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When the so-called House of the Century rose from the swampy earth back in the early 1970s, it arrived as a vision of the future, a biomorphic experiment in modern living. Back then it was a bright white jumble on the shoreline, and depending on your angle of approach, it looked like either a man's erect genitalia or a giant schnoz.
Today, this futuristic house is a decaying relic of the past, and its future is a subject of concern and conjecture.
— Dallas News
Though Ant Farm, the experimental architecture firm founded by Doug Michels and Chip Lord in 1968, is not among the most well known firms of that era, they produced a number of projects both famous and deserving of fame. They are perhaps best known for their early experiments with inflatable... View full entry
Last summer, students from SCI-Arc and INDA ventured out to the Morongo Valley to take part in a week-long course in which they designed and built a series of exploratory units. Titled 'Landing', the mobile educational camp was the brain child of Danny Wills and Gian Maria Socci, who set up the... View full entry
Freed from the conventions of architecture and construction, what would this world look like?
It’s a question Japanese architect Junya Ishigami has been trying to answer for the past decade, dreaming of structures that are as light as a cloud, as vast as the sky, as random as the trees in a forest or the stars in the sky.
— The Guardian
Glass Pavilion, Park Groot Vijversburg, NL. Image: junya.ishigami+associates.The Guardian's architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, takes a closer at the fascinating work of Junya Ishigami, the bright new star on the Japanese architecture firmament, who is catching more and more mainstream... View full entry
Swiss architectural practice Rahbaran Hürzeler Architekten is developing an experimental residence to be realized anywhere. Called movable house, every aspect of this project is determined by motion from floor plans to structural elements to energy storage. Movable house rendering © Rahbaran... View full entry
There is a persistent risk of doing harm, dashing hopes, and eroding trust with trial and error, no matter how virtuous the objectives. It is the duty of the powerful to minimize that risk as much as possible. “It was supposed to be innovation, but now we’re being told it was experimentation,” Papa Omotayo, a Lagos-based architect and friend of Adeyemi’s, said of the floating school a few days after the collapse. “The issue is, can you experiment in a community like [Makoko] [...] ?” — magazine.atavist.com
Kunlé Adeyemi's floating school was built in 2013 and collapsed in 2016. The structured was meant to served 100 elementary students in Makoko, a heavily populated slum on Lagos' waterfront. Classes were only held for about 4 months in the 3 years it stood. Now two years later, Allyn... View full entry
A drone skyscraper has been proposed by designers Hadeel Ayed Mohammed, Yifeng Zhao and Chengda Zhu that acts as a central control terminal for drones to dock and recharge, situated in the heart of Manhattan.
The ‘dronescraper’, dubbed ‘the hive’ has been proposed as an alternative to Rafael Vinoy’s 432 Park Avenue superstructure, which is set to become the tallest residential tower in the western hemisphere.
— Design MENA
The skyscraper has been undergoing some significant design reconceptualizations lately. Here's a round-up of the most interesting takes:A closer look at BIG's West 57th Street "courtscraper"Screen/Print #30: SOILED's "Cloudscrapers"A bamboo skyscraper fosters public life View full entry
For as long as architecture has been reduced to a service to society or an “industry” whose ultimate goal is only to build, there have been others who imagine it instead as a field of intellectual research: energetic, critical, and radical.
But how can we produce or maintain this position?
— Giovanna Borasi – Chief Curator, CCA
The Other Architect, an expansive exhibition that considers "architecture’s potential to identify the urgent issues of our time" through twenty-three case studies from the 1960s to the present, opens tomorrow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.Curated by Giovanna Borasi... View full entry
As Kushner sees it, the advent of social media changed architecture in the same way it has changed other industries. It’s a real time barometer for how the public feels about any given project. He sees this as a good thing. The beauty and frustration of architecture is that it’s unavoidable; we’re all stakeholders, even if we don’t want to be.
In the past, the voices of only a select group of these stakeholders would be heard. Today, anyone with an internet connection can be a casual critic.
— wired.com
“I look forward to continuing the tradition of experimental architecture he did so much to define.” — A/N
Betsky seems to be the man of the hour these days, writing popularly discussive articles in defense of architecture and participating in social media. Congratulations and looking forward to seeing what becomes of the heavily branded institution in need of a new life. View full entry
When Mr. Keret, 45, received a call from the architect, he was initially puzzled. “This guy with a very heavy Polish accent said he wanted to make a house in proportion to my stories,” he said. “It sounded like a prank.” — NYT
Steven Karutz profiled Keret House, a recently completed example of "experimental architecture" by Jakub Szczesny, a Polish architect. Mr. Szczesny, 39, designed the space for an ideal resident, specifically Israeli writer, Etgar Keret. The architect who belongs to a collective called... View full entry
