Lebbeus Woods called Michelangelo’s sketches one step in “the risky task of invention.” The intense precision of his lines and how ahead of their time they are– still fresh to look at, conjuring many associations– bring to my mind the peculiar case of how architecture evolves. Invention is violence. The conflict of ideas against reality. This profession, […]
Author: the.vonz.himanen
Ivan Himanen is an architect, urbanist, and researcher based in New York City.
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Meet me at Grand Central
Christian and I gave an architectural walking tour of midtown in September (titled “Outreach To The Elderly”). In writing it, we were ourselves surprised to discover an elegant distillation of the architectural merit of Grand Central Terminal, and a simple explanation of what architects mean by “space.” One of the unique challenges of URBAN […]
To those who haven’t watched it, this video gives some good insight into the players behind the MoMA expansion, and some good counter-arguments from the panel. Times are tough at DS+R, their feet are in some muck. Liz Diller’s presentation comes across as stilted and uninventive, which is strange coming from a firm that has successfully championed […]
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Specters of Cooper
These thoughts have taken a while to put down, partly because of so many implications in each (you will see the drift to rant mode)…. The Cooper Union’s current predicament is shitty, no matter what road is taken. However, the shittiest fact to swallow is that there seems to be an unwillingness to take risks […]
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A Contorted Universe
The universe may be much more contorted than we think. Denis and I were walking out of AP physics, exchanging, bug-eyed, our newest theories on the makeup of the cosmos. That day, the class had done a review of Newtonian physics– the crux of which, it was concluded, lies not in gravity or the three […]
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Politics of the English Language
Politics of the English Language, by George Orwell. A must-read. There are strong lessons here for poets and speech-writers in equal measure. Unfortunately, what Charlotte, Ezequiel, and I recently concluded on the definition of poetry– that it is the economy of language– applies here to any form of writing at all. Just the way it […]
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Cartesian vs. Euclidian drawing
My post on Bernini made me recall a critique in advanced drawing seminar under Sue Gussow. That time she invited a guest professor who identified a simple dichotomy. Looking at my drawings– charcoal on bond on the left, ink wash on mylar on the right– he noted the contrast in technique represented a larger duality, one […]
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Food on demand
There is a pattern emerging in the past decade or two in the cultural niche of apocalypse-gazing. Namely, we have become increasingly enthralled with the kind of world’s ends which are categorically insidious, infectious, and truly uncanny– the notion is popular that an apocalypse will sprout germ-like from a familiar flower. Both zombie swarms and […]
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Words for snow / words for dairy
We can learn a lot about a culture by just investigating its vocabulary. Common trivia holds that Eskimos have about two dozen words for snow. As kids, when we first hear this, we are of course blown away– until we realize that the words are in fact used to describe different kinds of snow: falling […]
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