Everything about this project highlighted on Infranet Lab is great, except for the title (“Arctic-tecture”).  Enough with the “archi-” and “-tecture” titles.  On the other hand, both of the research projects that Arctic-tecture’s author, Andrea Brennan, was/is involved in at MIT pair good work with equally good names (both projects were published in Volume, in volumes 14 and 18, respectively, if I have my numbers straight):

1. the Office for Unsolicited Architecture, a project which looks to question and subvert the ‘four cornerstones’ of architecture: the client, the site, the budget, and the program.  Investigations into the financial and the legal, worlds all too often avoided, ensue.

2. GAG: the Green Architecture Guide, offers both a pun and a program that I can endorse, as it questions several of the broad narratives of ‘green’ architecture, from Arup to McDonough.  While GAG is perhaps not the deepest discourse, offering a few (on-target) quick jabs at each narrative before asking appropriately pointed questions, but it is a spot-on starting point for questioning both green dogma and the backlash against green dogma.

This is one more piece of evidence fitting the pattern Stephen has identified in the past — that much of the most interesting and critically engaged architecture is being done by students right now.  (Or perhaps it has always been that way, and the dissolution of barriers to publishing produced by the advent of digital media has merely made it visible?)