The recent flurry of critical missives and tweets over MoMA’s decision to demolish the next-door American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, has got me thinking about Harley Earl. The square-shouldered vice president and head of design at General Motors introduced stylised curves, chrome, and sex appeal into an industry driven by function. His most significant contribution to American culture, however, may be not the tail fin but planned obsolescence. Read More …
This past fall, Skirball Cultural Center opened the “Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie,” a sweeping exhibition that delves deep into the work and nearly fifty-year-long career of the Israeli/Canadian architect. Models, drawings, photographs, and films illustrate a body of work that spans from North America to the Middle East and Asia. The title underscores not only the geographical breadth of Safdie’s work, but his commitment to making architecture as a social, cultural, and, even, political act. Read More …
When did the war between technology and urbanism now battling on the streets of San Francisco begin? On December 10, protesters blocked a private bus from commuting from the city’s Mission District to Google headquarters in Mountain View, 34 miles away. Over the summer, emotions ran high when tech entrepreneur Peter Shih posted his screed 10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition. Read More …
You’ve likely heard of William Mulholland. There’s a ridgetop road in the Santa Monica Mountains, Mulholland Drive, named after him that offers breathtaking views of the Los Angeles basin and was the namesake of a David Lynch movie. Tall tales and mythologies swirl around Mulholland, the civil engineer who founded the Los Angeles Aqueduct and brought water to the desert. The aqueduct, which opened on November 5, 1913, and recently celebrated its centennial, would eventually become the water half of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) and Mulholland’s life would transform into legend. But if the story of L.A. water is well known, what of the power supply, the last letter in LADWP? That’s the question posed by the exhibition LADWP Power, on view at the Los Angeles headquarters of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) through February 2014. Read More …
To cap off 2013, ARCHITECT asked a few critics and contributors to list their favorite architecture and design books of 2013. This informal panel picked books that even devoted design readers may have overlooked, plus some titles that no one can afford to miss. Here are seven titles they named as their favorites of the year (and one editor’s pick for good measure). Read More …
To tie in with our Next Generation issue, we are taking a look at three emerging practices and their accomplished first builds, from Copenhagen-based Kato x Victoria’s school playground – designed to capture the ’emotional drama’ of teenagers – to vPPR’s triangle houses in London and Murmur’s ‘inside out’ house in Malibu.Here, we catch up with Murmur…
Heather Roberge established LA practice Murmur in 2008. Her research ‘investigates the influence of digital design and fabrication on architecture. It asks, how do we produce architectural surfaces with the technology we have now?’ Her first residential build, Vortex House in Malibu, was designed to capture the site’s views. Read More …
Different Kinds of Water Pouring Into a Swimming Pool, on view now at REDCAT through November 24, is the first solo project by Madrid-based architect Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation in Los Angeles. Jaque, who is currently a professor at GSAPP Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York, sidesteps conventional notions of architecture, preferring to make work that stirs up questions around community, consumption, and political engagement. His work, IKEA Disobedients, which was performed at MoMA PS1 in New York was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA) as the first “architectural performance piece” in its collection. Read More …
The Solar Decathlon took place in early October in spite of the government shutdown that furloughed all but the most essential employees at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which organizes the biennial competition. Fortunately, the decathlon was funded during the previous fiscal year and is also supported by private donors. But there was another reason the fiscal battle in Congress barely cast a shadow over the proceedings: For the first time since its founding in 2002, the decathlon wasn’t held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., but rather at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, Calif. Read More …
How many women? That’s the question I routinely ask when faced with a lineup of panelists, a competition jury, an exhibition checklist, or a table of contents. Then I will count, picking out female names and remembering which offices are partnerships.
I’m not alone in my inventory. For (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Poster Project, Micol Hebron asked fellow artists to contribute posters depicting the numbers of male and female artists represented by top galleries in Los Angeles. Read More …
When talking about workplace design, the buzzword “collaboration” flies around the tech world faster than a speeding foosball. From startups working out of garages to sprawling corporate campuses, everyone is looking to harness the creative energy of people working together. Pinterest is no exception. The design-driven company is using its new 45,000-square-foot headquarters in San Francisco’s SoMA neighborhood as a test site for collaboration. Read More …