MAU is too charmed by its subject to nail down what he has achieved, or why people should even care about him in the first place.
Rem Koolhaas
Posted inIn Brief
Chinese Government Has Had It with “Oversized, Weird” Architecture
Architects in China apparently need to tone down the quirkiness of their designs and quit erecting buildings that pass as giant pants, penises, and ancient coins.
Posted inNews
Inside the Skeleton of Rem Koolhaas’s Under-Construction Miami Beach Forum
MIAMI BEACH — A new cultural center designed by Rem Koolhaas with OMA is aiming to give Miami Beach a year-round multidisciplinary arts hub.
Posted inOpinion
When Architecture Causes Suffering
The city of Buckeye, Arizona, recently got a glittering new supermax prison.
Posted inOpinion
Architecture Blogger Uses Terrible Rape Metaphor
You might think, in the year 2014, that the distastefulness of casual rape metaphors would be obvious. But you’d be wrong! In a blog post published today on the website Arch2o, Ivan Sergejev shares 20 “tips” for being a successful architect, based on his experience interning at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the firm co-founded by Rem Koolhaas.
Posted inArt
What Social Media Tells Us About the Venice Architecture Biennale
How do you determine the success of an exhibition — by the number of visitors, the tenor of their reactions, or some other gauge? That’s the question Maria Novozhilova tackles in her assessment of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, which ended late last month.
Posted inArt
Breaking the Ground Between Art and Architecture
In recent years, the connections between architecture, art, and design have, in many cases, become inextricably bound to another in a kind of symbiotic relationship. For some observers, architecture appears relevant to the twenty-first century only when it emulates an abstract sculptural presence.
Posted inOpinion
Method Man? Notes on Shigeru Ban’s Pritzker Prize
Earlier today, the Pritzker Foundation named Shigeru Ban as its 2014 Laureate. Focusing on his work in disaster relief, the nine-person jury praised his interventions in places such as Rwanda, Haiti, India, China, Italy, and his home country of Japan — Ban is the third Japanese architect in the past five years to win the award.
Posted inOpinion
What’s So Fundamental About Rem Koolhaas’s Architecture Biennale
When the 14th la Biennale di Venezia International Architecture Exhibition announced that it had (finally) roped in world-renowned architect Rem Koolhaas as the director of the Architecture Sector to lead its ranks, the speculative — often skeptical — architecture crowd wore its mixed emotions on its sleeve.
Posted inArt
Remaking the City with Architectural Collage
From a standpoint of cohesion, the architecture of the 20th century was a mess. Brutalist monoliths were constructed alongside shimmering aluminum waves, while some architects clung to scraps of classicism like life preservers in a swelling sea of modernism. However, it was this mishmash of styles and ideas that resulted in some of the most visionary designs, and not surprisingly the use of collage became a central medium for experimentation.
Posted inArt
The Architectural Is Always Political
New York’s East 53rd Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, is full of nondescript Manhattan skyscrapers. In the courtyard of one of these clinically clean buildings, however, there are five crumbling, old slabs of concrete covered in graffiti. It’s hard to believe that these blocks, so out of place in their surroundings, were once part of one of the most politically charged structures in the world, one that divided the globe in two based on ideology and geopolitics — the Berlin Wall.
Posted inArt
What Makes a Library a Library?
The latest controversy striking the tumultuous world of libraries (a very shocking place) is the announcement of a bookless library to open this fall in San Antonio, Texas. The new space will look and function more like an Apple store than what we would traditionally think of as a library, but how much does that matter when it comes to providing public access to information?
