Opinion
Rereading Ada Louise Huxtable: 5 Essential Pieces
In honor of her death earlier this week, here are five significant reviews and essays by pioneering architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable.
Architecture
Art
Thinking BIG in Phoenix
Last month, Danish architecture firm BIG unveiled its plans for a landmark in Arizona's largest city that the developer hopes will become a symbol of the city much in the way Seattle's Space Needle has come to represent that great Northwestern city.
Opinion
South Africa's Mobile Churches
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
Chinese Pirate Architects Copycat Zaha Hadid's New Complex
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
Chinese Pirate Architects Copycat Zaha Hadid's New Complex
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
Historic Beijing Neighborhoods to Be Bulldozed
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
Threatened Frank Lloyd Wright House Is Saved
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
News
The World's Oldest Wooden Architecture
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
Remembering Radical, Theoretical Architect Lebbeus Woods
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
New Trends in Global Urbanism
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
Will Design Save the World?
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
A Designer Reimagines Contemporary Office Space
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