Chicago, The Windy City, Chi-Town, or The Second City. It’s a place that is known by many names, but to architects and urban planners alike, it’s famous for its history which has given us some of the best-known buildings and important advancements that have helped to shape other cities across the United States. From its inception, Chicago has long served as an architectural hub for innovation.
In 1969, ‘The Architects' Resistance’, a collective of students from Yale University, Columbia University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published a manifesto titled ‘Architecture: whom does it serve?’
With this manifesto, the group sought to place the practice of architecture in a broader economic, social and environmental context than the one taught in their university lecture rooms. In just two and a half pages, we find a powerful call to reclaim a more social and ecologically conscious architecture. It unambiguously denounces the role architecture played during those years as a practice in service to those in power while adding that “the architect's submission to the system begins with the belief that they possess special skills and knowledge that are inaccessible to the general public.”
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Designer Paul Wellington, based in Milwaukee, United States, is the author of Black Built: History and Architecture in the Black Community, a book that documents more than 40 works of architecture around the country by Black architects that have had a direct impact on communities of color. He’s now working on a new book that will focus on Black women architects in a field dominated by white males. I spoke with Wellington about the new book, what he learned through his research on Black architects and their work, and the future of increasing the ranks of Black architects in the U.S.
The Graham Foundation has announced the award of 56 new grants to individuals exploring ideas that expand contemporary understandings of architecture. The recipients have been selected from an open call that resulted in nearly 500 submissions. The selected projects are led by 81 individuals with diverse backgrounds. The funded projects, including exhibitions, publications, films, and podcasts, among other formats, encourage experimentation and foster critical discourse in architecture.
After a prolonged period known as the Middle-Ages, a growing desire to both study and mimic nature itself began to emerge, with an inclination to discover and explore the world. Between 1400-1600 A.D. Europe was to witness a significant revival of the fine arts, painting, sculpture, and Architecture. The ‘Renaissance’, meaning ‘rebirth’ in French typically refers to this period of European history, although most closely associated with Italy, countries including England and France went through many of the same cultural changes at varying timescales.
Prior to the dawn of the Renaissance, Europe was dominated by ornate and asymmetrical Gothic Architecture. Devoured by the plague, the continent lost approximately a third of its population, vastly changing society in terms of economic, social and religious effect. Contributing to Europe’s emergence into the Renaissance, the period ushered in a new era of architecture after a phase of Gothic art, with the rise of notions of ‘Humanism’. The idea of attaching much importance to the essence of individualism. The effect of Humanism included the emergence of the individual figure, greater realism and attention to detail, especially in depictions in art.
Humans try very hard to make the inexplicable understood. Our spirituality becomes religion. Fairness becomes law. And what delights us becomes aesthetics, and aesthetics are dumbed down to “style” in fine arts and architecture. The description, then definition, of aesthetics enables us to judge, and hopefully, control what thrills us: "Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent". -- Roger Scruton
But the instant delight we sometimes feel when we hear, taste, think or see parts of our experience is unreasoned in its apprehension. We try to create value in our outcomes by defining them beyond experience – that is aesthetics.
CopyCat is the act of emulating something that's already been created and using it in a different context. Copycats can exist in music, arts and design; but they are not exactly a design inspiration or a style reference, but rather a literal copy with almost no modification of the original work.
In architecture, it is as if you were inspired by an emblematic work from another space-time and placed it somewhere unconnected with the original roots of the work-style.
Stairs in architecture are oftentimes a design focal point- the heavyhandedness in creating something that moves us from one level to the next, up and down repeatedly, something so simple and familiar with a twist is what makes the experience of traversing a stair so unique. Our obsession with stairs and the level of illusion that they create in architecture perhaps stems from the way that they’re able to twist the optics and perceptions of space. We understand that they transport us in one direction or another, but can stairs ever be circular? Is it possible to go up and down for eternity?
The dawn of nuclear power, dramatic advances in rocketry, and the desire to be the first to put men into space and on the moon, kick-started an era known as the ‘Space Age’. Upon the closure of WW2, both the Soviets and the Allies found themselves in a state of antagonism, as they both began to struggle to make advancements in space exploration before the other, a race for space. The era would give way to rapid advancements in technology and huge accomplishments including the moon landing in 1969. The Space Age aesthetic completely changed the way designers visualized the new world and left a dramatic impression on architecture and interiors. A new vision of futurism and prosperity.
Today, one of the most popular initiatives regarding public space, participatory design and activism in the city is the so-called citizen urbanism or tactical urbanism. The approach proposes to trigger, through limited and low-cost interventions, long-term changes in public space, i.e. short-term action, long-term change (Street Plans, 2013).
The strategy used is to create temporary scenarios that make visible a specific problem and the formation of specific interventions to solve it, seeking to incorporate the community to give it relevance and promote its sustainability over time and, in this way, raise the discussion about the benefits of the projects for the quality of life in the context in which they are inserted.
Last Tuesday, March 15, Francis Kéré became the first African architect to win the Pritzker Prize, the most important award in the architecture discipline.
The election of Kéré is not only symbolic in a time of identity demands, where the institutions that make up the mainstream are required to more faithfully represent the social, cultural, and sexual realities that make up our societies, but it also confirms the recent approach of the Pritzker Prize jury.
In November 1930, in Indiana, United States, one of the great feats of modern engineering was executed: a team of architects and engineers moved an 11,000-ton (22-million pound) telephone exchange without ever suspending its operations either basic supplies for the 600 employees who worked inside.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
New Orleans was designed by its early settlers in 1721 as a Cartesian grid. You know it as the famous French Quarter or Vieux Carré. Such grids are named for the Cartesian coordinate system we learned to use in algebra or geometry class, perpendicular X and Y axes, used to measure units of distance on a plane. The invention of René Descartes (1596–1650), these grids reflect his rationalism, the view that reason, not embodied or empirical experience, is the only source and certain test of knowledge. William Penn used a similar grid in 1682 in selling Philadelphia as an urban paradise where industry would thrive in the newly settled wilderness. And just as the massive buildings of Italian Rationalist (i.e., Fascist) architecture express authoritarian control, so, too, Cartesian grids implicitly say: Someone is in charge here. We’ve got this. Trust us.
The year 2021 has been a turbulent one –coronavirus rages on, and the design and construction industries have been forced to keep adapting two years into a global pandemic. As virtual methods of working and communicating continue to be tweaked and honed, a plethora of virtual events has meant that architectural discourse outside the western canon and Eurocentric gaze, in a small way, has been able to claim space front and center in the global architectural conversation.
Ethical practice spans all parts of architecture. From intersectionality and labor to the climate crisis, a designer must work with a range of conditions and contexts that inform the built environment and the process of its creation. Across cultures, policies and climates, architecture is as much functional and aesthetic as it is political, social, economic, and ecological. By addressing the ethics of practice, designers can reimagine the discipline's impact and who it serves.
When examining the world of African cinema, there are few names more prominent than that of Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène. His films ‘La Noire de…’ and ‘Mandabi’, released in 1966 and 1968 respectively, are films that tell evocative stories on the legacies of colonialism, identity, and immigration. And whilst these two films are relatively slow-spaced, ‘slice-of-life stories, they also offer a valuable spatial critique of the setting where the films are based, providing a helpful framework to understand the intricacies of the post-colonial African city, and the contrast between the African and European metropolises.
What is an architecture critic? And what makes a critic in the 21st century? Throughout history, critics were the select few who were chosen to describe and evaluate architecture while we waited for their rave reviews or disappointments before we validated our own opinions. Their thoughts and words became design canon and heavy-handedly shaped our profession. This mindset and culture only further contributed to the idea that architecture is an “elitist” practice where a few set the rules and the rest must learn them. While architecture will always have named critics, just as other forms of art and culture have theirs, there’s recently been a push for architecture to transform itself into a profession that designs for the masses and is equally critiqued by the masses.
On October 18, 2019, a 4-cent increase on Santiago's Metro fare caused an uproar on the streets of the Chilean capital. The citizens' anger escalated quickly, leading to demands of immediate structural changes in the Chilean economic and social system. Alongside the people's call for change, daily clashes between protesters and the police led to excessive use of tear gas by the latter across the country.
Even though the use of tear gas is banned in warfare since 1925, police worldwide are allowed to use it for the sole purpose of scattering protesters, as had happened in Chile. The most iconic example can be seen in Plaza Dignidad (Dignity Square), previously known as Plaza Italia ahead of the social outbreak that erupted in the country: everyday, a camera records the activities around the iconic roundabout, capturing the constant and excessive use of lachrymatory gas every Friday.
.jpg?1647823485 "Gando Primary School Extension / Kéré Architecture. Image © Erik Jan Ouwerkerk")
.jpg?1647822667 "Serpentine Pavilion / Kéré Architecture. Image Courtesy of Kéré Architecture")
.jpg?1647822697 "Startup Lions Campus / Kéré Architecture. Image Courtesy of Kéré Architecture")
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