Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

It’s easy to picture Philip Johnson seated in his regular booth in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons; his back to the windows, his bespectacled eyes on the door, he’s confident and at the top of his game as he presides over a room of his own design.

Now imagine him jittery and hesitant in a different room on a different coast. It’s the late 1950s and, faced with a University of California, Berkeley researcher trying to uncover the secrets to his creativity, Johnson uses his ample verbal and social gifts to upend the interview. In a typed report, the researcher would later write, “He showed many classic features of the manic: self-centered, irritable, jumpy, flight of ideas, arrogance, use of humor to defend against serious consideration of anxiety-producing topics.” Read More …

“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. Although the sharing economy recalibrated how we interface with the city through apps and services, the design of buildings and public spaces are still largely conventional. So, how to design for better civic engagement? In conversation with architect Michel Rojkind, writer Leslie Wolke, and architecture critic Mimi Zeiger will explore recent experiments at the intersection of architecture, interaction design, and urban intervention: from a department store in Mexico City wrapped in a 10-foot-deep layer of programmable hexagonal pods to mobile structures in Madrid that transform historical spaces. What do these urban interventions mean to us as technology and architecture intermingle in unfamiliar ways?

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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