As you may remember from last week, Melania Trump's (and the RNC's) claim that she has an architecture degree was debunked, after scrutiny from multiple news sources:The ensuing wave of critical attention towards Melania Trump [for plagiarizing Michelle Obama] dug up other questionable details... View full entry
Nearly 90% of the 447 respondents said they had had to work through the night at some point. Almost one-third said they have to do it regularly. Two-thirds of undergraduates said their debt at the end of their course would be £30,000 or above. Despite that, almost a third said they had been asked to work in practice for free...
[One student respondent] said: “A culture of suffering for your art is promoted within education.”
— The Guardian
More on Archinect:When the pressure is on, dedicated architecture students show how to power nap like a proArchitects constitute the fifth most likely profession to commit suicideEpisode 6 of Archinect Sessions, "Money Changes Everything", is out now! View full entry
On June 23rd, 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union. In the following month, the pound dropped 10% in value against the US dollar (the lowest since the 1980s), PM David Cameron resigned, Boris Johnson resigned, Nigel Farage too (not before insulting all of the European parliament), and... View full entry
Deborah Berke, a practicing architect with a firm of over 60 employees and former adjunct Yale professor, has replaced the inimitable Robert "Bob" A.M. Stern as the dean of the Yale School of Architecture. Berke has ideas about how to shape the future of the school's pedagogy. In an interview with... View full entry
Peter Marino, the leather-clad architect best known for his collaborations with fashion labels, was sued last year for racial discrimination by a former employee. Now, he's accusing the employee of making homophobic slurs, according to a report by the New York Post.Deirdre O'Brien worked for... View full entry
Now through August 25, take an immersive, tongue-in-cheeky video tour through Los Angeles at WUHO Gallery, with David Hartwell and Bill Ferehawk's "MEDIAN".Enter the narrow, deep gallery space and be at the center of MEDIAN–an "experimental moving image installation" projected onto the length... View full entry
Magid agrees with those who argue that the Barragán archive should be open to the public and returned to Mexico, but she insists that this is not her focus. “If that’s what my intentions were, I don’t think I’d make art,” she told me. “I’ve always called the archive her lover. To marry one man, she negotiated owning another man, whom she’s devoted her life to. It’s a weird love triangle, and I’m the other woman.” — The New Yorker
“‘It intrigued me as a gothic love story,’ [Magid] said, ‘with a copyright-and-intellectual-property-rights subplot.’” A fascinating story about “architectural preservation” that focuses on an artist's elaborate negotiation to open Luis Barragán's tightly controlled archive to... View full entry
[James] Leadbitter called it “a playful and exciting space for redesigning madness, a utopian attempt at what a mental health hospital could be like.”
Each structure...is an abstract interpretation of the feedback from the workshops, designed to offer varying levels “of privacy and intimacy ranging from total isolation to complete togetherness.”
“This is only a small glimpse of a project that has huge potential to influence the way we think about the design of mental health care environments,”
— Slate
More than 300 patients, architects, and psychiatrists pitched their ideas on how they would redesign the psychiatric ward for “Madlove: A Designer Asylum”, a collaborative project conceived by artist and activist James Leadbitter, who has suffered from mental illness and has stayed at several... View full entry
Sunday was supposed to be move-in day for many athletes, but the leader of the Australian Olympic delegation said its athletes would not be checking in because of problems with the gas, electricity and plumbing. [...]
delegations from Britain, New Zealand and other countries were experiencing similar problems in the village, which is in an area of western Rio called Barra da Tijuca.
— nytimes.com
The official start to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro will go ahead on August 5, despite ongoing concerns over the spread of the Zika virus, political upheaval, economic distress, polluted competition waters, and now, questionable athlete facilities.More from the New York Times:Olympic... View full entry
Moscow City Hall has announced the launch of its own version of online game “Pokemon Go.” Russians will be asked to find and "catch" historical figures in the streets of the capital via an app called “Know Moscow.Photo.”
[...] people will be able to catch and take a selfie with [...] Yury Gagarin, Alexander Pushkin, Pyotr Chaikovsky, [founder of the first Russian university] Mikhail Lomonosov, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and the tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich,” [...]
— The Moscow Times
Related stories in the Archinect news:No, Pokémon Go is not an urban fantasy for the new flaneurMoscow's metro expansion moves ahead of scheduleMoscow's iconic Shukhov Tower added to World Monuments Fund Watch List View full entry
As far as the art world was concerned, his leap into architecture — designs for things like public parks, airport rest areas and a man-made island — was almost as if Mr. Acconci decided to enter the witness protection program. But he disappeared right in the art world’s midst, continuing to teach generations of art students — NYT
On the occasion of Vito Acconci's first retrospective in the United States, in more than three decades, Randy Kennedy held a series of interviews over three months with the artist. See also; in the News: (via The Architect's Newspaper, the J. Crew catalog and a Vice/VBS.TV six part... View full entry
Whatever the outcome, we will learn from their actions. I am confident that those who committed wrongdoing will be held accountable, and that any malfeasance will come to light. I am also confident that the final story will adequately celebrate all the good that AFH did. — medium.com
Garrett Jacobs, executive director of the Open Architecture Collaborative, responded to the $3M lawsuit against AFH via a statement on medium, taking care to make clear as crystal the fact that while OAC grew out of AFH, it is "unequivocally an independent organization, a California LLC and Public... View full entry
More broadly, this reconfiguration would make the games, for the first time, a truly global event. Dozens of countries that could never afford to host the Olympics in their current form – Kenya, Thailand, Chile, to name a few – might easily host a single Olympic sport. Rather than being an occasion for nationalistic displays by a single, powerful host country, the Olympics would become a celebration of human diversity. — Paul Christesen
With overwhelming evidence that hosting the Olympics is a huge burden for several cities, Paul Christesen, a Professor of Classics at Dartmouth, makes a case for the possible advantages of having Olympic sports competitions take place in different cities throughout the globe. He also makes... View full entry
the set is a shotgun marriage of Star Trek and Macbook modern, with perhaps a touch — in the rounded stairs, lighted from below — of Art Deco. [...]
The goal seems to be a series of smooth surfaces to which none of the more direct ad hominem verbal attacks or accusations of plagiarism might stick — a slate that can be wiped clean whenever a change in tone or direction is wanted. Call it Teflon minimalism.
— latimes.com
Hawthorne's Teflon comparison is particularly evocative, given one of the latest incidents last night at the RNC, when Ted Cruz didn't endorse Trump during his primetime address. He was booed off the stage.The Republican National Convention's last day in Cleveland is today, themed "Make America... View full entry
When Melania Trump’s much-anticipated address at the Republican National Convention on Monday provoked outrage for plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the typically demure member of Trump’s campaign suddenly became the center of a lot of negative... View full entry
