Ivan Himanen is an architect, urbanist, and researcher based in New York City.
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 […]
For Diane Lewis WALK UPRIGHT COUNT TO TENDRAW A LINE GO TO SLEEPSyllabus atop a stoolUnwilling memento mori. Yorick’s skull just now set down(Like your hand once weighed ideas)Warm erasers, smeared and darkWith residue of angel’s wings Wood and steel and acetoneBloodless, in the backgroundNothing breathing, nothing cold,Smoke escapes beyond the […]
Very rarely do two chapters of my life confront one another directly. Most of the time I pass my days evolving, hoping that things I have done in the past that became pieces of me will just fade into memory and not have to be repeated. But two of the great things about Charlotte is […]
Though the ITF recognizes a bunch of different tennis court surfaces, for simplicity I’ve chosen to only discuss the three major surfaces represented by the four Grand Slam tournaments. Scores after every passage are on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. GRASS COURTS: You are a purist. You enjoy tennis the way you enjoy a […]
“Jackie, that’s my daughter’s name. She just left for college in Europe. Wasn’t half a decade before we were best buddies, her in middle school, me working 20 hour weeks. That’s the time every kid starts to beat her dad at everything. Always been giving her sports to play and riddles to solve. First to […]
In my version of the Hippocratic Oath for architects (which I decided should be called the Vitruvian Oath), I noticed a challenge: if architects and doctors are equals, what is the former’s analog for “healing” and “sick?” What is the core action, the operative verb, without which architecture wouldn’t exist? Not an easy question to answer. […]
Doctors and architects all too often lumped together as roommates in the penthouse of the apartment building of educated society. One particular quality they share is the obligation to serve the public, to improve the livelihoods of others. Doctors, for various reasons, are more front and center in the eyes of the very society they serve […]
Already some time ago I discovered the joy of observational freehand drawing. Aside from benefiting my mentality (I can count it as meditation) and its use as a learning tool as I observe the physical world, drawing opens channels to engage the people around me. The cold stoicism of modern strangers melts away when they […]
In man’s early years, he had still to occupy the entirety of the globe, on top of which he didn’t even know how much of the world was still unoccupied. Imagine: knowing your territory, but facing a frontier at all sides. How much further does it go? How big would primitive man have imagined the […]
A model lives and dies just like the building it poses for. It’s preceded by dreams and drawings and logistics and a budget and a construction schedule…….. and of course a sharp drop in market value shortly after its completion. After that the name of the game is either find a can of spraypaint and a prominent […]