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In that spirit I set a challenge for myself: Could I come up not just with one but with 25 buildings that might have deserved the award this year? It took me a few days — and I was helped by some terrific suggestions from architects, critics and historians on Twitter and elsewhere online — but in the end finding 25 wasn't that difficult. — LA Times
LA Times journalist Christopher Hawthorne has penned, or passionately typed, an inquiry into the fact that this year's 25-Year-Award was awarded to—no one. In the article, Hawthorne walks us through the importance and aim of such an award and how to him, there are more than a few projects that... View full entry
The slabs in front of me seemed at once the most and least architectural objects I’d ever seen. They were banal and startling, full and empty of meaning. Here were the techniques of Land Art, medieval construction, marketing and promotion, architectural exhibition and the new nativism rolled uncomfortably if somehow inevitably into one. — Los Angeles Times
LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne takes a trip down to the U.S.-Mexican border in San Diego to attempt the challenge of critiquing Trump's border wall prototypes, "alternating bands of substance and absence, aspiration and impossibility". Image: U.S. Customs and Border Protection. View full entry
So what does the taste for Hogwarts-style dormitories say about the Yale or the USC of 2017? It says that the primary job of residential architecture on campus is to provide a sense of consistency and familiarity for donors and incoming students alike — to soften the edges of the college experience. — Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne looks back at 2017's resurgence of Neo Gothic and Neo-Gothic-ish college architecture and compares the newly completed USC Village and Yale residential complexes with architectural references of the manifestation of nostalgic Anglophilia... View full entry
This week, Donna and Ken are joined by Indianapolis architect and ARE Sketches author, Lora Teagarden. Lora is an architect with RATIO Architects and L^2 Design. On this podcast, we'll be discussing three news items from the website. First up is the controversy around the proposal for the... View full entry
Its forms are basic, totemic: Euclidean shapes dredged from the long memory of the field. It sometimes relies on modules or grids. It’s often monochromatic. It’s post-digital, which means it rejects the compulsion to push form-making to its absolute limits that overtook architecture at the turn of the century. As a result, it sometimes looks ancient or even primordial. It never looks futuristic. — LA Times
Famed LA Times architectural critic, Christopher Hawthorne, released his view of contemporary architecture that culminates in it being classified as boring, and yet, that might be exactly what the architectural discipline ordered. As a reaction to 'hyperactive form-making,' Hawthorne argues that... View full entry
"I cross a bit my fingers,” Renzo Piano told me. “It may work. We shall see.”
We were standing inside the concrete shell of the main auditorium of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, an ambitious but troubled project that after a series of delays is expected to open in 2019. [...]
Construction workers hammered away all around us, producing a ring of noise that occasionally made it tough to hear Piano, who at 80 speaks more softly than he once did.
— Los Angeles Times
LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne dissects Renzo Piano's third Southern California project, the troubled Academy Museum of Motion Pictures which — plagued by delays and controversy — is currently under construction right next to his other two completed buildings, the... View full entry
Christopher Hawthorne interviews Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee about this year's Chicago Architecture Biennial. The two reflect on the theme of the biennial—'Make New History'—and their role as curators. Hawthorne: What attracted you to history as a guiding idea for this biennial? Lee... View full entry
It has also been remarkable to watch Amazon pursue a dramatically different strategy. Its plans for a second headquarters suggest that in terms of architecture and campus planning it wants to be everything Apple is not. It wants to lean into the city — and thorny questions about gentrification and housing prices, to the extent that they will be a natural byproduct of this process — rather than away from it. — Los Angeles Times
"Though he took a very different path to get there," Hawthorne writes in his LAT opinion piece analyzing Apple & Amazon's lofty headquarters ambitions with a focus on urban integration (or the complete lack thereof), "Bezos ultimately reached the same conclusion Jobs did: that the wealthiest... View full entry
Very rarely does ethics become a selling point for a client or a selling point when you’re talking about a studio project. It’s very rarely the idea generator. I think most practitioners traditionally came from a comfortable or upper-middle-class. It’s the Jeffersonian ideal: the gentleman designer. Architects in this country tend to have clients who are in the upper income level. And I think that has really been a problem. Our students, many of them, come from underserved communities. — LA Times
Back in July, Archinect featured Woodbury's new dean, Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter, as a part of the Deans List series, in an interview about the importance of economic diversity and the school's commitment to egalitarian and practical education. The Los Angeles Times recently conducted a similar... View full entry
At a ceremony last week to mark the opening of the $700-million USC Village, C.L. Max Nikias, the university’s president, spoke at some length about the architecture of the new complex and what he called “USC’s extraordinary physical metamorphosis” in recent years. [...]
Then came his ringing conclusion: “And let’s always remember, the looks of the University Village give us 1,000 years of history we don’t have. Thank you, and fight on!”
— latimes.com
"Even delivered in a vacuum it would have been a remarkable statement," Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne remarks. "The president of the leading private university in Los Angeles taking up, as a rhetorical cudgel, one of the laziest clichés about the city, that it has no... View full entry
This interest in performance among architects is less a style or a fledgling movement than a register, a way of working. It’s a means of sketching out a new set of priorities — and giving up older ones that are tarnished or compromised. It’s also open-ended, challenging the idea that a building can ever really qualify as finished. It makes room for perspectives that come from other fields. — LA Times
According to Hawthorne, this new trend—seen in the work of architects from Andrés Jaque to Bryony Roberts—evidences the appeal of "impermanence and often...informality," putting the work in contrast to the ritzy architecture that seems to dominant these days. View full entry
[K. Michael Hays] represents an approach to teaching architecture and architectural theory that has held sway in the American academy for at least a generation. This approach doesn’t simply treat architecture as a discipline separate from the rest of the world, with its own passwords and protocols. It guards that separation with its life. — The Los Angeles Times
A spirited Christopher Hawthorne reviews Harvard GSD's first online course as taught by K. Michael Hays, who appears to prize obfuscation and condescension as teaching methods (Hawthorne does explain the history behind this autonomous pedagogy, which resulted from architects of the 1970s needing... View full entry
The museum is not a singular or path-breaking work of architecture; its design goals have more to do with manipulating light and shadow and with physical substance [...]
Yet taken as a whole the museum offers a range of encouraging signs about the priorities of architecture’s up-and-coming generation. These include a genuine interest in shifting definitions of public space in a digital age and — most important of all — a preference for measured and layered effects over operatic ones.
— Christopher Hawthorne - latimes.com
UC Davis' new Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of art opened in November, and will function as a teaching museum with spaces for studios, galleries, and classrooms, including a courtyard for performances and installations.According to Hawthorne, SO-IL's design (done in collaboration Karl... View full entry
When Frank Gehry's office was first attached to the L.A. River's master plan and redevelopment, the river began attracting fresh attention over a project that had already been evolving for decades. This October, in an attempt to do justice to the river's complexity and history (and the... View full entry
The L.A. River's redevelopment is one of the most challenging, and exciting, projects currently underway in Los Angeles. Accounting for the River's 51-mile stretch, and all the neighborhoods it runs through, is a mammoth endeavor—and one that will necessarily involve contention and compromise... View full entry
