Some of the best websites out there are the ones that provide a seamless, legible overview and archive of works by artists and designers. It’s a step above a plain Google image search, but not as painstaking or as limited as the archives of a modern art museum. The need for these accessible compendium-type sites […]
There was a time in when the nowiest way to make buildings was with as uniform and white a surface as possible– usually stucco, hand-troweled over metal lath over sheathing, or the like. That modernist style has roots in the Enlightenment, with the sweeping yet abstract paper-projects of architects like Etienne-Louis Boullee, and became the […]
Behold the latest construction photos from my mother’s project in Sunnyside, Queens. She has designed this whole house HERSELF– seriously, no helping hands– for the past couple of years. She and her client, Irina, have decided that two women are going to get a house built no matter how many (male) engineers and contractors it […]
Perhaps it begins with the genealogy of the American landscape… the fact that roughly one third of the country’s population streams over beige prairies and terra cotta mesas towards the two coasts, dropping off windward mountain faces to the edge of the oceans… the fact that those 100,000,000 people have formed some of the largest […]
It is strange how we live in a world that is built upon automation and repeated forms, and yet architecture is by and large a practice of customization. Every client demands something unique, and architects demand it of themselves. From an industrial, economic, and in some ways environmental point of view, architecture’s chief goal should […]
Yes, change is good. But wait, no, standards are better. No hang on, we have to let things evolve. On the other hand, consistency and tradition are better values…. Where between these two poles does architecture situate itself? The answer should be: right in the goddamn middle. There should be no noticeable creep to one side or […]
I’m going to describe to you a stereotype in the design world. Frequently we encounter characters who are obsessed with the building code. While there isn’t anything wrong with adherence to and knowledge of the law as such, this dude has fallen under a spell. Every increase in floor area, every added faucet, every change […]
Frei Otto’s Pritzker Prize win is great news, and a long-deserved recognition. The tensile roof structures for which he is best known are broad and altudinous webs which still knock us on our asses when we see them. Broad, altudinous, and web-like also happens to describe his legacy on the profession fairly well. Here is […]
There’s little to belittle Bjarke Ingels’ approach to architecture. It fires on all cylinders– through his youth, his energy, his charisma, his Scandinavian origins, and most importantly his ability to make design more accessible to the common man. These are all desirable traits, and thus far his ability to steward positive change on a large […]
Stick by stick. Beam by beam. I will make this house mine. Mine with the trees. The studio had to be completed first—a warm brain first to conceive the rest. It was enclosed by September which was his goal (cutting it rather close to first frost in the snow belt), but was still damp and […]