The first Urban Symposium event, as a part of StoreFrontLab Season 2, kicked off with a full room of people, each with a party hat on and margarita in hand. > Read More
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SANAA’s Anti-LouvreRichard Ingersoll
Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” at the terminus of the Louvre-Lens’ grand gallery. (Photo by Richard Ingersoll.)
Just before Christmas a superb new museum—a subsidiary of the Louvre in Paris—opened in the ex-coal mining city of Lens in northern France. To promote this breakthrough in museology, the curators chose the familiar icon of revolution, Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” one of some 200 artworks on loan from the parent institution, the world’s most popular museum. Richard Ingersoll paid a visit. > Read More
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ACADIA 2012: Synthetic Digital EcologiesThérèse Tierney
The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) convened late last fall at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco for its annual four-day conference, organized this year by CCA’s Jason Kelly Johnson.[1] It headlined an impressive list of international speakers, including Manuel DeLanda, Saul Griffith of otherlab, Greg Lynn, and Achim Menges. > Read More
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Manifest Destiny!Donna Schumacher
Photo by Cesar Rubio Photography.
The view walking along Bush Street towards downtown San Francisco recalls the exaggerated perspective of a Wayne Thiebaud painting. The sharp crest of the hill forces the gaze forward and down, revealing the urban fabric below where Manifest Destiny! — a19th-century, smaller than life-size cabin—adheres like a barnacle to the blank façade of 453 Bush Street, three and one half stories up. > Read More
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Ghost StoryBrad Leibin
Opening day at Pruitt Igoe. Photo via http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/urban-history/
It remains nearly impossible to escape architecture, urban design, or planning education in the United States without hearing the name Pruitt-Igoe, even forty years after the St. Louis housing project’s demolition in 1972. > Read More
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Rodolfo Machado at Wurster HallJohn Parman
Rodolfo Machado at Wurster auditorium, UC Berkeley, on March 9, 2012. Photo by John Parman.
“Where were the students?” one of their professors asked me as we were leaving. It was a pity they missed the lecture, because Professor Machado had aimed to instruct, showing in detail how three of his projects moved from planning to completion, warts and all. > Read More
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‘Architecture in the Expanded Field’Yuki Bowman
Photo by Yuki Bowman
Co-curated and designed by CCA’s Ila Berman and Douglas Burnham, ‘Architecture in the Expanded Field’ is an Herculean and painstakingly crafted 3-dimensional exhibit that indexes some 75 works of ‘installation architecture’—an experimental terrain of practice explored by Erin Hyman for this magazine. > Read More
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Lars Lerup at Wurster HallJohn Parman
Lars Lerup explaining his analysis of the Houston cityscape. Photo by John Parman.
Playing to a big, friendly crowd, Rice Professor Lars Lerup acknowledged his Berkeley roots in a lecture on Wednesday night, 7 March, centered on his new book on the Houston cityscape, One Million Acres & No Zoning (Architectural Association, 2011). > Read More
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Dreaming of HomeJonathan Lerner
Architectural model, plan view, for MOS’s "Thoughts on a Walking City" project for Orange, New Jersey. Photograph courtesy of James Ewing. © 2011 James Ewing.
It didn’t take the mortgage meltdown to make clear that residential patterns affect individual, societal and environmental health. And the crash only made the ruinous implications of conventional sprawl development harder to ignore. Now an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art asks how architecture and planning might ameliorate those consequences, proposing alternate ideals of home and imagining buildings and places to express them. > Read More
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STRANGE ATLAS 02: PULL IT TOGETHERMallory Cusenbery
Gerhard Richter. Atlas. Tafel 5. Albumfotos 1962-1968. ©Gerhard Richter 2011.
The creative process is an intriguing design problem of its own: how should you craft the method used to craft other things? This is the second in a series of essays exploring this topic through the lens of strange atlas, an interpretive creative process. Although this approach applies beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries, the essays focus on its application for designing the built environment.
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The Dis[re]membered BodyJohn E. Parman
Image courtesy Richard Ingersoll.
Richard Ingersoll, Nomads in Sprawltown
February 2, 2012
Like every lecture nowadays, the speaker begins hunched over a cinderblock media counter checking to see if his technology is compatible with the space. Wearing mostly black and bedecked in a small beret, the Montevarchi, Italy based architectural historian and professor Richard Ingersoll commands the attention of around 50 students and visitors who stare down at him from the blocky bare wood of the New Soft Room at the Architectural Association’s London office.
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Overexposed?Yuki Bowman
Charles and Ray Eames "pinned" by chair bases, 1947. © 2011 Eames Office, LLC.
The Architect & The Painter, the new film on Charles and Ray Eames, is broad in its ambitions and captures a few things very well. > Read More
The new corporate? It’s about the mix.Bryant Rice
High tech in the city: Google's New York campus dwarfs its neighbors. Photo by ToastyKen
A standing-room-only crowd turned out for SPUR’s January 11 program on “The Not So Corporate Campus.” The program promised to reveal the “future of work,” with a panel including Alexa Arena, Forest City’s vice president in charge of the groundbreaking 5M Project, John Igoe of Google, Everett Katibak of Facebook, and moderator Laura Crescimano of Gensler. While the discussion highlighted three campus projects that are trying to go beyond the typical speculative development of office parks, it posed unanswered questions about the importance of diversity and flexibility in sparking innovation. > Read More
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SNØHETTA DESIGNS THE SFMOMA EXPANSIONPaolo Polledri
View from Yerba Buena Gardens. Image courtesy Snøhetta.
Compared to the existing San Francisco Museum of Modern Art building, the new addition designed by Craig Dykers of Snøhetta looks, well, very new. This is not stating the obvious; it seems as if the museum itself is about to change into something completely different. > Read More
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Renzo Against CorbuRichard Ingersoll
Aerial photo of Ronchamp today. Photographer: Iwan Baan (Bauwelt)
When Renzo Piano was commissioned to make some additions and adjustments to Le Corbusier’s iconic Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, it caused an uproar. Now that the scaffolds have been removed, Richard Ingersoll wonders what the controversy was about.
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Richard Serra: A RetrospectivePaolo Polledri
Picture 1: Richard Serra, Abstract Slavery, 1974; paintstick on Belgian linen; 114 x 212 inches; collection of Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands; © 2011 Richard Serra / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: Robert Mates and Paul Katz
Richard Serra is the quintessential modern artist. The exhibition Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art makes obvious that he’s immune to convention, a follower of no movement, and firm against authority—occasionally even his own. > Read More
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