Opinion
LOS ANGELES — On a recent long distance bus trip in Uganda, part of my sojourn was occupied by listening to a religious individual on a bus preach, pray, and collect donations from his captive audience. I didn't understand the language but I understood the form, as he shuffled up and down the aisle
News
In Chinese, there's a contemporary slang term, shanzhai, which refers to imitated or pirated brands or goods like fake purses and DVDs (or even books) that are a little too cheap to be real. Shanzhai culture has gone one step farther with a copy version of architect Zaha Hadid's curvaceous new comme
News
In Chinese, there's a contemporary slang term, shanzhai, which refers to imitated or pirated brands or goods like fake purses and DVDs (or even books) that are a little too cheap to be real. Shanzhai culture has gone one step farther with a copy version of architect Zaha Hadid's curvaceous new comme
News
The heart of Beijing isn't the cold, highway-crossed neighborhood around Tiananmen Square, but the corridors of old, hutong-style houses just to the north. Two landmarks stand sentinel over this area — the Drum and Bell Towers, stately structures built in 1272. Now, in the name of easing access to t
News
While most of us don't believe in Christmas miracles, this story may come close. Two and a half months after a story about the potential destruction of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Phoenix, Arizona, appeared on the front page of the New York Times, a deal has gone through to buy the building from i
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The starchitecture of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas might rule the day today, but the world's earliest architecture was quite a bit more, shall we say, austere. Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest known example of wooden architecture, a 7000-year old structure.
Art
Defiantly non-conformist, anti-starchitecture architect Lebbeus Woods died on Tuesday, October 30. He was 72. Through a lifetime of work, the vast majority of it existing only on paper, Woods challenged the architectural establishment, railing against boring buildings and resisting the temptations o
Opinion
The BMW Guggenheim Lab, that UFO of urban experimentation that took up residence in New York City and Berlin, has just published a helpful guide to the most recent trends in city activity. Here are some of the major trends contained therein.
Art
On Thursday, I caught a segment on Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now about Michael Reynolds, a renegade architect living near Taos, New Mexico. Although I try to follow developments in sustainable architecture, I had yet to come across Reynolds’ name, and what I heard on the radio intrigued me: houses
Art
CHICAGO — Given that most of us labor in virtual space these days and our work requires little more than a desk, a computer, and a keyboard to get done, why do we stick to such outmoded concepts as cubicles and cafeterias? A current exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Outdoor Office: Jon
Art
The New York Times recently published a two-part survey arguing that the data centers owned by the technology companies we all depend on every day — Apple, Google, Facebook — are destroying the environment with their electricity usage. Experts have debated their reasoning. But what the conflict over
News
A few days ago, we asked whether the New York Times could save a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Phoenix from demolition. The answer, it appears, is yes — at least for now.