Ivan Himanen is an architect, urbanist, and researcher based in New York City.
I’m going to show a photograph I took. Hundred bucks if you can guess what I saw that blew my mind. On Black Friday weekend (pure coincidence), my parents and I took a day trip out of Barcelona to the wine region of Penedes, just to the west. The valley is stunted, the sun is […]
I was overcome with the quiet pride of a writer finishing her first novel when I packaged my thoughts on propriosteption. And then, in the kickoff session to our Robotic City seminar at IAAC, the concept reappeared before me, and I felt like the same writer learning that her novel got greenlit for a movie […]
The following is an excerpt from an essay I wrote for the Fab City Design Strategies Seminar, at the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Barcelona, in October 2017. Thoughts on Atlas for the End of the World[1] & Fab City Whitepaper[2] “Nature” and “artifice” are not as separate as we think. This revelation has […]
Skylines are a speculator’s dream. Strictly speaking, they are not real things. In the same way that edges are not really there, but merely the points at which an object leaves a beholder’s eye, a city’s skyline is an imagined contour. If I ask you to imagine New York City’s skyline, you will most likely […]
To all my Cooper Union vets: what do you think of when you think of “9-square grid?” Well, what about this? This is a promotional sign for the Superilla, in Barcelona’s Poblenou neighborhood. Though I had seen propaganda about it for many months since arriving last September, the Superilla remained rather isolated in my head. […]
Our Master in City & Technology class is as diverse as can be. We are different ages (23-32), we have different professional backgrounds (agriculture, interior design, fresh graduates to licensed professionals), a dozen languages between us (Mandarin, Arabic, Yoruba, and, you know… English), three-and-a-half religions…… Designing and debating with my new friends is exciting, because […]
Every time we pass Spain’s most famous building, we have something to say. “La Sagrada Familia. More like La Sacada Familia. La Chingada Familia. La Putada Familia.” “It looks like someone bought one of those nozzle attachments for cake icing and decided to just try all the settings.” “There was a time when you had […]
Picture you’re crossing a crosswalk, taking broad confident New York strides. The sidewalk curb up ahead is a full foot above the road, so you fix your eye on it and prepare to take that step up, knowing that failure to plan ahead will cause you to trip and look like a fool in front […]
My first thought when I saw Black Friday posters ALL OVER the shop windows in El Born the day after Thanksgiving was “What? How on Earth did that American capitalist plague spread over here?” Then, my second thought was “Oh, look, another American capitalist plague has spread over here. What else is new?” (That last […]
For the past couple of years I’ve been proudly cultivating a theory of architecture and sustainability which I believed bridged all of the gaps between my various interests in the field and which could usher in a truly new way of seeing things to unite designers, engineers, and the inhabitant. In essence, it espouses physical […]