According to Kyle Bergman, the founder and director of the Architecture and Design Film Festival, “Kids who grow up with architects as parents mostly fall into two groups. Some want to become architects and some want to run away, to get as far away from architecture as possible. But then there’s this middle ground, people who are intrigued by what their parents do but want to do their own thing.”

That third group is where the future documentarians come from, Bergman said. — The New York Times

Gone are the days when the easiest way to make an architectural splash was with a shimmering and photogenic stand-alone building, fancy forms torquing this way and that. Along with exploring new takes on regional or vernacular design traditions, the field’s top talents are taking on projects that reimagine existing institutions or public spaces — or forge new links among them. — Christopher Hawthorne, The New York Times

The reopening returns a certain architectural equilibrium to Johnson’s estate. The original paired structures, said Kirsten Reoch, who was named executive director of the Glass House campus last summer, “are two parts of a whole. Neither was conceived without the other. So the idea that we’ve been showing and interpreting half the story, it kind of blows your mind.” — The New York Times

Zumthor describes the wing as “a concrete sculpture,” with floors, walls and ceilings of exposed concrete. There will be bronze surrounds on the window and door openings throughout the building. When I visited Haldenstein, he and his colleagues were weighing final choices for the color palette of the walls at the base of the new wing, inside the various legs. “Lively, not dark colors, to give identity to different spaces,” he said. “And then you come up into this world of concrete.” — The New York Times

Actually, the reason we curate the shows ourselves is not because we want to control how people think, but quite the opposite. I don’t want to be too defensive. I’m not a moralist. If I would to try to control everything, I would have chosen the wrong job. — The New York Times

What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, “Learning from Las Vegas” argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be—and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture. — The New Yorker

The rude stop-start of the pandemic economy has meant that scads of new marquee developments—new infrastructure, new performance venues, new housing, new museums, new everything—are now hurtling toward completion almost simultaneously. Five days spent crisscrossing from the hills to the beach and back, occasionally by car but also by bus, by train, and, yes, by bike, revealed a city seized by startling, epochal changes. For Los Angeles, it has been a long time coming. — Ian Volner

No other city has understood its connection to mobility the way Los Angeles has. There’s a longstanding view that the city is most legible through motion. You read it by moving through it. — Architectural Record

More than a dozen designs for accessory dwelling units, known as ADUs, will be offered through the city’s ADU Standard Plan Program [...]. The small-scale, stand-alone residences are generally tucked into properties zoned for single-family homes. The idea, says the city’s chief design officer (and former Times architecture critic), Christopher Hawthorne, is to take a weeks-long permitting process and “turn it into an approval that is over-the counter.” — Los Angeles Times

The idea of the “both-and” suggested a new pluralism, and maybe a new tolerance, in architecture. But the phrase turned out to have its limits. To the extent that Venturi was making an argument in favor of a kind of big-tent populism in architecture, it was a space for new styles instead of new voices, new forms rather than new people. In fact, tucked inside Complexity and Contradiction is an argument for a renewed insularity in the profession [...]. — The Atlantic

Why focus on Wright, American architecture’s equivalent of Abraham Lincoln, the giant who casts a shadow over his field big enough to blot out smaller and underrepresented figures?

[...] Because the architect’s brilliant if forbidding Southern California houses, the most important of which were designed in a burst of creative energy during the first few months of 1923, remain mysterious, their meaning and inspiration as opaque as their heavy, richly patterned concrete-block facades. — latimes.com

If no one in 2018 would argue, as a young writer named David Brodsly did in 1981, that the "L.A. freeway is the cathedral of its time and place," or that it's the spot where Angelenos "spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives," as British architectural historian Reyner Banham put it with almost laughable enthusiasm a decade earlier, there's no doubt that both the practical and metaphorical meanings of the freeway continue to preoccupy Southern Californians. — Los Angeles Times