The 14th Venice Architecture Biennale is now one month into its extended six-month run. Rem Koolhaas of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is its curator and with his appointment came two demands, a longer preparation (2 years) and exhibition run (6 months). Koolhaas chose the title, Fundamentals, implying a return or realignment towards a… Read More
Lebbeus Woods passed away two Novembers ago. He was loved and respected by other architects and by the generations of students he taught at Cooper Union. He was also a rogue figure, drawn more to meditative explorations of the human condition and futuristic scenarios then to building in any button-up, doing business kind of sense.… Read More
In January, Rizzoli Books announced that it would be closing its store on West 57th Street. By the time April rolled around the closure felt sudden. On April 11th, 2014, approved the final day, the store was packed with people, significantly busier and louder than usual. It was filled with curiosity seekers and discount scavengers… Read More
Lebbeus Woods was a singular figure in architecture. He was an outsider, yet quietly influential to architectural thinking over the past three decades. He was a humanist, a deconstructionist, a utopian, a critical thinker, and often misunderstood. Lebbeus asked radical questions of architecture, questions that Architecture as a discipline was hardly capable of answering. His… Read More
Gun Machine is a tightly wound, little beast of a detective novel. The story begins with two NYC detectives who stumble into an explosive situation. An angry, naked man with a shotgun is set off by an eviction notice and threatens to kill his neighbors in his run-down apartment building. One of the two officers… Read More
Part two of our mapping series. See Part one Mapping Histories History is never objective—interpretations of events always vary depending on whose perspective is prioritized. It is always a process of selection and exclusion, approved what is remembered and forgotten, talked about and written down, history is not left up to chance but to the… Read More
The Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden was built to house the Hirschorn art collection, thumb which was acquired by the Smithsonian in 1965. The site picked for the Hirschorn had previously held the large red brick Medical Museum which was demolished to make room for the new museum. It was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of… Read More
Rising from the muck, much like the urban wastelands of JG Ballard’s novels, Alex Lukas’ remnant landscapes present viewers with a future vision of our ruined present. These works on paper hover into one’s vision, offering fleeting memories of great cities, lost and then rediscovered. Cities or their fragments are inundated with water, scrub, marsh,… Read More
The “para-” prefix indicates a beyond, and look against, search ask alongside, more about or abnormal state. SFMOMA’s ParaDesign exhibition collects objects that often seem wrong, lack obvious usability, or contain other degrees of uncertainty—carrying with it the assertion that these objects exist for themselves as narrative devices or as critiques of design objectives. Though… Read More
Esther Choi and Marikka Trotter (Editors) Workbooks/MIT PRESS 2010 The recent anthology, salve Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (AEEE), web edited by Esther Choi and Marikka Trotter explores the anxious state of architectural thought and practice. Choi and Trotter have compiled a notable list of thinkers and practitioners to interrogate the current moment… Read More