adaptation is doublespeak for the displacement of poor communities, and an alibi for unsustainable growth.

As coastal megacities adapt to climate change, they often bring in outside planning experts who push highly engineered, technocratic resilience programs. Lizzie Yarina looks at how this trend is affecting local communities in Bangkok, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Jakarta, and argues that "resilience is not fundamentally a technical question. It is social and political. Planners and designers must recognize and negotiate the diverse "resilience imaginaries" across the cities in which they are needed."

The Invention of Wessex: Thomas Hardy as Architect

2018-02-13T14:08:00-05:00

There is a good case for listing Thomas Hardy amongst the greatest of all conceptual architects — the prophet, well before the fact, of a particular type of speculative, imaginary architectural project which would boom a century later.

The 19th-century author Thomas Hardy has never been considered much of an architect. Yet as Kester Rattenbury shows, his creation of Wessex was an architectural project - one that drew on the ideas of his time, but also predicted some of the most inventive architectural work of our own age. Hardy saw rural England through an experimental, modern frame, and his Wessex Project was as radical in its time as Learning from Las Vegas and Delirious New York were in theirs.

Josef Frank’s Modernist Vision: "Accidentism"

2018-02-06T18:50:00-05:00

“Away with universal styles,” wrote Josef Frank. “Away with the idea of equating art and industry, away with the whole system that has become popular under the name of functionalism. Modernism," he was fond of saying, "is that which gives us complete freedom."

More than an architect and designer, Josef Frank was an “intellectual, who built ideas.” Christopher Long introduces Frank's 1958 essay, "Accidentism" — a humanist manifesto denouncing the banality of orthodox modernism and calling for a new pluralism in design. As Long explains, "the essay reads as a bracing critique of modern architecture, all the more notable for having been written by a prominent modernist" — the ultimate statement of his long-standing disquiet with the tenets of the mainstream movement.

The article is the latest installment of our Future Archive series, which republishes significant 20th-century writings on design, selected and introduced by leading scholars.

The Modern Urbanism of Cook's Camden

2018-01-23T14:08:00-05:00

The council housing designed 50 years ago for a progressive London borough remains a potent symbol of the achievements of postwar social democracy.

Prompted by Mark Swenarton's recent book, Cook's Camden, Douglas Murphy looks at the radically experimental public housing estates built by the London borough from 1966 to 1975, and the reevaluation of these extraordinary projects currently underway in our own era of unaffordable cities and triumphant privatization.

Prop and Property: The House in American Film

2017-12-19T18:50:00-05:00

Cinema heightens the ambivalent but powerful pleasure we take in looking at property. The private property of the house is already a spectacle, of course, as the house is a medium for making visible the wealth of its owners and inhabitants. In a movie theater, this spectacular function is multiplied.

A history of the house in American cinema might well begin with Gone with the Wind, a film that is fascinated with the loss, acquisition, and consolidation of private property; and To Kill a Mockingbird, a putatively antiracist film whose production history is actually an archive of racist urban development. The houses in these pictures tell stories about property that the films do not mention, but cannot cease from showing.

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.

Tradition for Sale

2017-10-31T17:29:00-04:00

Yale has just completed two new residential colleges near the heart of campus: a superblock of neo-Gothic fantasy. This reversion to an archaic visual language exemplifies a troubling trend. With their new architecture, universities all too often abdicate leadership in promoting artistic innovation as they pander to plutocratic donors.

Columnist Belmont Freeman takes a critical look at Yale's RAMSA-designed Benjamin Franklin College and Pauli Murray College in his latest piece for Places.

While Freeman marvels at their extraordinary evocation of tradition, he argues that their historicism represents a missed opportunity to reinvent the residential college for the 21st century — as Saarinen did on the same campus in the middle of the 20th.

The Ugly Pet: On Sustainability and Architectural Form

2017-09-21T17:53:00-04:00

I’m particularly interested in how sustainable buildings might affect the experience of landscape differently — actually better, differently — because, as a human being, I’m hoping for more sustainable architecture, and, as an academic (and as an architect), I’m thinking the consequences should be revolutionary to architecture.

Unlike earlier technological revolutions — the development of the steel frame, or the invention of concrete — sustainability in architecture has not yet had any significant, self-identifying formal consequences. Instead, the experience of sustainable space has to be hyper-mediated.

In his latest article, Places columnist David Heymann vents his frustrations about environmentally-sensitive design and examines how architects including Kieran Timberlake and Glenn Murcutt are feeling the way forward for the field.

What makes a work of architecture American?

2017-09-11T20:53:00-04:00

“Whether there is or is not a Northwest regional style of architecture is debatable,” said John Yeon in 1986, “but what is certain is that lot of people want to think there is.”

In "A Fortuitous Shadow," Keith Eggener is inspired by the Portland Art Museum's recent exhibition on John Yeon's life and legacy to explore the concept of regionalism in architecture, beginning with the doubts expressed by the architect long associated with Pacific Northwest regional modernism.

Socialism and Nationalism on the Danube

2017-05-09T15:57:00-04:00

Both Vienna and Budapest can be viewed as battlefields in an unfolding European crisis of identity and confidence that threatens the continent’s political unity and raises fundamental questions about what exactly it means to be European, to be Europe. Can we read these crises at the level of architecture?

In light of contemporary political turmoil in the region, Owen Hatherley examines key moments in the architectural histories of two quintessentially European cities, from the development of Vienna's monumental public housing to Budapest's experimentation with an ethnonationalist style.

Hong Kong, Grounded

2017-05-02T18:44:00-04:00

Even in this relentlessly vertical city, famous for walkways that feel like aerial labyrinths, you can’t levitate forever. Where the mountain rises up faster than the towers, you bump into a hillside and come back to earth. In Hong Kong, the ground is everywhere.

The terrain that weaves between streets, through public spaces, and beneath buildings in Hong Kong reminds observers of the tenuous relation between the city and its geology. Karl Kullmann photographs these zones of contact between the multilevel metropolis and the mountain, reflecting on the city's genuine landscape infrastructure and the urban experiences that it grounds.

History of the Present: Mexico City

2017-02-17T15:51:00-05:00

An unpopular president, a myth-making architect, and a multibillionaire tycoon are building an oversize airport in a nature preserve. Can they make Mexico great again?

The progressive capital of Mexico has a long history of massive infrastructure projects — megaproyectos — with egalitarian aims. Daniel Brook looks at the social, political, and environmental issues surrounding the latest — a $13bn new airport rising on a sinking lakebed. This article is part of Places' ongoing series, History of the Present, on global cities in transition.

New Fairy Tale Architecture in Places Journal

2016-12-22T16:46:00-05:00

How many architects, young and old, have been inspired by a hero or heroine who must imagine new realms and new spaces — new ways of being in this strange world? This project presents a line of flight into architecture as a fantastic, literary realm of becoming.

This week, our series on Fairy Tale Architecture returns with four new designs by Snøhetta, Ultramoderne, Smiljan Radić, and Bernheimer Architecture. Each one explores the relationship between the domestic structures of fairy tales and the imaginative realm of architecture. But don’t expect a light escape into fantasy. These fantastical worlds draw their power from engagement with the real.

Tiddalik the Frog, designed by Snøhetta

Flatland, designed by Ultramoderne

Gripho, designed by Smiljan Radić

The Seven Ravens, designed by Bernheimer Architecture

14 to 1: Post-Katrina Architecture by the Numbers

2016-07-13T15:44:00-04:00

The thousands of new old houses in New Orleans reveal the ethos of a people in a place nearly destroyed. New Orleanians have embraced their city’s architectural heritage as they’ve rebuilt for an uncertain future.

What does post-Katrina architecture look like in New Orleans? And what does it reveal about its society? In their survey in Places, Richard Campanella and Cassidy Rosen discover that historical styles are 14 times more popular than contemporary styles in the rebuilt city, despite the focus of media coverage on experimental projects like Make It Right. The retro revival pays homage to 19th-century New Orleans and a past that has become both a refuge from the present and a cicerone to the future.

The Arab City

2016-06-01T15:00:00-04:00

In a region at once feared and exoticized, we have been witnessing for more than a generation the devastation of old centers and the rise of new ones. Today there is no better context in which to investigate the complexities of global practice in architecture than that of the rapidly changing Arab city.

How does the deeply traditional meet the hypermodern in the older centers of Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo, and in the emerging new cities of Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi? In Amale Andraos’ new article on Places, and in the new book, The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, she explores the region’s complex relationship with modernity, questions the risks of essentialism in the enlisting of its cultural heritage, and asks what architecture has to do with identity in today’s Arab cities.

The History and the Future of the Urban Skyway

2016-05-18T18:26:00-04:00

The grade-separated pedestrian systems built in the 20th century have a variety of names: skyways, skywalks, pedways, footbridges, the +15, and the Ville Souteraine. But they have one thing in common — they have radically altered the form and spatial logic of cities around the world.

Despite its fundamental role in the production of urban space, the skyway has received scant critical attention. In their article on Places, and new Walker Arts Center book Parallel Cities: The Multilevel Metropolis, Jennifer Yoos and Vincent James take a closer look at the history of urban skyways. From their experimental origins to the emerging new wave of 21st-century skyways, Yoos and James uncover the far-reaching ways that three-dimensional urbanism has shaped cities around the world.