Ivan Himanen is an architect, urbanist, and researcher based in New York City.
Entering the 11th hour, the ground beneath the brain thins out. What in daylight was a pleasant stroll along a train of thought now becomes a tightrope walk. All it takes is one slip for focus to collapse completely. Architecture is full of these triggers: double entendres that turn work flow to turn into uncontrollable…
Once a year or so, which is as frequently as my pride will concede, an old lesson from a professor pops out of my memory and hits me with a that’s-what-they-were-talking-about! moment. The most recent one came while walking around Paris, the professor was Anthony Vidler, and the lesson was a pantomime of Claude Frollo’s “THIS…
How do you win a design competition? Stand out, right? Present ideas and illuminate things unique to your proposal, right? Don’t trod the beaten path? What do most of us think of when we think “architectural competition proposal”? We think of a single building, viewed from about one hundred feet, with a clear sense of…
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…
Look what happens. I told Sasha he could help to renovate the house. From one immigrant to another, I told him. Let us make it like old times in Sankt Peterburg Arkhitekturnyi Universitet, our nicknames for professors, the long nights in winter and in spring, the Noviye Godyi and Easters, sunlight in the skylight at…
Several years ago, for Rod Knox’s seminar on daydreaming, I wrote a short story called I&M— a dialogue between two unnammed characters, about philosophical questions, inspired by Before Sunrise. This is how it started. I: So, what’s new with you? M: Many things. Actually, it’s lucky I bumped into you, because I’ve been thinking about…
This is an excerpt from Physics and Beyond, by Werner Heisenberg, published 1971, from a chapter called Science and Religion, of a debate between Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Paul Dirac, titans of 20th century science. …mathematics is a mental game that we can play or not play as we choose. Religion, on the other…