This article was originally published on Common Edge.
The relentless drumbeat of climate disasters in the headlines—scorching heat waves, raging wildfires, historic floods, crippling droughts—are no longer a series of anomalies. As a grim new reality across much of the globe, these extreme weather events, driven by human-induced climate change, are becoming more frequent and severe. In short, they are clearly symptomatic of a broader and more pervasive environmental crisis.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
What makes something sacred? When does a building mean more to us than nearly all other places, spaces, objects, or activities in our lives? Architects strive to achieve the sacred in buildings, but it’s the rest of us who either sense it or not, whatever the aesthetics may be. I think the meaning of what is sacred to us can be most profoundly seen and felt when things change.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
The whining of architects is futile. The stick-frame-over-podium building—the so-called 5-over-1—is here to stay. The Box, as I like to refer to it, utilizes the hybrid technology of a concrete-and-steel base below wood-frame construction, and is used predominantly for market-rate housing. Despite the common negative reaction to its banal aesthetics, the appeal to a large segment of apartment consumers is undeniable. It’s an obvious hit with developers, too.
His work – more than 250 buildings in the span of 30 years – was lauded by critics and colleagues, cited for international design awards, and landed the architect on the cover of Time. But today, even practitioners and aficionados might be challenged to name one of Minoru Yamasaki's buildings beyond his two most infamous creations that no longer exist: the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis and New York’s World Trade Center towers. Paul Kidder explores this complex architect and his work in a new book, Minoru Yamasaki and the Fragility of Architecture (Routledge).
Kidder, a professor of philosophy at Seattle University, provides a fresh, sobering assessment not only of Yamasaki's architecture but the man himself: his challenges, triumphs, and contradictions, as well as the fragility of architectural achievement. The loss of this architect’s most famous buildings suggests the growing scope of architecture’s fragility, especially today, when real-estate investment often augers against preservation of even late-modern works. Yet, paradoxically, Yamasaki believed that fragility could be a desirable architectural quality—the source of its refinement, beauty, and humanity.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Christopher Alexander (1936–2022) and Joseph Rykwert (b. 1926) were two giants of 20th century architectural theory who began their work in England and eventually created lasting legacies at two great American architectural schools: the University of California at Berkeley (Alexander) and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (Rykwert). Their careers not only coincided with a critical period of social and cultural research among designers and urbanists, but in many ways continue to inspire the current generation of committed critics of late capitalist development on our imperiled planet. Yet to many they are too little known.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Developers often make it sound as though their latest LEED platinum office building will single-handedly reverse climate change. The unfortunate reality is that they could spend a lifetime designing and building all of their work to meet the highest environmental standards, but it wouldn’t fix the problem. The planet will grow hotter, the seas will rise, and storms will intensify. A century of burning fossil fuels has baked global warming into the atmosphere for our lifetime.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
In London, where I live, there are 23 universities. Those universities make up an institutional population of nearly half a million people. In a city with almost 10 million residents, 5% may seem a small number, but it’s a significant one, roughly the population of Atlanta. Shrink the city, and the proportion can increase dramatically. In our neighbouring cities of Oxford (population 150,000), 40% of the population is institutional; in Cambridge (population 125,000), it’s 33%. Campus and city are so intertwined in those places that a plan for one is almost necessarily a plan for the other.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
In her Dhaka, Bangladesh–based practice, Marina Tabassum seeks to create a language of architecture that’s simultaneously contemporary yet rooted to its place. One of the first buildings she undertook after establishing her own practice in 2005—the Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in her own city—won an Aga Khan Award for Architecture, which recognizes design that addresses the needs and aspirations of Muslim societies.
Bangladesh’s Museum of Independence, which she designed with her former partner, Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury of the practice URBANA, has become a national landmark. But Tabassum also works at the intimate scale of housing, pursuing innovative modular space-frame designs constructed of bamboo. She’s taught at architecture schools around the globe. Recently, she was recognized with an award from the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum and identified by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people for 2024 for her work in sustainable, socially responsible design.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
For architects and designers, unbuilt/unrealized projects are confounding, bittersweet, frustrating, elusive, even ghostly—the ultimate what-ifs. Often launched with the grandest ambitions, only to become derailed by the multiplicity of complications that can beset every proposed work of architecture. Author, editor, and critic Sam Lubell has spent a healthy chunk of his career cataloging these thwarted fever dreams. Now he has released, with co-author Greg Goldin, a new compilation, Atlas of Never Built Architecture (Phaidon), a global survey of more than 300 unbuilt projects ranging from the 20th century to the present day.
Recently I reached out to the writers to talk about the book, what unbuilt projects say about the culture at large, and some of their favorite unrealized projects. This interview was conducted via email, with Lubell and Goldin choosing to respond jointly.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
In 1956, when car ownership and the suburban development that this enabled were just being embraced as American cultural ideals, pioneering urbanist Jane Jacobs wrote that the U.S. was becoming “an unprecedented nation of centaurs. … Our automobile population is rising about as fast as our human population and promises to continue for another generation.” She continued, “the car is not only a monstrous land-eater itself: it abets that other insatiable land-eater—endless, strung-out suburbanization.”
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
The U.S. has a long tradition of republicanism and laissez-faire capitalism that has not favored strong federal housing policy or intervention in the housing market. Policymakers have believed that private enterprise could best provide sufficient housing and that, as with healthcare and education,[1] government involvement would bring in “socialism” and undesirable control of the free market. There are two major exceptions to this tradition: the 1937 National Housing Act, a result of the devastation of the Great Depression, and the “war on poverty,” initiated by the Johnson administration in the mid-1960s.[2] Successful as these programs were, subsequent federal housing policy has mostly been aimed at undermining them, through either malice or neglect. Instead, federal policy has mainly sought to promote home ownership, the American dream, but that approach was eviscerated by the collapse of financing due to the subprime loan crisis and its aftermath. The result is that there is currently virtually no cogent federal housing policy. Thirty-five million Americans live in substandard housing; a much larger number devote 50% of their income to a roof over their heads. Housing construction is at a historic low, and construction costs have risen so high that they are well beyond the means of the average citizen.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Architecture mirrors the culture it is built from, while simultaneously aspiring to lead that culture. This is almost oxymoronic, since reflecting and projecting our values is an essential part of every human life, and architecture is exquisitely human. Our buildings embody us, with all of our mixed messages.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
On April 10, 2024, the New York Landmarks Conservancy bestowed the Preservation Leadership Award to author and urbanist Roberta Brandes Gratz. A longtime preservation activist, Gratz served on the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. She also led the successful effort to restore the Eldridge Street Synagogue, now the Museum at Eldridge Street. The following is a slightly edited version of the speech Gratz delivered at the 34th annual Lucy C. Moses Preservation Awards.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
I am by no means an expert on public-private partnerships. But for about 10 years, as the University of California Berkeley’s campus planner and then campus architect, I watched these developments play out in higher education—sometimes from a front-row seat, sometimes as a participant. During that time, this strategy, promoted with great enthusiasm and optimism, was touted as the answer to whatever problem arose. And yet the definition of a public-private partnership was slippery. The concept itself seemed to be all things for all people, depending on what was needed, who was recommending it, and what equivalents (if any) existed outside the university. The bandwagon continues to play today, making it ever more important to nail down the pros and cons of this development strategy, not only for colleges and universities, but for all public decision-making.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Traditional architecture is perceived as being historical architecture, both by the general public and by design professionals. Put another way, “traditional” = “style.” There’s no awareness of the process of tradition that creates what’s later considered a style. Modernism takes this perception one step further and frames traditional architecture as “not of our time,” and therefore obsolete.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Chinese temples have stood for centuries, battered by wind and earthquakes, without a crack or timber out of place. They employ an ancient technique called “bracket set construction” that requires no nails or metal parts to connect wooden structural elements. Scandinavian stave churches are nearly as durable. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of trees in Sweden and all over China.
So what is with the hype about innovation in “mass timber” construction over the past few years? As Boyce Thompson argues in his thoughtful new book, Innovations in Mass Timber: Sequestering Carbon with Style in Commercial Buildings (Schiffer Publishing), this will be the next big thing in “green” tech for architects feeling guilty about their costly titanium skins and outsized carbon footprints. The color photos show some impressive buildings in places where the wood industry has always been healthy, such as the Pacific Northwest and Scandinavia. The Japanese build log cabins with imported material that might as well be gold.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
The rise of generative AI has given every design educator sufficient reason to reconsider both what to teach and how to teach it. Training an architect is a long process, and mapping it onto an uncertain future is a daunting task. Researchers at OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, and similar companies seem constantly surprised by the rapid development and sometimes unforeseen capabilities of their AI creations. If even the creators don’t know how fast the future will arrive, it would be hubristic for any of us to claim that AI will do X or AI won’t be able to do Y in the next decade, which is about how long it takes to really train an architect.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
If you follow housing policy in America, you may have noticed a particular term cropping up a lot recently: social housing. Maybe you’ve read a longform academic article, live in a city that is codifying a social-housing policy like Seattle or Atlanta, or seen one of the recent mentions in The New York Times, highlighting U.S. and Viennese success stories. On the design front, Dezeen is running a social-housing revival series.
