History was written on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Or at least a little piece of it, as a group of volunteer Wikipedia editors gathered in MOCA’s outdoor plaza for Unforgetting L.A., an edit-a-thon sponsored by online art magazine East of Borneo. The third in a series, the event’s goal was to build Wikipedia articles for artists, curators, and galleries of the past 30 years — the three art-rich decades since MOCA’s inception. Read More …
This week Patrik Schumacher took to Facebook to decry the state of architecture as both a discipline and a discourse. Quickly filling his timeline, he scolded “critics and critical architects” for their agnosia, or form blindness.
“This [visual condition] is involved in the critic’s inability to grasp the significance of parametricism,” he wrote, aghast at the lack of appreciation of a high period of organic form derived from computational inputs. An hour later he continued his imperatives, writing “STOP political correctness in architecture. But also: STOP confusing architecture and art. Architects are in charge of the FORM of the built environment, not its content.” Read More …
Architecture and Design Film Festival Panel:
Hands-on, Ground-up: Community and Design/Build
- Dave Sellers
Architect - Jenna Didier
Artist - Mimi Zeiger – Moderator
Critic and Curator - Steve Badanes
Architect / Educator
Hippie havens, handbuilt provocations, and tech experiments with Yestermorrow, Jersey Devil, and Materials & Applications.
Mediabisto’s coverage of the panel by Brigitte Brown.
Emerson College Los Angeles, the newly opened West Coast outpost of the Boston-based institution, sits on a stretch of Sunset Boulevard that is rapidly changing from seedy to cinematic. The school has strong alumni community in Los Angeles and an established internship program. Designed by Wallpaper* Design Awards judge Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects, the $85 million, 10-storey building-cum-microcampus hosts students majoring in television, film, marketing, acting, screenwriting, and journalism. Read More …
“We build what developers won’t build: family-sized units,” says Sarah Letts, the executive director of the Community Corporation of Santa Monica (CCSM), standing on the outdoor terrace on the top floor of 2802 Pico Housing—a recently opened 100-percent-affordable housing project by the nonprofit developer. The family-oriented design by Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners provides ten three-bedroom and 23 two-bedroom rental units—all at 25 to 30 percent of market rate. Read More …
Mextropoli, the First International Festival on Architecture and the City, organized by Arquine and directed by Andrea Griborio, takes place in Mexico City March 22-26, 2014.
Panel Discussion: Habla ciudad: la crítica
Iker Gil (Chicago), Andrés Jaque (Madrid), Ethel Baraona Pohl (Barcelona), Mimi Zeiger (Los Angeles)
Habla ciudad: la crítica
Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Time: 5 pm – 6:30 pm
Location: Plaza de la Santa Veracruz
City in a City: A Decade of Urban Thinking by Steven Holl Architects opened at LA’s MAK Center for Art + Architecture in late January. Do not be fooled by the title. The exhibition is not about any particular city. Instead, it profiles a suite of projects by Holl’s office across China. The urban thinking in question, then, plays out in the scale of these built works and proposals, which express themselves over huge swaths of landscape and dazzle with their square footage. Consider the numbers:
2,383,797
7,035,000
215,280
1,296,459
3,500 Read More …
Architecture, especially at its most conceptual, is murky territory. It takes a risk for the public to wade in. The field is routinely blasted for using alienating jargon or offering up sci-fi designs that produce head scratching. Three exhibitions on view right now across the southland celebrate experimental design, while making it accessible to a broad audience. Each show — Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB); Materials & Applications: Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful, Projects 2002 – 2013 at Cal State Long Beach University Art Museum; and Blindspot Initiative at the Keystone Gallery in Los Angeles–provoke a collaborative dialog about architecture and its allied disciplines: art, design, fabrication, and digital technologies. While the installations run the gamut from the scrappy to the institutional, when taken together these shows reveal a rich and diverse community united by an ethos to question both the academic and professional boundaries that surround architecture. Read More …
When Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s outgoing Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, took the podium at an October workshop for Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, he warmly welcomed the participants, who had gathered at the Museum from around the globe. On hand to embark on a yearlong study exploring potential architectures of global urbanism were architects and researchers from Boston and Brazil, New York and Nigeria, as well as from Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, India, France, Turkey, and Hong Kong, all of whom had been selected by architecture curator Pedro Gadanho. Read More …
This year, the Van Alen Institute in New York celebrates its 120th anniversary. It’s hard to believe that an organization that was founded in 1894 as the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects would find itself in 2014 with a taxi-yellow bookshop on West 22nd Street, the drive to keep reinventing itself, and a new leader with a global vision. Read More …