informality - mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: informality

re-inhabited circle-k’s

["Mini-Mart, Albuquerque, NM"; photographer Paho Mann documents the diverse array of stores that re-inhabit the empty shells abandoned by the national corporation Circle-K; the current lives of Circle-K's include "a dry cleaners, a couple of florist shops, a tattoo parlor, a tuxedo rental place, several mini-marts and dollar stores, and Bridgett’s Last Laugh Karaoke and [...]

dialogue: finance, context, scale, and intervention

In a recent back and forth between myself (Stephen) and Rory Hyde in the comments of On Finance, Rory noted:
To zoom out even further, are we just talking about ‘context’? To understand the context in architecture normally means literally to understand the site context - the two terms are used interchangeably - but as all [...]

on finance

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 [...]

the city we have

In a recent feature on Archinect, Will Galloway of Front Office (they have a blog here) discusses the predilection of architects for the wholesale urban renovation (which, despite the prominence of theoretical frameworks that intend to offer alternatives, remains the dominant tendency of designers, even those working within frameworks — such as landscape urbanism — [...]

The Endurance of Cities, pt.1

I went to an interesting lecture put on by the architecture league Monday night. From the description on their website:
“Eric Firley will discuss his recent research for the book The Urban Housing Handbook (Wiley, 2009), co-authored with Caroline Stahl. Exploring the relationship between architecture and the urban fabric, the handbook provides graphic representations [...]