Archinect - BuildingSatire

The Benefits of Licensure

2014-02-27T23:08:00-05:00

Food Stamps? Stamps for food?
A new hope for architecture students and a bright future for architecture.

Architecture as Badge Collecting

2014-02-08T01:35:56-05:00

Gotta Patch em' All

Possible Pompadours | Cuts for Success

2013-06-16T07:00:50-04:00

Possible Pompadours | Cuts for Success

by The Rafaie

The Best Cover Letter Ever Written

2013-06-14T12:01:00-04:00

Like an impetuous and premature first-time or waking up without beer goggles, sometimes the world reminds us of humbling experiences that have defined our youth and sculpted us into the fine human beings we are today. This week, I awoke to a most nostalgic email that oozed ambition, dripped desperation, and stunk with virginal entitlement. To introduce an exhibit that needs no introduction, behold — the best cover letter ever written:

Applying For Internship

To whom it may concern:

Work experience for teenagers? Yes, but that does not mean basic training, simple task, naive teenagers, etc. I am proficient in AutoCAD, Photoshop and Sketchup, and I am only grade 11. There is no doubt about my communication skills, as I am the top 5% of my grade. Leadership? no problem. I am the leader of student government and have operated many volunteers and activities on my own.

I am looking forward to having a part-time work experience at your studio. Please reply to this ...

Seduction and Scaffolding

2013-06-14T10:44:20-04:00

One of our obsessions has been, and always will be, scaffolding. There is something about it; this thin wiry layer that echoes its contents. Maybe it’s the way it billows, maybe it’s the way it conceals. All I know is that I want to climb into it.

We’re walking around Berlin’s Brandenburger Tor area, a healthy mix of commercial, retail, and the occasional memorial. Berlin is still a young town – new developments are still going up, and that means scaffolding. A lot of scaffolding.

Scaffolding sets the urban stage. Scaffolding is here today, and gone tomorrow. But here in Berlin, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon. Behind a flimsy fortification of construction hoarding, a tarnished grey fabric clung and rippled around a clumsily large surface. Hardly seeing the edges of the building behind it, the fabric rippled around a large billboard placed on it – a billboard of white space from none other than Apple.

In a city so newly temporary, is it possible to use these sca...

PSPeeps

2013-05-21T20:32:00-04:00

There seems to be two camps in terms of representation: people who love silhouettes and people who love people. We’ve all made both, and quickly we seem to put ourselves into one camp or the other. There seems to be very little middle ground. I like people. The starkness of the silhouettes populating the scene give off a coldness, a ghostliness, of a not yet conceived project. It seems to keep a project in another world entirely—a world devoted to the abstraction of the render, pristine with shiny materials and black figures.

Zaha Hadid employs the use of the silhouette, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has visited her work. There’s inaccessibility to it, a lack of a connection between the computer rendering and the actual build work. The intangible computer model somehow is translated into a built architecture, but the blatant disrespect of the human experience still evident in the obvious struggle to build the unbuildable. She employs the silhouette wi...

From Being an Intern to Having Them

2013-04-23T10:15:23-04:00

Trained and tested in the flames of inadequacy, the fertile ashes of destitution provide for the emergence of the ripe succulent — so is the rise of the promoted intern. There’s nothing quite like that point in an architect’s career where they go from being an intern to having interns. For some, this is a gradual transition, for others, the brilliant metamorphosis comes with the casualness of a coin flip, such abrupt transitions contain a moment of eureka. Through being spit on, kicked, and blamed for your supervisor’s oversights — you really begin to think about how you treat other people, especially those who are in a place you so recently crawled out from. These are my post-destitute reflections on how to treat interns:
1. Assume interns are as smart as you and kindly compensate when necessary. Simply because an intern doesn’t know what a bulb tee is, can’t spell, “spider joint,” and thinks flashing has something to do with Tiesto, doesn’t make them useless. Your job as an ...

Olfactory Collection Unit

2013-04-07T00:54:39-04:00

SnarkDaily v.02

2013-03-27T14:58:30-04:00

(visit buildingsatire.com to check your answers)

Aggrenad Hotel
Fig 1: Holl, Nelson-Atkins
Fig 2: Three-Headed Dog from Harry Potter

Superkilen

Fig 1: Etsy Denim Patchwork Quilt
Fig 2: Candyland

Prague Library

Fig 1: EVE from WALL-E
Fig 2: Masked blob-ghost-monster from Spirited Away
Fig 3: Swiss Cheese

Hong Kong Design Institute
Fig 1: Fishnets
Fig 2: Kebabs

BuildingSatire Etsy Line v. 02

2013-03-27T14:53:18-04:00

Bring the magical atmosphere of a highway-underpass-squatter-encampment into your living room with this 100% recycled aluminum candle holder. This elegant masterpiece comes with a lovingly hand made wax coating at the base; simply heat the bottom of any candle and stick firmly in place. This can also doubles as an ashtray.

kid robot | BLU DOT

2013-03-27T14:51:08-04:00

please excuse m̶y̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶a̶u̶n̶t̶ ̶s̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ the font..

Schadenfreude Capitalism

2013-03-07T00:05:20-05:00

Architecture can be a poor, masochistic, and downtrodden profession, but it doesn’t have to be. The truth is we never had to be poor, in fact we probably could have had our choice of occupations, but for whatever reason we’re here. Our short term financial freedom lies in what I (and I guess a few others) call Schadenfreude Capitalism. German in origin, the term Schadenfreude means a happiness attained through another’s misfortune, an optimistic sadism in a way. What could be more American that profiting from loss, pain, and even death?

Whenever there is a hurricane, tsunami, war, etcetera — someone makes money. And while as architects, we lack the time to analyze market trends and keep up with the intentions and whereabouts of company CEO’s and board members, I think we all can understand that disaster yields demand. Forecasting what will be in demand and acting fast may yield short term profits, at least enough to graduate from PBR.

For an example of Schadenfreude Capital...

First Place | Adam Longenbach

2013-02-20T13:41:00-05:00

First Place | Adam Longenbach

Section Through the Mind of a Professor
Author: Adam Longenbach
School: Cooper Union, USA
Level: M.Arch II

“A word in a building, a sentence in a street, a paragraph in a neighborhood: the city is the manipulation of the earth into a collective autobiography of mankind, a physical index of human legacy to be read by the unborn, and thus it is also a common tombstone for each generation that passes through it. Like the human statues of stone that now lay hidden below the stratum of Easter Island, layers of the city tell the story of a time and a civilization that has since passed and cannot be revisited, only remembered through oral tradition and its earthen residues. This is the nature of Freudʼs psychical city, which holds that the city in its present state occurs as the coexistence of multiple stages of its history that are found in both the material layers of the earth and in the immaterial layers of the mind. We walk the strade of present day ...

Second Place | Benjamin McGrath

2013-02-20T09:38:32-05:00

Second Place | Benjamin McGrath

Beyond Open Doors | A Mother’s Labor of Chores
Author: Benjamin McGrath
School: Virginia Tech, USA
Level: 5th Year B.Arch

“…And we always knew that it would never be true. It was the fear that kept us from progress, but it was also fear that shaped our innocence. We loved with our eyes closed, she and I. More often than not, she comforted me like a mother, as if I were her child. That’s the funny thing about nature, all that is natural, it takes you in its arms, carries you in its womb for the duration of what feels like a lifetime of its own. But then comes the separation, the divorce, the birth from home and place of comfort—it feels more like an abortion.

To be spat out like that into the darkness of decay, the monotony of the world’s fatigue that shadows every day, it can be exhausting for the soul. It can bury you beneath the remnants of memory, torturing the mind with times of the past instead of the present. No one should have to live that...

Third Place | Tristan Vetter

2013-02-20T09:37:46-05:00

Section Through the New York Sewer System
Author: Tristan Vetter
School: University of Nebraska – Lincoln, USA

“This drawing is not a literal representation of the New York sewer system, but a metaphor of New York as a plumbing fixture which is part of the larger sewer system. A plumbing fixture has multiple components that function together, and must have a input and an output: a supply line and a drain. A fixture also contains a device that regulates the flow of inputs and outputs, a valve.”

Honorable Mention | Dawa Pratten

2013-02-20T09:37:04-05:00

Monuments for Memories | Hyper-Real Graveyard
Author: Dawa Ewan Tshering Pratten
School: Plymouth University, United Kingdom
Level: 4th Year BA

“In the year 2054, 50 years after its launch, Facebook is forced to confront the problem of death. Too many of its users are now dead. All their actions and interactions have been stored away, recorded and collected. A hyper-real world, carved onto digital walls for all time. The question now is, what to do with this information? Surely these vast sums of data have a value beyond existing as a simple record of your digital life?

Users constantly upload unprecedented amounts of personal information to the site, from character defining traits to utterly trivial nonsense. Most importantly however, users communicate. Relationships are recorded at discrete points of interaction and quantified as lines of data.

An app is launched. It digests all the information Facebook stores on you and learns how you act. By analyzing your comments, your i...

Copy Culture | Modern Surrealism as Reproduction

2013-02-20T09:19:16-05:00

Copy Culture | Modern Surrealism as Reproduction

by parrhesia

Top: Kim's Bin-Jip/ 3-Iron Bottom: Wang Du's The Kiss

I must play cynic as I feel it does not take much to be recognized these days. With the proliferation of social media and hyper-journalism, blogs, feeds, fodder, i-this, and insta-that, most of us have well over our Warhollotted fifteen minutes of fame. But for most of us, our efforts remain low-brow, all of which would never land us in the Centre Pompidou.

Recent travels to see the Pompidou’s Surrealist Collection reveal a curatorial emphasis on technique over content. Not to say art or the Surrealist Movement requires originality, but perhaps my gripe begins during World War I. As the progeny of Dadaism, the Surrealist Movement fed off the unpredictable, the juxtaposed, the ill-timed, and unfathomable-made-physical.

A viewing of Wang Du’s The Kiss 2005, left little impression of Surrealism or the Dada, simply a reference to a surrealist film produced i...

Associative Allusions | SnarkDaily

2013-02-20T09:12:52-05:00

Associative Allusions | SnarkDaily

by Clara

Penzkoferhaus by Peter Haimerl Architektur

Fourth Grace by Will Alsop

National Gallery of Greenland by Bjarke Ingels Group

Drift by Snarkitecture

Fig 1: Malevich Generative Art
Fig 2: Misguided PC Souls

Fig 1: Minerals
Fig 2: The Tasmanian Devil

Fig 1: Complacent Forms

Fig 1: Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Man
Fig 2: Egg Slicer

BuildingSatire Etsy Line

2013-02-20T09:02:44-05:00

BuildingSatire Etsy Line

by Blair

New “Do-It-Yourself Style” lampshade kit available on Etsy.

BuildingSatire is proud to announce its very own line of products available on Etsy, starting with this stylish and contemporary lampshade. Don’t settle for fakes or cheap imitations, get the quality you trust and deserve.

Give your apartment or home some character with this crafty/thrifty lampshade. The all-inclusive kit has everything you need to construct and install the shade entirely on your own. Each kit includes fifty-six stunningly embossed and perforated lampshades for the price of one. Impress your friends with your craftiness, ability to think outside box, and Scotch® tape skills.

Warning: Your parents might ask why there’s a paper towel taped to the wall. Also may cause fire.

Included are easy to follow, and beautiful hand-illustrated visual instructions (on a napkin) to make installation a snap!

$19.99

No refunds.

Kit Includes:

Office Archetypes

2013-02-01T14:19:00-05:00

Having worked at a few offices now, I’d like to share a few recurring characters I’ve noticed.

Goliaths
Goliaths are old beasts who have roamed the white halls of the office for years. They are comfortable throwing their weight around knowing there are no known consequences they could ever suffer. They stand firmly knowing that past success has earned them the respect, recognition, and fear they now bask in. Unfortunately, most goliaths are simply ogres, fumbling oafs easy to anger and slow to solving problems.

Snakes
Keen and quiet, the snake is seductively kind but waiting — waiting for the most opportune time to strike. In the event the meticulous snake does slip up, they will use you to take the fall. Like a shed skin, the snake will release you into the highway to be pulverized by speeding cars. The snake knows that their prolonged polite and soft reserve is enough to mislead management into thinking they are a most ideal employee.

Trendsetters
Trendsetters are n...

Crystallized Agoraphobia | A Spatial Conflict

2013-01-29T18:21:02-05:00

Crystallized Agoraphobia | A Spatial Conflict

Western Perspective | Eastern Employment

2013-01-26T02:56:15-05:00

I like to describe myself as a failure: I dropped out of graduate school and moved to China. There has always been this itch inside of me, a kind of restlessness and dissatisfaction with my experience, education, and abilities that I think I was hoping to fill. In fact, the night before I boarded my plane, I ran into my grandmother at the grocery store in my small hometown in Kentucky. My grandmother explained to the checkout girl that I was moving to China to work, and the girl’s response to me was, “I hope you find what you’re looking for.” I looked at her with skepticism, but she apparently knew more than I did.

I used to think that architecture was my life, and that everything in my life was devoted to it. China has changed me. I no longer want to be a hero for architecture. I cannot say that my passion for architecture has changed; in many ways I have fallen into a deeper love for it as I feel it is something that needs to be protected from environments like China. Envi...

Proposal for Descriptive Traffic Laws

2013-01-26T02:50:23-05:00

Linguists have started thinking about things (such as writing dictionaries) descriptively rather than prescriptively. Descriptive linguistics recognizes that there is, “no language in itself… only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages” [Deleuze A Thousand Plateaus]. Instead of defining universal rules of language, the task of descriptive linguistics is simply to map patterns in use.

Unlike linguistics, the thoughts of traffic engineers have remained rigidly prescriptive, and lag behind the reality of the complex systems of streets and sidewalks they supposedly regulate. Their conservatism is understandable. Traffic engineers are charged with regulating what is for most of us, the most dangerous part of our day. But there is enormous potential in liberating public spaces from the regime of curbs and paint. Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer, created marvelous examples of such liberated spaces. Cars, people, bicycles, and even cafe tables a...

Chromatic Impressions Part 1

2013-01-17T16:38:00-05:00

On a train ride from Beijing to Shanghai, I realized how monotone China seemed to me, or at least Beijing and the area around it. At that moment, I became conscious of the chromatic impressions cities have left on me. Coincidentally during my trip, the Powerstation of Art in Shanghai housed a piece titled, “State of Shades: Chinese National Oil Painting Pale Brown.” The room was covered in 175 different colors each representing a painting, vague streaks resembling a bleak hippie forest or a shit-tinted EU flag. Near the exit was C 42% M 52% Y 71% K 21%, the average color of 175 averages and the mood of a nation.

These are my urban chromatic impressions.

If cities had a color, Beijing, you’d be a a brownish gray with a hint of subtle sallow.
Pantone 7536 EC, the color of pollution that shields the sky from having to witness your filth, the color of mucus hawked from men in the street, and the color once eggshell buildings turn after sandstorms, spit, and sludge.

If ci...

Fear of the Dark | In Praise of Shadows

2012-12-28T22:38:43-05:00

I just finished reading, “In Praise of Shadows,” by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and it actually turned out to make some dull moments of my most recent family vacation a lot less dull. But still, less dull does not equate sharpness.

At first read I thought Mr. Tanizaki was a cantankerous prick making his critical almost negative opinions of the West and Western culture, but after finishing his essay, I think, yeah okay — I get it. Much of the book (hints the title) is looking at how the West deals with shadows and darkness versus Japan and Japanese culture; how we use our Bruce Dickinson, “Fear of the Dark” mentality in eliminating all shadows in our lives and in our physical spaces.

Deep.

This idea of embracing darkness had me think of my most recent trip to New York City where I had the ability to experience that mother fucker Hurricane Sandy. Yes, people died. Yes, it was shitty. Yes, a lot of money and time was spent bringing the cities of the East Coast back to a fu...

Neighborhood Watch | Urban Entrails

2012-12-28T12:50:00-05:00

Beijing is a dirty place. A few days after I arrived I realized the disgusting ephemerality of this city. You throw your trash out at night, the fairies take it away so you can breath a little easier from 8AM to 2PM, then the gooey tide rises again. It’s really no different than most metropolitan cities, but this is China.

A few weeks ago, I began to imagine the lives of my neighbors. Though I never speak to them and I rarely see them, I do notice their clothes hanging on lines each Monday and can see what they had for dinner the previous night just by looking down when I walk.

I’ve begun creating fictions around my neighbors only because they dump a bit of their personal lives into the gutter outside our hutong – my form of smell-o-vision. Yes, there are gutters everywhere, and the ones amassed at hutong intersections are quite clogged. But I am fascinated with mine because I know that this is where the tenants across from me dispel their intimacies.

The casting out ...

Farm to Table | …And Back Home

2012-12-28T00:03:00-05:00

So the project’s over. Finally.

We go out to this new restaurant around the corner for a celebratory meal. The food is “locally sourced” (whatever that means), organic, free-range, all that, and priced to match. Not the most intern-budget friendly option.

As I gaze down on the menu, I catch bits and pieces of my co-workers’ conversations.

“Oh, I love this place. Everything’s locally grown by the way. I love the chicken here…” (before getting distracted by the wine list)
“Gluten-free pasta. Done.”
“Do you think I could get them to make this vegan for me?”

It was a scene straight out of Portlandia, if Portland suddenly became the Bay Area.
The place was filling up quickly: the staff was bustling, our neighboring tables were busy instagramming their plates. And then, I made the fatal mistake: I asked what “farm to table” actually meant.

I felt like I said Voldemort’s name or something. Our table hushed, fell silent for two beats, until one of my coworkers ...

Competition v1.0 // Satirical Section

2012-12-17T14:59:34-05:00

Beginning December 16th and ending January 20th we are holding an international design competition for students. The winner will be awarded a two-week externship at LUXIGON Aloha Jacta Est in Los Angeles.

Guidelines:
Entrants will choose from the following categories and create a sectional representation of their architectural interpretation of the space:

- Section through a well-lit cemetery
- Section through the New York sewer system
- Section through the mind of your professor
- Section through the seven rings of studio hell (Rings TBD by entrant)

Although an entrant may enter under one category, they may incorporate as many of the other categories as they wish. (ie: the mind of your professor in the nyc gutter).

Submission:
Entry is free. To enter, email competitions[at]buildingsatire.com with your “.edu” email address, full name, and the category you wish to enter in by January 17th 2012.
You will be given an entry number that must be placed on your submittal...

Sh*t Clients Say

2012-12-16T14:17:38-05:00

Regarding a render.

Hacking Architecture | Inside Steven Holl

2012-12-16T13:49:00-05:00

Now, most of us have stories of pictures taken in the McQueen Exhibit when there was strictly no photography, of backpacks lugged to spend the day as a Cooper Union student, or even of scaffolding climbed at 3AM just to sit on the cold steel frame of the 9/11 site. For those of you who lack such stories, what’s wrong with you? I’m here to share with you a few tips on what I call hacking architecture.

It’s hard to have a valid opinion about an architecture without ever having been in its space. Most recently, I finagled my way into Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid, a music download in the world of hacking. I’d had mixed feelings about the project, but my opinion became clearer after spending some time in it, naturally. So how does one “sneak” into architecture you ask? Once you realize, “I’m an architecture student” won’t get you anywhere, try these tips to help hack architecture, perhaps some you already know.

Research
Take a minute to look over some plans, figure out where all...