For the newest installment of the NGV Triennial, architect Kengo Kuma and Melbourne artist Geoff Nees realized the Botanical Pavillion. Image Courtesy of Tom Ross
What might be called the Art Fair Industrial Complex has been an ambivalent force on both art markets and art itself in recent years: in one view, fairs offer their attendees chances to see international work they wouldn’t otherwise have access to; in another, the vast mall of it all dulls context into commerce.
Three years ago, in the wake of the release of his book Theories and History of the Modern City ("Teorías e Historia de la Ciudad Contemporánea", 2016, Editorial Gustavo Gili), we sat down with the author, Carlos García Vázquez, to discuss this complex and "uncertain creature' that is the modern city, focusing on the three categories that define cities today: Metropolis, Megalopolis, and Metapolis.
Based on an analysis of those "who have traditionally led the way in the planning of spaces" (sociologists, historians, and architects), the book illustrates the social, economic, and political forces that, in service to their own agendas, drive the planning, transformation, exploitation, and development of cities. In 120 years, urban centers have transformed from places where "people died from the city" to bastions of personal development and economic prosperity; however, the question remains —have cities really triumphed?
"Yes", says García Vásquez, "but we have paid dearly for it."
The East County Office & Archives by Miller Hull. Image Courtesy of Chipper Hatter
Back in February this year, the American architectural community was scandalised by a draft executive order from the White House threatening to make neoclassical or traditional regional styles compulsory for all new federal buildings. The initiative fails to recognise the specificity of the architectural expression and the innovation that stems from understanding the local context. Metropolis Magazine has gathered together several examples of civic architecture that succeed in expressing the needs and aspirations of their communities, thus building a compelling argument against a mandated, unified architectural expression.
Design With Nature Now revisits Ian McHarg’s eponymous 1969 book and takes stock of current practices and projects of resilience in landscape design the world over, such as AECOM’s Weishan Lake National Wetland Park in Shandong, China. Courtesy AECOM
Moving away from its early exclusive focus on natural disasters, resilient architecture and design tackles the much tougher challenge of helping ecosystems regenerate.
Thirty years ago, as a high school student at the Cranbrook boarding school in suburban Detroit, I wrote a research-based investigative report on the environmental crisis for the student newspaper. I had been encouraged to do so by a faculty adviser, David Watson, who lived a double life as a radical environmentalist writing under the pseudonym George Bradford for the anarchist tabloid Fifth Estate. His diatribe How Deep Is Deep Ecology? questioned a recurring bit of cant from the radical environmental movement: Leaders of groups like Earth First! frequently disparaged the value of human life in favor of protecting nature.
Boris Iofan’s winning proposal for Palace of the Soviets. Image Courtesy of Arkadi Mordvinov, Vyacheslav K. Oltarzhevsky/Tchoban Foundation
From the famous Kitchen Debate between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon to the popularity of Henry Ford within the USSR, the hundreds of factories designed by Detroit engineer Albert Kahn for Soviet Russia, and skyscrapers erected in Moscow, the Cold War had a peculiar side to it, that is the Russian fascination with American culture and technology.
Courtesy of Flickr user Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, licensed under CC BY 2.0
Designers have fixated on the visual culture that wrought Casio wrist watches and Superstudio. Mario Carpo explores the reasons why.
It began with a watch—actually, two. Last year I was co-tutoring two brilliant master students in a school of architecture in a European country I shall not name. They had started their thesis project with some very idealistic, “accelerationist” views of technology—assuming, in the footsteps of some improbable political theories currently in fashion, that technological change would “accelerate” the final demise of capitalism. Then one day they showed up for their tutorial sporting two identical black Casio digital watches, and I immediately realized that something had gone awry. As if struck by some illumination on their road to Damascus, they explained to me they had concluded that technology should thenceforth be their foe. From that moment, their project turned into a “critical” reinterpretation of some Superstudio projects from the early ’70s. For their final presentation, some months later, they set up an installation where everything, right down to some fresh baguettes bought from a baker’s next door, was wrapped in carefully executed Superstudio wallpaper—black grid on white background. Most of their friends in attendance were also wearing the same Casio watch, I noticed.
Concrete is the most carbon-intensive material found in the built environment, and rammed earth is a viable alternative—at least for projects of a certain scale. The San Antonio–based architecture firm Lake|Flato has opted for rammed earth on two of its residential projects, such as this one in West Texas.Courtesy Kyle Melgaard/Pilgrim Building Company
Practitioners have finally begun taking a more nuanced approach to the carbon emitted by new buildings. Are they too late?
I’ve started calling them come-to-carbon moments—the inner alarm bells that sound as you begin to register the devastating ecological costs of every man-made surface around you. Every sidewalk you’ve ever walked on, every building you’ve ever walked into, and every material inside those buildings, too. It’s the kind of thing you can’t un-see once you’ve started looking, the kind of knowledge that can transform a worldview, or a practice.
With her Mother/Child Dining Table, Maartje Steenkamp reflects on the connection between parents and their babies at mealtime. “[It] goes much deeper than just giving food; mother and child are almost one, as with the umbilical cord before birth,” she says. “In this way the furniture has to be one, too.” She based the orientation of its seats, and the length of the table, on the size and position of her own body while feeding her child. Courtesy Inga Powilleit
Designers, curators, and entrepreneurs are scrambling to make sense of motherhood in a culture that’s often hostile to it.
At their most extravagant, the tendriled seed pods of the Nigella damascena flower resemble the curled necks of swans in a Tunnel of Love. Its fringed, quick-growing blooms have long appeared in English cottage gardens, and in southern Europe and North Africa, where the species grows wild. In the United States you can purchase a packet of its seeds—around 2,200 of them—for about $6.
https://www.archdaily.com/930657/politics-has-failed-mothers-can-design-helpLila Allen
In some theoretical books, architecture and the human body are more or less the same, each depending on one another. Oftentimes, however, it is the body that undergoes detrimental adjustments to adapt to the architecture, not the other way around.
In the newly released book X-Ray Architecture, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina argues that health facilities inspired modern architecture's most dominant formal signatures.
Mars has been notable for capturing humans' interest, intriguing business moguls such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to go on a "billionaire space race" and settle on the planet. But does humanity have the right to colonize another planet? If so, who does this sky-high ambition serve?
People often find themselves physically and emotionally comfortable in specific public places. Whether one's reading a book on the terrace of a coffee shop, sitting on a cozy sofa at a hair salon, or waiting for the train at train station, some spaces tend to initiate a feeling identical to being in the comfort of one's home.
The field of environmental psychology has helped find the factors that achieve "human comfort", and now, architects and designers are working alongside the field's specialists to develop comfortable spaces.
Students on the balustrade of the canteen terrace, around 1931 (photographer unknown). Image Courtesy of Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
Women are imperative members of the design community, creating innovative and inspiring work in the fields of architecture, design, and urban planning. However, even with the rise of the women's movement, their contributions are still being questioned, compared, or taken for granted.
Metropolis Magazine looked back at the history of feminism in architecture, shedding the light on the times when the advocates witnessed unprecedented progress, and times when they lost their advantage.
Skanderberg Square / 51N4E, Anri Sala, & Plan en Houtgoed. Image Courtesy of Filip Dujardin
Design trends are often the result of foreign cultural influences, avant-garde creations, and innovative solutions for people's ever-evolving needs. Although the design world seems like one big mood board, some cities have managed to outshine the rest with their recent projects.
As part of their annual Design Cities Listing, Metropolis Magazine has highlighted 10 cities across 5 continents with intriguing projects that have harmonized contemporary urbanism with traditional and faraway influences.
Griffin founded the consultancy Urban Planning for the American City, which she complements with her pedagogical work at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
Since its emergence with the cultural turn in the 1970s and ’80s, spatial justice has become a rallying cry among activists, planners, and plugged-in architects. But as with many concepts with academic origins, its precepts often remain elusive and uninterrogated. Though some of this has changed with the advent of city- and place-making discourse, few are doing as much to lend articulation, nuance, and malleability to spatial justice as Toni Griffin. A Chicago native, Griffin practiced architecture at SOM for nearly a decade before leaving the city to work as a planner in Newark and Washington, D.C., among other municipalities. In 2009, she founded the consultancy Urban Planning for the American City, which she complements with her pedagogical work at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. There, she runs the Just City Lab, which, through research and a host of programs, aims to develop, disseminate, and evaluate tools for enhancing justice—and remediating chronic, systematized injustice—in America’s cities. But what form could justice take in the U.S. context, and how can architects and designers help? Metropolis spoke with Griffin about how focusing on inclusivity and embracing interdependence and complexity are parts of the answer.
Photograph of Eero Saarinen with two Yale residential colleges. From "Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory". Image Courtesy of Metropolis Magazine
Modernism in Pittsburgh. Central Park. Space settlements. Interwar typography. What do these topics all have in common? They are the subjects of a new batch of architecture and design books released this past year – books that constitute Metropolis Magazine’s spring/summer edition roundup of architecture’s newest and most exciting publications.
https://www.archdaily.com/922326/new-architecture-and-design-books-to-read-this-summerLilly Cao
The renowned founder of his eponymous studio—which joined Perkins and Will in 2014—passed away July 9th, leaving a major legacy of built works, community engagement, and advocacy within architecture.
In 2016, as the three-tiered, bronze-skinned, and filigreed National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened on the National Mall—a signature building of the Obama era—one of its main architects, Durham, North Carolina–based Phil Freelon, was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease ALS. Earlier this week, Freelon died of complications from the disease. He left behind a four-decade legacy of considered, attentive design for communities typically ignored—or worse, harmed—by processes forming the built environment.
Set to screen at the ADFF:NOLA festival, Frank Gehry: Building Justice showcases how Gehry-led student architecture studios developed proposals for more humane prisons.
Thanks to initiatives like the Art for Justice Fund, Open Society Foundations, and a slew of insightful reporting, the American criminal justice system has been under great scrutiny and pressure to reform. Some of these changes have been quite prominent—such as the increasingly-widespread decriminalization of pot and pending major federal legislation—and have faced opposition from the powerful lobbying of the private prison corporations. However, despite the depth and breadth of criminal justice reform, one critically important element has remained mostly overlooked: the design of correctional facilities.