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This post is brought to you by Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Tom Wiscombe, Chair of the Undergraduate Program at SCI-Arc, hosts a series of B.Arch Salons—informal Friday gatherings held at Cafe Americano across the street from the school. A recent conversation was... View full entry
Spaces like the Museum of Ice Cream and the Paul Smith Pink Wall offer a perfect setting for a highly shareable image—and that’s it. What happens to art, or travel, or the outside world in general when taking a photograph becomes an experience itself?
As photo-driven social networks continue to grow more powerful, they are both transforming boutique economies and exercising visual influence over our modern day cuisine, travel destinations, clothing labels, and makeup trends.
— The Ringer
From museums to music festivals to that cool-looking, brightly colored wall there, this article looks into how image-driven social media like Instagram is increasingly changing the way people are consuming art and culture in practically identical ways. In one interesting part of the article... View full entry
We're joined this week by Devin Gharakhanian, co-founder and co-creative director of the super popular Instagram account and online platform SuperArchitects, to discuss his work in architecture media and community-building, alongside issues troubling architecture education and the public's... View full entry
The Open Architecture Collaborative, the offshoot from the now-defunct Architecture for Humanity, launched its #iOpenArchitecture social media campaign on Tuesday, aiming to expand the dialogue around design and architecture. Participants (the campaign is directed towards "all members of the... View full entry
“New York Horizon” would be virtually impossible to implement in the real world, given the actual urban landscape of the proposed site, which includes some of NYC's subway lines for starters. That being said, the criticism “New York Horizon” has sparked in recent weeks raises bigger questions — particularly involving the rise of “meme-tecture”, the cultural value of landscape architecture, and re-evaluating the setup of open ideas competitions. — Bustler
Previously on Archinect:2016 eVolo Skyscraper Competition winners revealed2015 eVolo Skyscraper Competition winners imagine the potential of vertical architecture2014 eVolo Skyscraper Competition Winners View full entry
dying online is open to anyone willing to share his or her end with the blogosphere. [...]
This dissolving of the barriers between the public and the intimate is death’s vital new upgrade... death has acquired a “neurotic separation” from daily life, and this separation has been identified as part of the “malaise of the late twentieth century.”
But thanks to the internet, death might be losing some of its pariah status.
— designobserver.com
Prompted by the recent mass internet-public mourning of David Bowie, as well as a few agencies that offer post-death social media updates to perpetuate the online persona of your late loved-ones, Adrian Shaughnessy (graphic designer at the Royal College of Art) reflects on how a death shared... View full entry
So beginning today and running throughout the August recess, we're turning our Instagram account over to you. Just snap a photo – please do it safely! – of the worn-out infrastructure in your neck of the woods and share it with @USDOT using #ShowUsYourInfraWear. — transportation.gov
Public shaming has long been a tactic of the U.S. criminal justice system – there were the stocks of yore, the scarlet letters, and more recently, the tactics of felony court judge Ted Poe. Nowadays though, we tend to skip all the messiness of the public square and go straight to the internet to... View full entry
Clearly, the days of the critic’s hegemony are done. [...]
Yet as I know from years of blogging and tweeting, there is often wisdom in the crowd. The people who live in a neighborhood or work in a building often know more about it than the lazy critic who makes only a cursory inspection.
My take on all this is that architecture criticism is not dead ... They fail to recognize that the circumstances of our time offer promise as well as peril.
— niemanreports.org
In a speech delivered this past spring at Chicago's Society of Architectural Historians, Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, addressed the nature of architecture criticism in today's media landscape. The talk came after Kamin's contentious Twitter exchange with "comb-over... View full entry
Telephone poles, scaffoldings, abandoned utility plants: like taxpayer-sponsored dark matter, these elements form the largely ignored visual majority of our daily urban experience. K O S M O S, a self-described "virtual firm," whose four partners occasionally physically convene in New York, Basel... View full entry
As part of a larger communications outreach campaign, The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture has launched a new online sharing portal called IMadeThat.com. A kind of HootSuite for architectural students and faculty, the portal collects all Vine, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter... View full entry
Instagram may very well have enabled a whole generation of false artisans—and even encouraged cliché street imagery by promoting hashtags like #middleoftheroad and #strideby through its Weekend Hashtag Project—but the effect may not be so terrible. Quoted in The Telegraph in 2011, Teru Kuwayama, a photojournalist who is now photo community manager at Facebook, compared the rise of Instagram to the advent of electronic music, both of which stimulated “amateur expression.” — americanphotomag.com
With final crits creeping up for many architecture students, there's no doubt that the agenda includes sleepless nights in the studio and personal health becomes second priority. Sad but true. In recent years, some students turned to social media sites like Tumblr to post snapshots of their peers... View full entry
It’s a Thursday morning in Beijing, and the world’s most famous living artist, Ai Weiwei, is sitting with one of the world’s most controversial technologists, Jacob Appelbaum, in the second-floor lobby of the East Hotel. [...]
On a whim, Ai suggests that they call Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been living for the last two years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. [...]
Ai and Assange talk for several minutes about the mundanities of the dissident life.
— fusion.net
Friday, November 21:Latest NCARB survey indicates architecture is a growing profession in the U.S.: Surveying Architectural Registration Boards in 2014, NCARB found a 3.1% growth of architects in the US since 2011.Thursday, November 20:Renzo Piano will design the new Kum & Go corporate HQ in... View full entry
Modern architecture, despite breaking with the past stylistically, nonetheless maintains this image of the gifted architect as a lone autonomous genius who overcomes gravity and prevails over his client [...]
Rather than an inner activity done in solitude, it has been found that people often discover their thoughts and ideas through interactions with others [...]
The centrality of collaboration in architecture is often overlooked in a culture celebrating and branding “starchitects.”
— Lilith
Referring to recent statistics concerning women in architectural practice and the Denise Scott Brown Pritzker controversy, architect Esther Sperber calls for an overhaul of how we think about creativity and authorship in architecture. Her piece for Lilith, "Revising Our Ideas about... View full entry
