Topic

architecture

A collection of 157 issues

Fiera Milano.

Mmmmm, modern architecture that’s inspired by the Italian piazzas. I think that’s my favorite thing about Italy; the piazzas. Piazza e caffe e gelato. From an article in the New Yorker by Paul Goldberger, about Milan’s new convention center; a quote from the architect, Massimiliano Fuskas: It

Here comes trouble. Her name is Ada.

“Good designers make trouble.” – Tibor Kalman Ada Louise Huxtable wasn’t a designer, but she made trouble. About design. For designers. Sometimes, I’m ashamed by how much I don’t know. I think I’ve heard of Ada Louise Huxtable, but would never have been able to place her

On starchitects, domestic violence, and the Stockholm Syndrome.

Le Corbusier. Frank Lloyd Wright. Louis Kahn. Great architects. Lauded visionaries. Master womanizers and manipulators. The film “My Architect”, a documentary about the life of Louis Kahn, provides a disheartening case-in-point. The film summarizes Kahn’s life: immigrating to the US from Estonia as a five-year old, he grew up

On design / build.

Calvert Vaux was the architect Olmsted worked with on his contest entry for the commission to design Central Park, formally entered as “Greenwood.” Vaux’s silence masked an important difference between the two men. Like most architects, Vaux considered design to be his paramount responsibility. Once a project was conceived

I want new letters.

The fact that graduate design programs bestow upon their students the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree is antiquated and irrelevant. Instead, the design discipline should have its own standardized classification of academic distinction, as programs at IIT, Cincinnati, and Carnegie Mellon do: a Master's of Design. And

Thursday, March 27th. The shoes I wore to meet the architect....

The wind of the Olympic Mountains has no power over it; the heavy and rigid trunks of this tree defy the power of the storm. It is always silent, no matter if the wind roars in canons and uproots pines and firs; or if the day is calm and full

Wednesday, April 13. The shoes I wore to meet the architect.

Living in a trailer isn’t so bad. That’s what I like to tell myself, anyway. I moved into my first one in 1975, a year after my mother died and my brother saved me from foster care. A step up from the low-income apartments we lived in (all

The shoes I wore to meet the architect....

were weathered white oxfords with robin’s egg blue wingtips. Shoes with a point-of-view. To design a house is an intimate, opinionated thing. For it is within houses that we are our most intimate: naked, raw, vulnerable and honest. It is within houses that we are our most opinionated: yelling,

Saturday, March 26th. The shoes I wore to meet the builder.

Numbers are scary. Numbers signifying your weight, your blood pressure, your bank account balance, your age. Numbers, as it turns out, more often than not highlight more of what you don’t have than what you do. Numbers, as is often the case, focus on what’s left out rather

A Line in the Sand.

From a recent article in the New York Times, summarizing architecture’s role in creating the wall serving to cordon off the West Bank: In certain respects, the proposed 450-mile barrier is a model of planning reduced to its most primitive – the desire to divide black from white, us from