February 15, 2010 – 7:30 pm
Bureau de Mesarchitecture’s “Double Happiness”, an installation for the 2009 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial, is described by the architects as a piece of “nomad” “urban furniture”, allowing users (who presumably own a forklift) to “reanimate” and “reappropriate” the public spaces of their cities, which, despite the obvious deficiences seems to me an appropriately ambitious aim [...]
February 12, 2010 – 12:36 pm
Via Pruned and elsewhere, the Chicago Architectural Club has just launched a spring competition, “Mine the Gap”, which holds a great deal of promise: …at a moment when the global recession has either slowed or frozen completely the driving forces that had propelled architecture and urbanism over the past decades. The bursting of the realestate [...]
January 25, 2010 – 1:06 pm
[The Large Hadron Collider] The end of a decade inspires a lot of list compiling; in that spirit, mammoth offers an alternative list of the best architecture of the decade, concocted without any claim to authority and surely missing some fascinating architecture. But we hope that at least it’s not boring, as this was an [...]
By mammoth
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Also posted in economics, engineering, finance, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, meta, the-expanded-field, urbanism
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Tagged alan-berger, china, city-car, elemental, fresh-kills, groundwater-replenishment-system, high-speed-rail, iphone, james-corner, kiva, large-hadron-collider, medellin, parque-biblioteca-espana, pontine-systemic-design, quinta-monroy, svalbard-global-seed-vault
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January 22, 2010 – 2:38 pm
While researching a forthcoming post last night (which I can assure you will live up to the site’s title, at least in length), I stumbled across this fantastic interview with Alan Berger conducted by Abitare. The interview deals first with Berger’s work in the Pontine Marshes, but expands to discuss his general working methodology (airplane [...]
January 7, 2010 – 6:55 pm
I was browsing the archives of loud paper a couple days ago, and a (somewhat older, though I’m not sure exactly how much older) article by Kazys Varnelis, “Teen Urbanism”, caught my attention. In it, Varnelis drags a couple of insights out of Louis Wirth‘s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, a seminal sociological essay [...]
December 21, 2009 – 2:47 pm
[Manhattan skyscraper zoning ordinances, given visual form by Hugh Ferriss; image from Kosmograd's flickr account] 1 The tricky thing with Duany is sorting out what is a genuine attempt to improve cities and what might be a carefully-constructed shield for the extension of the corporate real estate economy (so long as Duany says things like [...]
November 20, 2009 – 12:53 pm
Strangely affecting photographs of Ordos under construction, via delicious/sevensixfive; my previous thoughts on Ordos here.
November 11, 2009 – 7:02 pm
You’ll want to read all of Dan Hill’s post on his involvement in the design of The Cloud, a proposal for “a new form of observation deck” overlooking London and its new Olympic stadium. The proposal draws upon a number of fascinating themes, including urban informatics, cloud computing, weather, crowd-sourcing, and “re-industrial” cities: Data is [...]
October 19, 2009 – 12:20 pm
["Subdivision: Sunshine Acres", by Ross Racine.] Thomas Sugrue, in a Wall Street Journal article on the American culture of home ownership from August: Every generation has offered its own version of the claim that owner-occupied homes are the nation’s saving grace. During the Cold War, home ownership was moral armor, protecting America from dangerous outside [...]
October 16, 2009 – 1:30 pm
I’m loving the architecture series of TED talks – 20 minutes seems to be the perfect amount of time to get a handle on the key driving forces behind an architect’s practice. Also, the TED audience (which as far as I can tell is comprised mainly of brilliant non-architects) forces architects to talk about their [...]
October 14, 2009 – 9:33 am
A conversation worth following: the original piece is Matt Jones’s “The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future” at io9, in which Matt draws connections between Archigram, the architecture of science fiction and comics, ubiquitous computing, and the future of mega-cities. Varnelis responds, arguing that Jones’ rhetorical adoption of Archigram inadvertently reveals an absence [...]
By rholmes
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Also posted in asides, readings, urbanism
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Tagged a456, archigram, bldgblog, criticism, io9, kazys-varnelis, lebbeus-woods, speculative-architecture, things, utopias
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October 13, 2009 – 10:04 am
I see that Dan Hill put the post from the Toward the Sentient City exhibit up at City of Sound, and that version improves on the version at Toward the Sentient City by including links and images. Reading Hill’s post again, I noticed a couple paragraphs that bear on the post below regarding architecture and [...]
October 12, 2009 – 2:19 pm
You should read Adam Greenfield’s post “Towards Urban Systems Design”, which includes some response to my brief note on Dan Hill’s post at Towards the Sentient City. A couple items from Greenfield’s post below that I’d like to respond to, in reverse of the order in which they appear in the original, because that’s convenient [...]
October 9, 2009 – 11:31 am
City of Sound’s Dan Hill comments on the Architecture League’s exhibition “Toward the Sentient City”, at the Sentient City website. While he praises the intent and content of the exhibition, he wonders if it doesn’t go far enough in several ways. The last of these, “the positioning of architecture itself”, is particularly relevant to themes [...]
October 6, 2009 – 12:00 pm
[Alexander Brodsky's pavilion on Lake Pirogovo, near Moscow, via flickr user Yuri Palmin. Described in Metropolis in 2006: ...in winter 2003 a team of laborers under his direction trudged out onto [Lake Pirogov's] frozen surface and, in the frigid conditions, assembled a rectangular mesh cage about 40 feet long and 8 feet high that they [...]
October 2, 2009 – 2:56 pm
Infrastructurist has a round-up of some of the projects selected by Chicago to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Burnham and Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The projects, roughly themed as “big”, “bold”, and “visionary”, are organized into six categories: big plans, catalysts, public spaces, the lake front, towers, and transportation. Notable winners include Urbanlab’s plan to [...]
September 29, 2009 – 1:45 pm
Adam Greenfield wrote a post about a week ago using Berlin’s Allianz Arena as a test case for a general shift in urbanism from “constant” to “variable”, which is one of the shifts he’s previously identified as composing a condition he calls “networked urbanism”. Greenfield speculates about how the Arena’s current, relatively limited ability to [...]
September 21, 2009 – 3:38 pm
Entschwindet und Vergeht penned a thoughtful and clever critique of Hadid’s Museum of Transport (in Glasgow) a bit over a month ago: I’ve already discussed ZHA a number of times here, often in regards to unwittingly interesting things that they’ve done, such as the accidental brutalism of LF1 and the Wolfsburg museum (which I shall [...]
September 6, 2009 – 1:17 pm
Its taken me a few days to notice it (because both Stephen and I’ve been on mini-vacations from the internet), but the winners of WPA 2.0 contest have been announced. “Urban Beach”, from Darina Zlateva and Takuma Ono’s winning entry, “Hydro-Genic City, 2020″ The six winners propose harvesting biofuels from pools of algae fed by [...]
August 24, 2009 – 1:37 pm
Rory Hyde (who is working for Volume) comments on the “Office for Unsolicited Architecture” from Volume 14, which Stephen and I have both tangentially touched on in the past: [T]he role of reality in the production of an unsolicited project… is arguably what separates unsolicited architecture from so-called speculative or paper architecture. While Archigram’s visions [...]
