March 4, 2022

What happens on your 100th birthday?

A set of confabulations in memory of Peter Reyner Banham

Architectural Association School of Architecture

TAGS

Architecture, Events, Reyner Banham, Urbanism

Peter Reyner Banham is one of the most relevant architectural and design critics of the 20th century. Join us to celebrate his 100th birthday on March 4 with a symposium, organised as a collaboration between the AA and The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, which will bring together multi-generational duets of scholars and practitioners engaging on themes key to the life and intellectual legacy of the English critic.

The symposium will precede two AA Visiting Schools held from June-July 2022 – “Farewell Reveries” (online) and “A Blighty Safari” (a road trip throughout the UK) – that will reflect on Banham’s passion for travel and field exploration.

Original image by Tim Street-Porter

October 7, 2021

FF – Distance Edition: Stoss Landscape Urbanism

The Boston and Los Angeles-based studio kicks off our fall series with a virtual studio visit and project tour.

The Architectural League

TAGS

Chris Reed, Events, Stoss, Urbanism

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The League’s FF – Distance Edition, an online version of the long-running First Friday series, will continue on Thursday evenings. This season’s events feature design practices that are redefining the contemporary public landscape by responding to social and environmental concerns and exploring the intersections of architecture, technology, and ecology.

FF – Distance Edition brings participants on site, offering virtual access to practices’ workspaces and current projects. Following each presentation, join in an open conversation with the designers.

Founded in Boston by Chris Reed in 2001, Stoss Landscape Urbanism is a landscape architecture and urban design firm committed to “the power of open space to bind communities to one another and to the environment,” according to its website. At Stoss, landscape is a catalyst for positive change, enhancing both human wellbeing and ecological diversity. The firm’s work focuses on creating active and environmentally sustainable urban realms, socially vibrant public spaces, and diverse, vital neighborhoods in which people can live, work, and play.

June 2021

Past and Future Monuments

L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Articles, Black Lives Matter, Camae Ayewa, Dell Upton, Donald Trump, Eto Otitigbe, Höweler + Yoon, Mabel O Wilson, Monument Lab, Rasheedah Phillips, Urbanism

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It was a summer of outrage and pain. The weeks after the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin and the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many other Black men and women, was a moment in the United States when veil that hung over the racism and white supremacy was ripped open and all the grief and anger tumbled out into the streets in mass protest. A history of oppression and a present heavy with generational burdens of inequity was laid bare. For Black and Indigenous, Latinx and Asian Americans, this is lived experience. For many white Americans, it was mirror held up to a country that is a democracy only to some.

Spring 2021

Mise-en-Scène

The Lives and Afterlives of Urban Landscapes

ORO Editions

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Books, De Nichols, Julia Czerniak, Mike Belleme, Sara Zewde

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Mise-en-Scène is an immersive exploration of the social lives of urban landscapes—the actors and actions that compose the daily theater of urban life. Conceived as a unique collaboration between an urbanist, Chris Reed, and a photographer, Mike Belleme, the book combines photo essays, original maps and drawings, newly commissioned essays, excerpts from historical writings, and interviews with residents. The result is a rigorous and artful examination of the social, cultural, environmental, and economic challenges of life in American cities today. Read More …

December 10, 2020

On Futures: Annalee Newitz

SCI-Arc Channel

TAGS

Articles, Urbanism

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The work of journalist and novelist Annalee Newitz is about what is real and what is fictional, what is past, present, and future. Questions of temporality, urbanism, and identity percolate through Newitz’s science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of the forthcoming book about archaeology Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, and the novels The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

Winter 2020

Dreaming & Dwelling

The architecture that imagined a new society

Aperture

TAGS

Adam Wiseman, Architecture, Art, Articles, Elon Musk, Jade Doskow, Laurent Kronental, Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer

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Imagining a new society begins with visionary design. What can we learn from the bold architectural schemes of the twentieth century?

The frontispiece of the original edition of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, published in Leuven, Belgium, in 1516, depicts a small island, nearly round with deckled edges. The engraver’s hand shaded the landmass with short, neat hatch marks to suggest topography and a river. More imagined utopia as a self-contained world where communities shared a common culture and way of life. This definition sets up two particular criteria: place and society. To convey these intertwined conditions, the illustrator dotted the woodblock print with buildings.

June 30, 2020

Can Quarantine Propel Us Toward Planetary Sanctuary?

Critic Mimi Zeiger reflects on refugia and the regenerative potential of crisis.

Metropolis

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Articles, Design Earth, Donna Haraway, Olalekan Jeyifous, Urbanism

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I can’t stop thinking about refugia. In the years, months, and days before the COVID-19 pandemic, the term was confined to the literature and philosophy of climate crisis, referring to pockets of life that through geographic isolation or species resilience manage to hang on in spite of the environmental forces against them. Think of clusters of Pacific Northwest barnacles nestled high on coastal outcroppings to avoid falling prey to sea snails. Or old-growth forests insulated from rising temperatures in cool mountain valleys.

As self-quarantine set in earlier this spring, the word refugia, at least for me, expanded in definition from specific ecological condition to conceptual touchstone—a necessary leap to metaphor when faced with planetary crisis. The magnitude of this pandemic falls outside human comprehension, but for the luckiest of us, refuge is manageable: a place of relative safety, of sourdough starters and online Jazzercise classes.

July 17, 2019

L.A. River planners float three design proposals for a major new park

Los Angeles Times

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Mia Lehrer, Studio-MLA, Urbanism, WSP

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The three design schemes look totally distinct on paper and come with different names — “Island,” “Soft Edge,” “The Yards” — but they all have the same goal: restore wildlife habitat, plant people-friendly landscapes and develop flood-control strategies for a place that has been the subject of so much neglect, speculation, dreaming and debate: the L.A. River.

Some of the loudest conversations about the transformation of the 51-mile L.A. River center on Taylor Yard, what had been a greasy, soot-filled tangle of rail lines and boxcars. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, freight trains rumbled to and from the yard named after the Taylor Mill that once stood on the site. When Southern Pacific Railroad vacated the land in the mid-1980s, the company left behind a contaminated plot along the concrete-lined waterway.

February 2019

LIVE AND LEARN

Algorithms are bringing new kinds of evidence and predictive powers to the shaping of landscapes.

Landscape Architecture

TAGS

Anya Domlesky, Architecture, Bradley Cantrell, Digital Culture, Molly Wright Steenson, SWA, William H. Whyte

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Tree. Person. Bike. Person. Person. Tree. Anya Domlesky, ASLA, an associate at SWA in Sausalito, California, rattles off how she and the firm’s innovation lab team train a computer to recognize the flora and fauna in an urban plaza.

The effort is part of the firm’s mission to apply emergent technologies to landscape architecture. In pursuing the applied use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the research and innovation lab XL: Experiments in Landscape and Urbanism follows a small but growing number of researchers and practitioners interested in the ways the enigmatic yet ubiquitous culture of algorithms might be deployed in the field. Read More …

November 2018

OAKLAND REPLAY

Landscape Architecture

TAGS

Amedee Sourdry, Architecture, Robert Winston, Urbanism, William Penn Mott Jr.

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Guiding the transition of San Francisco’s Presidio from military base to national park may be the standout accomplishment of the landscape architect and parks administrator William Penn Mott Jr., who assumed the helm of the U.S. National Park Service in 1985, but it’s a little “monster” from early in Mott’s career that has received renewed attention.

In 1952, when Mott was parks superintendent for the city of Oakland, he commissioned the artist Robert “Bob” Winston to create a unique play structure on the sandy banks of Lake Merritt. Sculptural and organic, the chartreuse green piece was known as the Mid-Century Monster. It was one of the first designs in the United States to depart from conventional swings or slides and celebrate imaginative play, and from its opening, children climbed on and hid inside the Monster’s many haunches and niches. Read More …