Each year, Critical Halloween celebrates a feared ghost of art and architectural production. This year, we explore DEMO, which operates simultaneously as an abbreviation, a prefix, a verb, and a noun.
 
From acts of collective will (DEMOnstration) to institutional erasure (DEMOlition), DEMO invites guests to intellectually examine ideas, issues, and objects in art, architecture, and design with a focus on those that should get a dose of DEMO. — Storefront for Art and Architecture

Selldorf and the curators were forced to strategically navigate the strict installation stipulations attached to each piece — and still create a dynamic space for viewing. [...]

“We wanted a very calm background,” Selldorf says. “It is the quality of the work that makes the show exciting, so rather than creating additional noise, we really focused on making spaces that were quiet and measured in such a way that the focus of attention was on the paintings.” — nytimes.com

“Pedagogy and Place: Celebrating 100 Years of Architecture Education at Yale”... will present YSoA alumni work and archival documents tracing the development of architecture education at Yale and the buildings that have housed the architecture program. [...]

An auxiliary installation ... depicts more than 30 architecture schools from around the world to further illuminate the evolution of architecture education and the relationship between pedagogy and place. — news.yale.edu

In the microbial metropolises that thrive in and on the human body, underground networks of viruses loom large. A closer look at human skin has found that it's teeming with viruses, most of which don't target us but infect the microbes that live there.

Almost 95 percent of those skin-dwelling virus communities are unclassified...Those unknown viruses may prune, manipulate, and hide out in the skin’s bacterial communities, which in turn can make the difference between human health and disease... — Ars Technica

Rural adolescents commit suicide at roughly twice the rate of their urban peers, according to a study published in the May issue of the journal JAMA Pediatrics. Although imbalances between city and country have long persisted, “we weren’t expecting that the disparities would be increasing over time,” said the study’s lead author, Cynthia Fontanella, a psychologist at Ohio State University.

“The rates are higher, and the gap is getting wider.” — the New York Times

A chain-link fence surrounds the stately brick mansion at 3201 Woodland Dr. NW in Woodley Park. Most of the windows are covered with plywood. Cars sometimes drive past slowly, with passengers leaning out...

In May, Savvas and Amy Savopoulos; their 10-year-old son, Philip; and their housekeeper, Veralicia Figueroa, were brutally killed inside. Now, less than six months after the shocking quadruple homicide that horrified Washington, the house is for sale.

Asking price? $3.25 million. — Washington Post

This is the work of Canadian architectural photographer Chris Forsyth who has been sharing his pictures on Instagram, looking to show how beautiful design is all around us. [...]

"What draws me to the architecture in the metro system is its variety from station to station. I love the colours, the architectural styles and influences, and above all its very bold graphic appearance." [...]

Forsyth uses long exposures to blur the motion and to remove traces of people passing through the shot. — bbc.com

Herbert Marcuse, who in his book One-Dimensional Man, which was widely influential in the counterculture, argued that advanced industrial society creates an uncritical consumerism that it uses to orchestrate social control as it integrates or binds the working class to endless cycles of both production and consumption. — Walker Art Center

"We want students to be able to build — to go to a building or a plaza and be able to analyze what works and what doesn't. And we want them to work within the social context, in this case, of Tijuana."

"Tijuana is our laboratory," says Enrique González Silva, the school's founding academic director. "The idea of the program is that the students understand the reality of being an architect here." [...]

"The theory is very important. But we want students to be able to design and build." — latimes.com