One of the best of the print architectural critics, Christopher Hawthorne, writes about his recent visit to Medellin in the LA Times, and offers a well-rounded evaluation of the significance of the notable projects completed there in the past decade. While the most important thing about Medellín’s new architecture is, as Hawthorne writes and mammoth […]
March 19, 2010 – 12:30 pm
In an article at Architect, Loud Paper‘s Mimi Zeiger explores the growing entanglement of GIS and BIM applications, and the potential impact of this relationship for architecture: Loosely defined as the integration of geographic analysis and tools into the design process, the term “geodesign”… as Dangermond [the president of ESRI, makers of ArcGIS] sees it, […]
Magazine on Urbanism‘s twelfth issue, Real Urbanism, was released last Thursday; mammoth is quite pleased to have had the opportunity to contribute to this consistently provocative publication. For this issue, MONU called for entries which “explore how people in the real estates business perceive and conceive cities”: “What do cities look like in the eyes […]
February 26, 2010 – 6:34 pm
[Model of “Blooming Landscape, Deep Surface”; all images from and by Smout Allen] I can’t let Stephen’s mention of Smout Allen pass — particularly in the context of a discussion of process and event in architecture — without also saying a word about their proposal for the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is one of my […]
January 19, 2010 – 12:45 pm
Urban Tick has a review of a new publication, The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure, which catalogs a variety of (mostly high-profile) infrastructural projects designed by architects in the past couple decades. Though I haven’t read the book, the first point of critique that Urban Tick makes is quite astute and demonstrates a common problem in […]
January 11, 2010 – 4:05 pm
Lebbeus Woods has a fantastic piece, “Utopia Redux”, on the collages of Daniel Meridor, a student at the Cooper Union; the second paragraph, in particular, is a succinct summation of where young designers find themselves after the first decade of the third millenium: Meridor’s generation—a younger one—has no faith in grand architectural plans to make […]
January 10, 2010 – 9:58 pm
Today I finally got around to watching “Church Machine”, a short video project from a GSD studio run by Michael Meredith of MOS, which popped up just before Christmas. The video is the work of a student named Matt Storus and is well worth the sixteen minutes it’ll take you to watch it, as it […]
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 […]
October 28, 2009 – 9:27 am
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, “The Museum of Innocence”, tells the story of Kemal, the son of a wealthy Istanbul businessman, and the forbidden affair that derails his life, which is relatively standard stuff. What is fascinating, though, is that Kemal’s obsession with the affair leads him to collect an assembly of objects from […]
October 23, 2009 – 9:13 am
Wayne Curtis in The Atlantic on architecture and the reconstruction of New Orleans: Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it’s hard to […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
The After/Afterparty is a Processing application (or series of applications) developed by David Lu in collaboration with Michael Meredith (of MOS), which uses the forms from MOS’s PS1 project (Afterparty) to explore how architects and software developers might work together, both through generative processes and crowd-sourcing applications. The later, though described by Lu as a […]
Studio Lindfors, who previously proposed blimps as an inflatable emergency extension of the metropolis for the What if New York City… design competition, speculate further about the inhabitation of the air in their entry to [bracket], “Cloud Skippers”: Imagine a community of adventurous pioneers who leave the Earth’s surface to drift and glide amongst the […]
Somewhere, Louis Kahn is blushing. HOW DARE THEY. Is this Landscape Urbanism? Or is this? More on Seoul here. And here.
Via things, a list of 50 “strange buildings” which mashes icons of modern architecture (Nagakin Capsule Tower, Habitat 67, Lloyd’s) with ducks and idiosyncratic vernacular structures. As things notes, the interesting thing here is not the list, but the (inclusive) attitude towards architecture revealed by the list.
This is an endlessly fascinating article about the role language plays in cognition. Forgive me for quoting at length: Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words […]
I found this project by Andrea Brennen, which Rob highlighted here, incredibly refreshing. Considering the vital role money plays in Getting Stuff Built, discussion of financing and its repercussions is absurdly rare in critical discourse on architecture and urbanism. This is problematic – it’s not as if designs are hatched in a capital vacuum, funding […]
By Stephen
|
Posted in architecture, finance, infrastructure, the-expanded-field, urbanism
|
Also tagged architectural-criticism, finance, incremental-urbanism, informality, infrastructure, microfinance, urbanism
|
|
Permalink
I haven’t read this yet, but it looks remarkably interesting. The lede: Architects have long intuited that the places we inhabit can affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Now behavioral scientists are giving their hunches an empirical basis. Scientists are unearthing tantalizing clues about how to design spaces that promote creativity, keep students focused and […]
