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To start off the new week, let's announce the winners of the Discovering Architecture book giveaway we had from October. The winners below will each receive a hardcover copy of "Discovering Architecture: How the World's Greatest Buildings Were Designed and Built" by Philip Jodidio. Released last... View full entry
The Eternal Space will visually recreate the marvel of the former Pennsylvania Station using the actual photographs that documented the station’s demise. [...] Using the latest in projection technology these arresting photographs will speak to the tragic demolition of an American architectural masterpiece [...] On the 50th anniversary of that great loss, The Eternal Space will pay tribute to the station and the gifted photographers who worked to immortalize it. — theeternalspaceplay.com
Architects, historians, and all urban enthusiasts are invited to a free evening event that will acknowledge the 50th anniversary of the demolition of NYC's Pennsylvania Station on Nov. 6 at the AIA | NY Center for Architecture. Hosted by AIA | NY, the program will begin with a live reading of... View full entry
Want to brush up on some architectural history or need an entertaining coffee-table book? "Discovering Architecture: How the World's Greatest Buildings Were Designed and Built" released today by Universe Publishing could be just what you need--and we're giving away three copies to three... View full entry
In creating associated descriptive metadata, in tagging building entries to describe their materials, types, and, perhaps most especially, their styles, the author of metadata is practicing the historian’s craft and engaging in the historian’s stock in trade. "Name it, then we’ll know what it is," Reyner Banham suggested at the end of “The Great Gizmo.” We can name it metadata creation, but we already know what it is: architectural history. — Places Journal
For several years Gabrielle Esperdy has been part of a team working on the development of SAH Archipedia — an online encyclopedia of American architecture sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians. Here she explores the critical challenge of creating structural and descriptive... View full entry
"It was a place where you got your information, and served as a post office -- it had an integral role in the community," Moy said of the building, as well as other similar sites. "It's a unique structure, even though architecturally it's very utilitarian and doesn't represent any high style of architecture. It's more about the people and the work they did." — Los Angeles Times
The National Trust for Historic Preservation released its list of the 11 most endangered buildings in the country and making that list is Southern California’s very own Rancho Cucamonga Chinatown House. No, the Chinatown House is not a restaurant at Victoria Gardens Shopping Center. Yes... View full entry
A historian might spend decades undertaking research in archives and writing up discoveries in scholarly journals, but if the work does not have a presence online — and, specifically, a presence that is not behind a paywall — it is all but invisible outside academia. As Ridge states, “If it’s not Googleable, it doesn’t exist.” — Places Journal
Over the decades women architects have received scant attention from historians and prize juries. On Places, Despina Stratigakos writes, "The painful cancellation of Denise Scott Brown in the awarding of the Pritzker Prize solely to her husband and collaborator, Robert Venturi, is an important... View full entry
Architecture with capital letter A is a short movie, featuring Architects who might have shaped the concept of Architecture itself in the last decade. The movie combines excerpts of their interviews, speeches or documentaries over the last 70 years. This accumulation of scenes expresses somehow the condition of Architecture today - its moments of Glory and Misery. — viavili.com
Yet another treatise on Steve Jobs? As an “architect” — really? And with Apple seemingly waning, aren't we behind the curve on this? Suffice it to say that my interest is not solely in Jobs himself, but rather in the challenge he poses to the methods and purpose of an architectural historian.... But since architectural stories are surprising rare here on the edge of the continent, I need a shtick; no matter my connoisseur-ish personal tastes and leftist political dispositions. — Places Journal
What is revealed when we contemplate the late Steve Jobs not only as a technologist extraordinaire but also as a sort of architect? And if we then compare Jobs with another complicated virtuoso, Rem Koolhaas? On Places, architectural historian Simon Sadler argues "Jobs and Koolhaas both seem to... View full entry
In Santa Barbara, Calif., the hot architect in town is George Washington Smith. In Charlottesville, Va., it's Eugene Bradbury. And in the small town of Washington, Conn., homes by Ehrick Rossiter are prized. These architects have a few things in common: They're long dead, they're relatively unknown outside the small, affluent pockets where they practiced in the early 20th century and they've all made a comeback. — online.wsj.com
In its most far-reaching aspects, container urbanism proposes to take the fundamental organic/architectural condition of containment further by exploring how a boundary might be better coordinated, even merged with the flow of material/ideas. Can containment equate more closely with transmission and, in so doing, position architecture and urbanism more in line with societal mobility and change? — Places Journal
The repurposed shipping container has become a fixture of urban architecture — part of a movement, as Mitchell Schwarzer argues, toward an "urban design as flexible, responsive and electric as the currents that feed it." On Places, Schwarzer examines the rise of container urbanism from the... View full entry
Eighteen feet below one of Rome’s most-trafficked junctions is a 900-seat arts center dating back to the second-century reign of Emperor Hadrian, Italian archaeologists have announced.
The discovery, widely seen as the most important in Rome in 80 years, came as a result of digging for the city’s third subway line. Archeologists spent the last five years excavating two halls of the structure under the Piazza Venezia, which is believed to be an arts center, or auditorium, built by Hadrian.
— artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com
We tend to think of architecture as solid, stable, enduring, something that at its best will outlast us and possibly say something about us to future generations. Demolition makes powerfully evident the vulnerability, the mortality, of all things standing. — Places Journal
"When does architecture, once started, stop?" asks Keith Eggener. "Does it end when human occupation or attention terminates, when function or fabric are removed?" What is the connection between civic buildings and collective memory? Just in time for the World Series, Eggener recounts the saga of... View full entry
For retailers, daylight offered one additional advantage the advertisements did not mention: the implication of moral virtue. Large department stores were described as cesspools of fraud, filth, poor working conditions, child labor, anti-competitiveness, potential press censorship (because of their advertising clout), disease, drunkenness, savagery, prostitution, suicide and darkness. A well-lit interior, it was said, could do much to counter such negative associations. — Places Journal
Earlier this year on Places, Keith Eggener assessed the career of the now forgotten early 20th-century Kansas City architect Louis Curtiss, and argued that Curtiss's obscurity has less to do with intrinsic merit than with the politics of professional reputation. In a new article... View full entry
If you drove far enough, from Maine to Georgia, from the Midwest to Southern California, or simply from one end of Los Angeles to the other, you would start to notice that there were different ecologies, and that some were geographical and some were cultural, but that they intersected and collaged to form a vast, sprawling, layered network whose patterns were discernible only if you took the long view and just kept driving. — Places Journal
In an essay for Places, Gabrielle Esperdy (of American Road Trip) follows architectural critic Reyner Banham out of Los Angeles and out onto the open road, placing him in the tradition of European travelers, from de Tocqueville and Dickens to Alistair Cooke and Stephen Fry, whose observations... View full entry
How should the state pursue the goal of making decent housing affordable and accessible to all its citizens? How can we mobilize our collective resources in the service of social justice? In what other ways might we imagine living together? What is a house? — Places Journal
On Places, architectural historian Jonathan Massey puts Occupy Wall Street and the 99 Percenters into the historical context of housing in America. Walking us from the 1920s to the present day, he explores how governmental and banking policies have worked to promote the ideal of home... View full entry