Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

June 1, 2014

Liverpool Department Store–Insurgentes

Rojkind Arquitectos transforms a standard department store into an active public space

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Architecture, Articles, Michel Rojkind

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Rojkind Arquitectos transformed the Liverpool department store on Mexico City’s Avenida de los Insurgentes by wrapping three sides of the building in a 10-foot-deep layer of programmable hexagonal pods.

“Can architecture serve as a way to reconnect parts of the city or enhance human experience?” asks architect Michel Rojkind, founder of Mexico City–based Rojkind Arquitectos. The question is ambitious, even a little outsized, considering that we’ve sat down over coffee to discuss the firm’s remodel of an outpost of Liverpool, a Mexican department store. But Rojkind is sincere and determined to create designs that give back to the community.

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May 26, 2014

Vault House

Johnston Marklee takes a curvaceous approach the beach house paradigm.

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Architecture, Articles, Johnston Marklee

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Arch. Dome. Vault. The terms are relics of architectural history, but in Southern California they are also the building blocks of suburbia, where Mission-style McMansions flaunt endless stucco arches and vaulted foyers. Principals Sharon Johnston, AIA, and Mark Lee of Los Angeles–based Johnston Marklee, however, have updated the archaic and used vaults to rethink a beach house in Oxnard, Calif., just north of Malibu. Read More …

May 2014

WHERE ARCHITECTURE MEETS THE PEOPLE

Three firms challenge the traditional top-down procedures for architecture and urban design

TAGS

Agents of Change, Andres Jaque, Architecture, Articles, Daisy Froud, Raúl Cárdenas Osuna, The Office for Political Innovation, Tom Coward, Torolab

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You can hear the “bwak, bwak” of chickens as dusk falls on Camino Verde, an informal settlement that sprawls over the hillside of south Tijuana. Down the slope, a group of
men tinker with busted trucks. The neighborhood is home to 40,000 people. In a city that has become a hub of art and food culture in Mexico, Camino Verde is largely immune to any
revitalization and is still plagued by poverty, crime and drug use. I’m standing on the site of Transborder FarmLab, created by Torolab, an interdisciplinary art collective based in Tijuana. Among the discarded tires, piles of trash and loose dogs, people here are trying to make a life for themselves. The FarmLab lot used to be narco-gang turf. Now, it is home to a bunkerlike cultural facility and terraced soil awaiting plantings.

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May 5, 2014

Opinion: Architects and Mayors

The architect is simultaneously mayoral consigliere and rabble-rouser.

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Eric Garcetti, Urbanism

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A few weeks ago at a conference in Mexico City, architect Elizabeth Diller took the stage of the Teatro Metropolitan and presented a series of projects culled from her firm’s growing oeuvre on the theme of the city. She guided the audience gathered in the faded splendour of the vast auditorium through each work — the shrewd Lincoln Center, the precedent-setting The High Line, the upcoming Culture Shed, among others (notably minus the scheme for a supersized MoMA).
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April 22, 2014

Funhouse Chic

Inside The "Funny Or Die" Offices

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Clive Wilkinson Architects

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There are hip workplaces, high-tech workplaces, and old-school buttoned down workplaces. Then there’s Funny or Die’s new headquarters, which can only be described as funhouse chic. The color palette tilts to pop hues–straight out of early MTV. The architecture is a little off kilter. And that’s okay, according to Jana Fain, the company’s director of operations. “You can’t walk in and feel nothing,” she says.
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April 30 - May 24, 2014

Letters to the Mayor

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Events, Exhibitions, Urbanism

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As a civic figure, the architect has the privilege and responsibility to articulate and translate the collective aspirations of society, and specifically of those not able to sit at the decision-making tables.

Throughout history, architects have engaged with this responsibility and the structures of economic, political and cultural power in different ways and with varying degrees of success. With the rise of globalization and the homogenization of the contemporary city, the role of the architect in the political arena has often been relegated to answering questions that others have asked. While designing the next economically driven cultural-iconic-touristic object, an increasing amount of both architects and with them, politicians, have forgotten the ethics that should be associated with architectural practice and the potential of design in the construction of public life.  Read More …

April 16, 2014

Memos from the Front Line

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Architecture, Between Digital and Analogue, Digital Culture, Events

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Join us at USC School of Architecture for a lecture by Mimi Zeiger.

Trained as an architect, critic Mimi Zeiger tracts the rise of publishing as practice through her own work. Memos from the Front Line rejects the binary of the print and digital divide and suggests that the commingling of the analog and algorithmic creates rich territory for cultural production, criticism, and architectural experimentation.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014 | 2pm
Gin Wong Conference Center
Harris Hall 101

April 13, 2014

Letter to Mayor Garcetti

For 'Letters to the Mayor' Exhibition

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Eric Garcetti, Exhibitions, Mike Davis, Urbanism

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Dear Mayor Garcetti,

“The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future.”
—Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990)

“L.A. WANTS 2 HELP U”
—Billboard Oracle, L.A. Story (1991)

What is the future of Los Angeles? This is the question everyone is asking. And it is the perennial question posed by everyone from William Mulholland to Walt Disney to Frank Gehry. In each casting of the runes, the city is both subject and object. It is a place where the wind rustling the bougainvillea is a siren song and the Santa Ana’s blowing down palm fronds is an omen. But you know this, my fellow Angelino. Just as you know that The Los Angeles 2020 Commission wrinkles its collective brow with concern as it evaluates the next six years and that the LA2050 initiative (funded by the Goldhirsh Foundation) foresees an optimistic, crowdsourced metropolis. Read More …

April 1, 2014

Emerson College Los Angeles

A new Hollywood outpost brings added density—and a striking silhouette

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Morphosis, Thom Mayne

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Drive down Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard and you’ll discover Morphosis Architects’ latest project, a futuristic cube, rising from a strip of lowly fast food outlets. The structure is the West Coast micro-campus for Boston’s Emerson College, and is home to 217 students majoring in television, film, marketing, acting, screenwriting, and journalism. As you draw closer, the solid mass reveals itself as a proscenium, framing a patch of blue sky. The building’s two residential towers bookend open-air courtyards and performance spaces. “Some might say it is an aggressive building, but I see it as rather classical,” says Thom Mayne, FAIA, principal of Morphosis Architects, with offices in Culver City, Calif., and New York. “[The design] is a critique of an institutional building as a big block.” Read More …