Archinect - News

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.

On the legacy of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies

2014-01-13T16:59:00-05:00

I wish that it still existed. — Frank Gehry It would be the world's biggest nightmare if the Institute were still alive. — Mark Wigley It was the moment for something to happen. — Diana Agrest //

In 1967 Peter Eisenman founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and until it closed in 1985 the Institute — a heady mix of think tank, exhibit space, journal publisher and cocktail party — was one of the centers of American architecture culture. Belmont Freeman describes the new documentary by Diana Agrest, The Making of an Avant-Garde, as a remarkable contribution to the record, and a fascinating glimpse at the early years of many of today's stars: "There is something almost (almost) touching about listening to today’s titans of corporate and haute institutional architecture remind us that once upon a time they were young, idealistic, radical thinkers."

What Is It About Cuba's National Art Schools?

2012-02-28T04:28:00-05:00

After I mentioned attending a screening of the new documentary film, Unfinished Spaces, about the National Art Schools in Havana, [my dinner companion] burst out: “What is it about the Art Schools? Why do foreigners love them so much? There’s nothing Cuban about those buildings. They’re ridiculous architecture for Havana and I always hated them.”

On Places, architect Belmont Freeman reconsiders the National Art Schools in Havana — the subject of John Loomis's groundbreaking book Revolution of Forms, as well as a new documentary film and an opera, and a cult favorite among architecture buffs. Does the North American obsession with the art schools carry a whiff of latent colonialism, or even racism? Freeman argues that the dramatic saga of the art schools has obscured the larger narrative of post-revolutionary Cuban architecture.