This will be both an album review of Vulfpeck’s The Beautiful Game and a general thought on architectural practice. In general, Vulpeck, the four-or-five-or-six-or-more-piece band from Michigan, has been solidly my favorite band for the past couple of years. Their music infuses funk, R&B, rock, jazz, and you never know what else (Klezmer? Bach? Swing?)– […]
When Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield said they would be abandoning Lexicon Valley, my beloved linguistics podcast, for other projects, I was crestfallen. Not even withstanding the fascinating content of the show, half of the reason I listen is for that comic pairing. Who could justifiably replace them? Though the name John McWhorter didn’t mean anything […]
Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects On Slowness. Using Tod Williams & Billie Tsien’s outlook on architectural practice as an opening chapter, you could write a whole book about the importance of treating yourself right physically, being present in the world around you, in order to improve your work. Architects always wax philosophic about “the body […]
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 […]