“Mark’s House,” by the firm Two Islands, is the winning entry in the Flint, Michigan Flat Lot Competition. The architects’ submission included seductive renderings of the proposed design: a mirrored, floating abstraction of a Tudor house. Then the project was built and, sadly, the reality was far from the glossy beauty portrayed in the initial […]

What type of “reading” is appropriate for this type of image, encountered on the website Archive of Affinities, nearly devoid of context? Cursory formal analysis yields minimal results: a tower made of casually stacked, differently skinned blocks, each covered by a green roof. But the image is too flippant to be taken straightforwardly. It seems […]

Architecture, as a way of thinking, requires something outside of itself. It requires something to think about. The point is simple enough, though it seems that, because of the incessant pressure towards the production of a tangible, built object, architects have become more likely to lose sight of architecture’s fundamental capability to evaluate subjects. This […]

“Crate diggers” are a peculiar species of modern consumer, endlessly and omnivorously searching for the obscure, the unusual, and the overlooked. They exhibit incredible patience, a keen eye, and an absence of expectation in their compulsive pursuit of forgotten vinyl treasures. It would be impractical and unrealistic to seek out a single desired LP when […]

With what framework can one evaluate the projects of Bjarke Ingels Group? They seem too casual, too whimsical for serious criticism. Their design process puts such great emphasis on the authorship of each project that the final products cannot be judged based on their forms alone. Instead, the forms are inextricably paired with their design […]

Most of the way down the chronologically ordered spiral of Choices, the John Chamberlain retrospective now on view at the Guggenheim, you might find yourself leaning against the white balustrade of the ramp in front of a sculpture like Nutcracker—an early, seemingly modest piece that pulls you out of your museum drift before you know […]

An architectural B-side is, clearly, not an architectural hit. While an architectural B-side is surely architectural, its placement within the discipline may not be quite familiar or easily classified.  Such difficulty in categorization puts an architectural B-side on the disciplinary sidelines. It is precisely this peripheral positioning that affords the architectural B-side the ability to […]

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées An empty space can feel foreboding, unsettling. When a plaza, a space typically of the people, is found empty, it can produce a sense of anxiety. This anxiety has been identified as a form of agoraphobia, a condition exclusive to modern urban dwellers. […]

Section. Sex-tion. Sex can be projected onto nearly anything, even (maybe especially) architecture. And this is not simply a product of perpetually having our minds in the gutter; often the innuendo is less than subtle. Towers, solid-void relationships, the earlier works of Gage/Clemenceau Architects (to name but a few of many culprits) all provoke thoughts […]

While Rem Koolhaas, in the essay “Junkspace,” compares contemporary architects’ understanding of the significance of modernism to “reading a footnote under a microscope hoping it [will] turn into a novel,” he has built a career out of assembling and recombining canonical Modernist tropes with the dirty realism of the built world. In many of Koolhaas’s […]

Perhaps more than any other transformation exerted by the computer, the immediate coordination of orthographic projections (plan, section, elevation, axonometric, etc.) has had the greatest effect on architecture. Building Information Modeling is, in fact, so good at correlating projected views with each other that the automatic production of drawings is by now hardly a novelty […]

Architecture is crazy. Not wild or awesome or amazing crazy, but I’m-afraid-to-introduce-you-to-my-mother, you’re-suffering-from-a-diagnosable-disorder crazy. As a discipline architecture has committed itself to engaging all-at-once with three-dimensional reality and two-dimensional abstraction (in varying proportions depending on who you ask). As a result, it has had to simultaneously address two modes of representation that often find themselves […]

Kenzo Tange’s metabolist icon, the Yamanashi Press and Broadcasting Building, stands tall in the low-lying valley town of Kofu, Japan. Unlike many metabolist projects that have struggled to adapt to changing twenty-first century environments, Yamanashi has aged well.  Built in 1967, the project underwent an extensive addition to accommodate the need for more space in the […]

This is not ‘Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie, Part Two.’ But once again, the technical virtuosity of Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon leaves us with something to talk about. Setting aside the broader history of architecture and animation, Dark of the Moon embodies an emerging position in digital architecture: it is […]

Amidst the vast quantities of anonymous and unremarkable modernist architecture—especially large-scale housing—that are distributed throughout the twentieth-century city, there appear occasional exceptions, aberrations, and mutations that, despite the obscurity of their origins, offer important lessons on the potentials of architectural and urban form. These works of what we might call the modernist vernacular do not […]

At least since Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s “Transparency” essays, for which a conspicuously unmentioned precedent can be found in Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, architects have understood that transparency does not necessarily equal transparency. The familiar argument suggests that so-called “phenomenal transparency” — a strange title, if only because it has little to […]