January 5, 2011 – 6:00 am
[Fantastic Norway‘s 2005 installation “Polar Night”, built in the Arctic town of Bodø. A total of 40 daylight lamps — bulbs of the sort which are designed to simulate natural sunlight and used in therapy — were attached to fiberglass panels, lighting a public square during the polar night, and producing an event which attracted […]
December 13, 2010 – 6:40 pm
I hope everyone has watched the video of the Metrodome collapse. The moment when the fabric tears and a inverted volcano of snow pours onto the field is incredible, like a roof giving birth. (I tried to capture a still, but the wonder is all in the fluid motion.) Parametrics should be the study of […]
December 3, 2010 – 5:27 am
On his blog, Rory Hyde interviews Geoff Manaugh and Liam Young at Thrilling Wonder Stories 2. I’m particularly taken by an idea the three converge on at the end: GM: …I guess if you’re trying to do a kind of trigonometric extension of the canon into the future, and to imagine where might we be […]
November 14, 2010 – 6:00 am
Architect and photographer Simon Kennedy’s exhibition 635×508: Heygate Abstracted opens at the Bartlett School of Architecture this Monday.
November 1, 2010 – 5:55 am
At Mute Magazine, Owen Hatherly picks at tensions in the rhetoric and built work of Zaha Hadid Architects, with a particular emphasis on both the claims Patrick Schumacher makes about parametricism as a new avant-garde and the Evelyn Grace Academy in London, one of ZHA’s recent buildings. Though it is not entirely representative of the […]
October 28, 2010 – 6:00 am
[David Garcia Studio‘s “Dead Website Archive”, from MAP-003 “Archive”; read about the Dead Website Archive at DPR-Barcelona.]
October 24, 2010 – 2:28 pm
BLDGBLOG recently ran an interview with Jeffrey Inaba, which sent me plunging back into the BLDGBLOG archives to re-read a trio of interviews that Geoff conducted in 2007 with Inaba and two of the other editors of Volume, Ole Bouman and Mark Wigley. I could share any number of excerpts from those interviews, as each […]
October 7, 2010 – 7:38 am
[Screenshot from “Magnasanti”] Vincent Ocasla’s “Magnasanti” is a SimCity with six million inhabitants, which Ocasla argues represents the maximum possible stable population achievable within the game. A winning solution, he says, to a game without any programmed conditions for winning. Ocasla, a Filipino architecture student, spent four years constructing the SimCity — building the SimCity […]
September 20, 2010 – 6:58 am
[A drawing from SUB-PLAN; click to enlarge] I’ve mentioned before that we try not to link to things that we suspect you, our readers, are already reading; this, of course, means that we rarely link to some of our favorite blogs. However: BLDGBLOG‘s latest missive — which is on David Knight and Finn Williams’ explorations […]
September 13, 2010 – 4:43 pm
As a coda to our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, mammoth spoke with Kazys Varnelis, editor of that book, about how the infrastructural city and “network culture” are related, what the contents of an imaginary new chapter for The Infrastructural City might be, and the future of architecture in the wake of global economic […]
September 12, 2010 – 1:10 pm
To celebrate this September being the fiftieth anniversary of the coining of the term ‘cyborg’, Tim Maly — whose Quiet Babylon is, as it used to say on the cover, concerned with “Cyborgs, Architects, and our Weird Broken Future” — has corralled a team of bloggers and guest writers to produce fifty posts on the […]
August 25, 2010 – 7:43 pm
A prominent “architectural” critique of Christopher Nolan’s Inception seems to be that its architecture is insufficiently dreamlike (example: Aaron Betsky). At Super Colossal, Marcus Trimble provides a helpful corrective to that line of thinking, situating Inception within a repeated portrayal of generic downtowns in Nolan’s films. While the most important thing to note when correcting […]
August 20, 2010 – 1:09 pm
[“Weather Field”; Lateral Office + Paisajes Emergentes for Land Art Generator Initiative] As we have nearly reached the conclusion of our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, we thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the lessons of the text with one of mammoth‘s favorite architectural studios, the Toronto-based Lateral Office. In a series […]
August 10, 2010 – 8:50 pm
[A model from SITE Architects’ series of projects in the seventies and eighties for BEST Products Company; I don’t think this particular one was built (I’d like to be told I’m wrong about that), but those that were built are also rather entertaining, and early examples of attempts to modify the architecture of big-box stores.] […]
Writing on the LA Times’ Culture Monster blog, Christopher Hawthorne (probably the most essential architecture critic writing for a major newspaper in the States) notes a common flaw in both the recent Vanity Fair “World Architecture Survey” and the counter-list of “green architecture” Architect magazine put together: “…Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces […]
We’re reading The Infrastructural City. This is week ten — after this, we’ve got Robert Sumrell’s “Props” next week and a brief return to the introduction the following week. Fill yourself in, if that’s necessary. [An aerial shot of the Alameda Corridor amidst warehouses and distribution centers, from Lane Barden’s photo-essay “The Trench”, which follows […]
“The objective is to convey 55 years of experience in the architectural profession and say what I can before the end comes.”
[What with the final and all, today is an excellent day to check out a bit of Rasmus Norlander’s photography; above is one of his photographs of the Soccer City stadium renovation in Johannesburg — site of today’s final — but I recommend continuing on to his website and looking at the extraordinary photographs in […]
[The massing of “Sliced Porosity Block”; image via Evolo] Having previously mentioned Hugh Ferriss’s drawings of the forms of Manhattan zoning ordinances (and having then speculated on the possibility that architects might design by sculpting ordinances), I think it worth mentioning Steven Holl’s “Sliced Porosity Block”, which is sited on an urban block in the […]
[For more about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, see our hyperbolically-named post on the best architecture of the decade]
