“We as a profession have to encourage young architects to understand that the technology they’re using is merely a tool. They have to understand how to build the building that they’re creating, but also understand that this place is going to affect somebody. So what can we do to make it a place that—in a sense—I want to be a part of, that I want to attach to?”
Archiculture: The Latest Architecture and News
Archiculture Interviews: Peter Lippman
Archiculture Interviews: Evan Douglis
“Something I always tell my students is that it’s important to fail on a continuous basis—and I’m not talking about the grade. I mean it’s in the spirit of risk, that you have to be willing to free yourself from a set of preconceptions in order to get to this new place. And if failing constitutes making mistakes in order to learn from these mistakes, then you have achieved an enormous amount. In fact, you’re only able to move forward because of this new-found knowledge.”
Archiculture Interviews: Michael Monti
“I think one generational shift that’s going on has to do with the interest in architecture students to be involved in the community. Students see architecture not just as a profession, like medicine or law, they see it as a kind of service profession, on the order of social work or social science, where they understand that the work they do affects communities and real people, so they want to involve the communities from the beginning in their design process.”
Archiculture Interviews: Terry Heinlein
“Students who enter schools of architecture today are entering it at a very young age, perhaps when their total world experience and awareness is relatively narrow, and they’re making the decision to become a practicing architect, and putting aside those studies—general ed., liberal arts studies—that might actually, in the end, make them more contributing architects. […] Fewer and fewer people are having that basic liberal arts, general ed. knowledge in the profession. And it’s a serious problem.”
Archiculture Interviews: Joe Riley
“What makes a livable city is the place where the resident—the occupant—feels in charge. So, for a child, a neighborhood that’s child-friendly. Or for citizens, a place that is physically beautiful, and handsome, and nourishing, and inspirational—a place where there is [a] substantial [amount] of public realm.”
Archiculture Interviews: Audrey Matlock
“I think that [sustainability education] is a massive responsibility of ours: to go beyond what we’re being asked to do, and to teach our clients what a good building is, and to get them to look at buildings in different ways, and get them to do […] the right thing.”
Archiculture Interviews: Marc Schaut and Dan Bucsescu
In a new segment of the Archiculture extras series, Arbuckle Industries interviews Pratt professors and architects Marc Schaut and Dan Bucsescu, who discuss the extent to which technology has transformed the teaching of architecture, and the necessities of a holistic architecture education. Watch the interview above, and delve into more Archiculture interviews here.
Archiculture Interviews: Matthew Berman and Andrew Kotchen
“You can teach certain things. You can teach people how to do a CD package, you can teach people how to draw certain details, you can teach people how to work through a process. You can’t teach someone how to be a good designer. And that might be subjective […] but it’s about speaking kind of a common language.”
Archiculture Interviews: Michael Reynolds
'I just blew off the architecture profession, really. I mean, I have blown it off in my mind as a profession because it’s not addressing the issues that we face. So I coined a new word called ‘biotechure,’ and I use that. I would say I’m a ‘biotect.'
Archiculture Interviews: Bill Hellmuth
“If you look at just carbon emissions, what we do for a living—building buildings, running buildings, all that— is 50 percent of all the carbon emissions in the United States. […] Well that’s both sort of dreadful and wonderful at the same time. […] The opportunity is, because it’s so concentrated, a relatively smaller group of people can do something about it. ”
As a part of its Archiculture series, Arbuckle Industries has interviewed HOK president Bill Hellmuth on his experiences in architecture school and working in a large practice. In the interview, Hellmuth discusses his path in architecture school, how large firms allow for the creation of teams, and issues involving sustainability and livable cities.
Archiculture Interviews: John Cary
"There are far, far more basic things - health, education, housing, and so on - but the thing that we try to communicate [...] is that we need to better articulate how design can improve those truly basic human needs."
Archiculture Interviews: Thom Mayne
"It's amazing how resilient our society is, and that resiliency includes architecture. It's resilient in terms of the society, it's resilient economically, and that's a really good thing."
Archiculture Interviews: Roger Hart
In Arbuckle Industries' latest Archiculture interview, Roger Hart, an environmental psychology professor at New York’s City University, discusses the relationship between people and their surroundings. He analyzes the effects of environmental factors on both behavior and health, and advocates that the physical environment and its occupants be regarded as symbiotic entities. Additionally, Hart discusses the shifting relationship between environmental psychology and architecture, and explains how a closer collaboration between these disciplines in the design process can produce a healthier and more humanized built environment.
Archiculture Interviews: Jess Zimbabwe
"We as a species assign value to people based on the environments we ask them to live in. And I think most people are worth more than a lot of the environments that we ask them to live, work, attend school and shop in."
Archiculture Interviews: Peter Bohlin
"I would say we're at the intersection of people, art, and technology..." In this latest Archiculture extras interview, Peter Bohlin, architect and president of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, sits down with Arbuckle Industries to discuss the nature of architecture. He addresses some of the design challenges he faced when developing the 5th Avenue Apple Store and how he ultimately overcame them. Additionally, he provides his perspective on the attributes of "good architects" and the mindset of these individuals. He goes on to discuss the role of architects, and the challenges he anticipates for this discipline in the future.
Archiculture Interviews: John King
"What I love about architecture is it really is the art form that we all encounter, it's larger than life, it's what you can't avoid." In this installment of Arbuckle Industries' Archiculture interviews, author and urban design critic John King dissects the role of the public in architectural practice and the mindset of those who get involved. He goes on to discuss the defining characteristics of successful, seasoned architects, and compares their mentality to that of emerging architects. Additionally, King touches on the subject of architectural criticism and how the profession came about.
Archiculture Interviews: Sway Calloway
"I think what you see visually in terms of how you live can definitely make a difference on how you view life."
Archiculture Interviews: Bill McDonough
"What I'm trying to look at is how do we make humans supportive of a natural world, in the way that the natural world is supportive of us?" In the latest installment of Arbuckle Industries' Archiculture interviews, architect, educator, environmentalist, and author Bill McDonough discusses some of the challenges and themes he has seen in our built environment. He focuses on environmentalism in architecture through the lens of carbon neutrality and the problems with that principle. He goes on to address some of his solutions, including a Cradle to Cradle design approach which changes the way environmental problems are tackled.