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Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay suggested some ways of Designing a Fix for Housing, beginning with rethinking our historic commitment to detached, single-family homes and segregated Euclidean zoning. Louis Arleo agreed that we need to redesign suburbia but argued "however suburbia will never be improved until architects embrace the idea of a developers business model."
Anthony Carfello, analyzed Los Angeles media’s failings in their role as "the de facto voice" of AEG’s development plans for Farmers Field in Farmers Field: Bringing Football Back on a Need-to-Know Basis. Carfello contended "The existing biases, the assumptions in play... View full entry
Passage across a border wrenches us from a space of citizenship — where our individual being is cloaked in layers of legal protection — to a space where we experience at once freedom and nothingness. As architects and planners, we lack the language for describing this shift in the perception and socio-political dimension of place; for distinguishing between the place of the citizen and the place of the stranger within the space of the state. — Places Journal
In an essay on Places titled "Hospitality Begins at Home," architect and Pratt Institute professor Deborah Gans explores the spatial and political dimensions of being a stranger, particularly an immigrant or refugee. She reviews Maya Zack's Living Room exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York... View full entry
In landscape, legible intent is different for forms we perceive to be buildings than for forms we perceive to be sculptures, since in most cases (Gehry is the exception) before we ask, what is the architect’s purpose, we ask, what is the building’s purpose? This may be the single most profound difference between architectural and sculptural presence in landscape. — Places Journal
David Heymann analyzes the very different ways in which works of sculpture and works of architecture occupy the landscape. And he looks closely at a grain elevator, and shows how a form which we usually experience as a familiar and even neighborly presence can come to seem evil. The final... View full entry
The underwater mortgages and overleveraged loans that underlie this latest great contraction result in significant part from valuing both residential and commercial buildings merely as investment vehicles rather than as complex and consequential things-in-the-world. And on this urgent issue, which places buildings at the very center of key political and economic debates, architecture critics have been mostly missing in action. — Places
Thomas Fisher dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, reviews the state of architectural criticism. Are the days of a professional critic who writes for a major newspaper over? Has architectural criticism been weakened by the globalization and commodification of the... View full entry
Architects innovate through design, but developers also innovate by selecting architects and making decisions to invest in new neighborhoods or provide housing forms that they think other developers are neglecting. Although what developers do is not as obvious as architecture, that doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences to liming competition among them. — forbes.com
As he has moved through the design professions, Hustwit has scaled up from a single typeface (Helvetica) through industrial design (Objectified) and now to cities. Each one has followed essentially the same structure, talking heads interspersed with images, one person and one idea leading to the next. No voiceover. No narrative. No critique. And not a lot of style. As Hustwit told Adam Harrison Levy, that’s the way he wants it. — observersroom.designobserver.com
The new library across from the Pacific Design Center strikes an appealingly upbeat tone, borrowing from various architectural influences to become one of the most impressive public pieces in the region in a decade. — Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times
Times Culture Editor Jonathan Landman: In this case, Michael had some things to say about the approach he will take to this beat that I and my bosses thought were worth amplifying. The old-writer-new-mantle thing played a part, but there’s certainly no guarantee that a writer gets a Page 1 story when he or she switches beats. — New York Observer
In his first review, MIchael Kimmelman goes to the South Bronx of all places, sending a message that he may just be up to the task of replacing, even besting, Nicolai Ourossoff. View full entry
New York Times art critic and "Abroad" columnist Michael Kimmelman will become the paper's new architecture critic, the Times is announcing today. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com
For as long as I can remember, right back to when I was a teenager trying to piece together the story of architecture, the ziggurat at Eridu had been a presence in my life. I was haunted by the thought that somewhere in deepest Mesopotamia, today's southern Iraq, there lay, in ruins and largely hidden under sand, what might be the world's first monumental building: the mother of all architecture in the world's first metropolis. — Jonathan Glancey
Critics at the Guardian newspaper share the most inspirational moments within their fields. View full entry
Next month sees the launch of the Guardian's fourth annual young arts critics competition, open to all readers aged 18 and under. To help us get it under way, we want to put your questions to our team of critics. — guardian.co.uk
"Architecture is inherently a political act, be it in the public or private sector. As a process it begins long before actual design work, and it is difficult to do by oneself. Art can be political, but the work of art only has to be itself and can be done by oneself. Architecture is not Art." — Mary Ellen Carroll and Peter Noever, "To Locate One’s Self," Art Lies
The new issue of Art Lies is out on shelves. And its primary focus this issue is a proverbial bitch slap– "architecture is not art." "The positions maintained in and by this issue upend the seemingly quaint flaccidity of Picasso’s moral argument that “Art is not truth,” and... View full entry
Roger Ebert, acclaimed film critic, has become more of a cultural critic these days. He uses the web as his medium of choice since thyroid cancer rendered him unable to speak. Yesterday he posted a critique of modern architecture. In it he describes modernism like a virus, eating away at the... View full entry
