Architecture

Laetitia Wolff
Practical Utopias: Luca Ballarini, Turin’s Designer-Caretaker
Utopia + care-taking of our cities sound like opposites, in fact they’re complementary to creating vibrant, greener, more inclusive communities.


Victoria Sloan
Meet Me Under the Bents
There are now more than 25 so-called “infrastructure parks” in North America, including Canada’s Bentway.


Susan Morris
The New York Film Festival 2022: Building-Centric Films
This year’s New York Film Festival, the 60th, featured films that used architecture, design, urbanism and landscape architecture as a key storytelling devices.


Susan Morris
Observed at DOC NYC 2020
Of the more than 200 films at the 2020 DOC NYC festival, the largest documentary film festival in the U.S., films centering on design and the built environment highlighted the themes of obsession, the passage of time, and the city as shifting canvas.


Jessica Helfand + Claire Weisz
On Architecture
Herewith, the first in a series of conversations with artists, architects, photographers, cinematographers, designers and makers of all kinds, from all over the world.


Kathleen Meaney
A Breath of Fresh Architecture
What takes our breath away is both the thrill of life and life threatening.


Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand
Episode 120: Federal Style
The Trump Administration’s draft executive order Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again, the rise of the blur, a CBS brand book at the California Antiquarian Fair, Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley


Steven Heller
Don Wall: Brave New Book Design
Steven Heller talks to architect Don Wall about his radical book from 1971: Visionary Cities: the Arcology of Paolo Soleri.


Justin Ross Muchnick
Between Space and Place: The Entrance to the Churchill War Rooms Museum
If “place is security" and "space is freedom” how does an entrance to a museum celebrating an underground bunker define that boundary?


Alan Rapp
Personal Space
Robert Sommer’s Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design was published in fifty years ago, and its compact title concept — an invisible but perceptible security zone surrounding an individual — caught on.



Steven Heller
Hudson Yards Lays an Egg
On Thomas Heatherwick’s much anticipated giant honeycomb, 150 foot-tall “Vessel” structure, the centerpiece of the Hudson Yards outdoor plaza, bathed in reflective copper-steel, comprised of 154 staircases and 80 landings.


Michael Bierut
S6E2: Billie Tsien
Billie Tsien is the co-founder of Tod Williams Billie Tsien architects, which works on buildings for museums, universities, and the Obama Presidential Center.


Laetitia Wolff
Radical Architecture on Paper
NN Studio, a small Belgian design studio, advocates for emergent forms of architecture and urbanism.


James Cartwright
Architecture for the People: Bryan C. Lee is Taking Trust Back into Public Spaces
“Architecture is the most democratic and the least democratically used tool.”


Michael Bierut
What’s That Crashing Sound, Or, Eisenman in Cincinnati
I had chosen to spend five years in a place that many considered the ugliest college campus in America.


Thomas de Monchaux
Something Elemental About Something Artificial
Exploring the complex space between the formal and informal, the formed and formless with LOT-EK.


Bill Shaffer
Modern Survivor
An enormous, glorious, digital clock: a quintessential expression of the design ethos of the 1960s.


Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand
S2E5: David Rockwell
David Rockwell is the founder and president of the architecture and design firm the Rockwell Group and a theatrical set designer.


Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand
S1E8: Leslie Koch
Leslie Koch was the president and CEO of the Trust for Governors Island.


Debbie Millman
Pierluigi Serraino
Debbie talks to architect Pierluigi Serraino about some of the things creative people have in common.


Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand
S1E3: Deborah Berke
Deborah Berke is the founding partner of Deborah Berke Partners, the architect of the 21c Museum Hotels, and the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture.


Mark Lamster
How to Design an Iconic NY Fast Food Joint
Design secrets of New York fast food icons.


Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand
Shapes and Japes
Corporate design humor from Mic Drop to bland.ly, photoviz, remembering Zaha Hadid


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Kreuzberg Tower in Berlin by Hélène Binet
The aura of a building


Debbie Millman
Design Matters From the Archive: Michael Arad
The designer of the 9/11 memorial—Michael Arad— on the process of design.



52-Blue
(in)Fringe 05: Hushed Spaces
POPOS and the public


Adam Harrison Levy
The Master
On the occasion Frank Lloyd Wright’s birthday Adam Harrison Levy pays tribute to a life that was as spectacular as any of his buildings.


Rob Walker
Defending The Standpipe
A curious concentration of designs to discourage people from sitting on standpipes.


Bryan Finoki
Architecture vs. the People
How anti-homeless measures diminish a city’s responsibility to its most vulnerable citizens


Rob Walker
Scalies in the Spotlight
The uncanny figures populating architectural renderings get some fresh scrutiny


Rick Poynor
Exposure: Restaurant de la Réserve by Jean Gilletta
Wonder and yearning by the sea



Erik Spiekermann
Ideas Come First
The observations of a graphic designer as client



Steven Heller
A Memory of Mickey
Steven Heller remembers Mildred Friedman, who passed away late Wednesday.


Rick Poynor
Tracking the Locations of J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes
A photo-essay on the futuristic marina and business park in the south of France that inspired Ballard’s disquieting fantasy about corporate crime


Erik Spiekermann
Should Architects Understand Type?
The relationship between architecture and graphic design has deep roots.


Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo
The Rand House: A House to Work and Live In
While not a large house, it felt just right, as if it had been made to measure for every interaction and every function.


Mark Yoes
Elinor Evans : Some Truths from the Master
The artist, educator, and architecture guru Elinor Evans turns 100.



Observed
House Housing
Opening today is 
House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate in Nineteen Episodes — the first public presentation of a multi-year research project conducted by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University.


Adam Harrison Levy
The Last Unknown Place in New York
If you want to see a version of the future you could try to take a boat to an island off the coast of the Bronx.


Owen Edwards
Rizzoli Erased
Owen Edwards remembers the elegant old Art Nouveau building that housed the Rizzoli bookstore, just what a bookstore ought to be.


Alexandra Lange
Lucia Eames, 1930-2014
An appreciation of Lucia Eames (1930-2014).



Observed
Shape: A Film About Design
Shape is a short film that is part of MakeShapeChange , a project aimed at young people to get them thinking about how the world is made around them and where design fits in.



Observed
Deventer
In Deventer, the Netherlands, a routine real estate deal and demolition became the site of innovation and new intelligence in urban design.


Mark Lamster
The Astrodome and the Challenges of Preservation
The Astrodome and the future of preservation.





Alexandra Lange
Not Afraid of Noise: Mexico City Stories
A photographic tour of Mexico City, house by house, wall by wall.


Jennifer Kabat
Genzken and the City
A review of Isa Genzken’s current retrospective on view at MOMA.


Alexandra Lange
Premature Demolition
The Folk Art Museum, David Adjaye's market hall, and the first addition to the Morgan Library. If three makes a trend, then premature demolition qualifies.


Alexandra Lange
Criticism = Love
Why you have to love design to be a critic.


Rob Walker
Hale County Revisited
An in-depth look at Hale County, Alabama, an accidental social-design laboratory.


Alexandra Lange
Year of the Women
A year-end wrap-up of my favorite stories. The common theme? Women and the making of design.



Observed
Fairy Tale Architecture
A roundup of our holiday Fairy Tale Architecture posts.


Debbie Millman
Susan Szenasy
Susan S. Szenasy is editor-in-chief of METROPOLIS, the award-winning New York City-based magazine of architecture and design.


Alexandra Lange, and Mark Lamster
Lunch with the Critics: Fourth-Annual Year-End Awards
Our intrepid critics, Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster, celebrate (and castigate) the best and worst architecture and design of 2013.



Alexandra Lange
Art On Campus
A review of the renovated Blaffer Art Museum and James Turrell's latest skyspace, "Twilight Epiphany."



Steven Heller
Lettering Large
An excerpt and gallery from Steven Heller and Mirko Ilić's new book: Lettering Large: Art and Design of Monumental Typography.



Alexandra Lange
L.A. Loves Deborah Sussman
A Kickstarter for an upcming exhibition on the wotk of Deborah Sussman in Los Angeles.



Mark Lamster
Can the Doomed Astrodome Save Modernism?
The Astrodome and the Future of Modern Preservation


Alexandra Lange
MoMA’s Modern Women
The Museum of Modern Art's new installation, "Designing Modern Women," could have made a bolder statement about the transformative role of women in 20th century design and architecture.


John Foster
Giraffe Houses of the Ozarks
Giraffe houses are generally thought to have first appeared around 1910, but their acceptance grew during the 1930s.


Alexandra Lange
Learning New Tricks
Harvard doesn't have any design courses, but I've found new friends in "material culture." What it's like for a critic to go back to school.


Mark Lamster
High Net Space: The New International Style
High Net Space: The New International Style


Alexandra Lange
A World of Paste and Paper
Today's obsession with digital renderings sparked two exhibitions that suggest a handmade, but far from quaint, corrective.


Mark Lamster
Architecture's Proto-Blogger
G.E. Kidder Smith, forgotten master of architectural criticism.



Observed
Making Big Things Out of Small Pieces
Researchers at MIT have developed a super strong material created out of interlocking small parts


Alexandra Lange
Rural Vacation | Urban Questions
Driving Vermont's rural routes I began to wonder: Why does this town get a brand-new energy-efficient supermarket, and that one a minimart-slash-video store-slash-bank?



Observed
Reimagining the Serpentine Pavilion
Sou Fujimoto is the youngest-ever artist to design a pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery


Alexandra Lange
Nevermind the Masterpiece
What's your "Masterpiece of Everyday New York"? A broken umbrella? A shirtwaist? Discarded gum?



Debbie Millman
Jean-Louis Cohen
Jean-Louis Cohen reveals a Le Corbusier who was not only a great architect, but also a savvy promoter of his own ideas and work.


Mark Lamster
Lost Landmarks in New York and Fort Worth
Modern landmarks, in New York and Fort Worth, are destroyed before preservationist can act.


Alexandra Lange
Every Little Thing
Cranbrook: A campus where the designers have thought of everything.


Alexandra Lange
Praise the Partner(s)
Salute Denise Scott Brown because she deserves it, but let's not forget the other partners.



Observed
Flickr Collection of the Week: Are these Buildings? Or Art?
Images of architecture as art.



Observed
Wheelwright Prize 2013 Winner
Gia Wolff, Brooklyn-based architect, wins $100,000 travel grant for her proposal Floating City: The Community-Based Architecture of Parade Floats.



Observed
Michigan Modern: Design that Shaped America
Michigan was an epicenter of modern design in postwar America, this summer the story will be told through a symposium at the Cranbrook Educational Community and an exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum.



Alexandra Lange
Beyond Gorgeous
Is prettiness a distraction? Yes, when it comes to taking Alexander Girard seriously.


Mark Lamster
The Bush Library
A review of the Bush Library.


Alexandra Lange
Architecture Without Signs
If you can't find the entrance, there's a problem with the architecture.


Alexandra Lange
What It Costs (to Buy a Bench, to Extend a Curb)
Participatory budgeting lets communities put their own urban priorities in order.


Alexandra Lange
Portlandia + Timelessness
No better place to consider what looks timeless now than downtown Portland.


Alexandra Lange
Instagramming Around Australia
Lessons from contemporary Australian architecture, plus what I saw on Instagram.



Philip Nobel
Oops: Understanding Failure
A review of To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure, by Henry Petroski.


Mark Lamster
Inventing the Modern Library
A new exhibition of Henri Labrouste, the French architect who invented the modern library.


Alexandra Lange
Patterns of Houston
How do you critique the urbanism of Houston? Look for patterns.


Alexandra Lange
Why Bernadette Fox Is Scary
The heroine of Where’d You Go, Bernadette is an award-winning female architect. Don’t envy her life.


Alexandra Lange
Balthazar Korab, RIP
Tribute to architectural photographer Balthazar Korab, and a discussion of what made him different from contemporary Ezra Stoller.


Alexandra Lange
Kicked A Building Lately?
That question, the title of the 1976 collection of Ada Louise Huxtable’s work for the New York Times, embodies her approach to criticism.


Alexandra Lange
George Nelson in Two Dimensions
Ignore the Coconuts and Marshmallows, admire George Nelson's modular graphics.


Alexandra Lange, and Mark Lamster
Lunch With The Critics: Third-Annual Year-End Awards
Idiosyncratic awards bestowed on architecture, design and media.


Mark Lamster
The Other Ezra Stoller
No achitect is unfamiliar with Ezra Stoller, the pioneering photographer whose clinical eye defined modernism and shaped our vision of the built world for much of the twentieth century.


Alexandra Lange
Knolling Your Polling Place
Knolling your polling place: for the next election, a little spatial organization would go a long way.


John Foster
Accidental Mysteries
Visual examples from the tiny house movement.


Mark Lamster
High (Line) Anxiety
Is the High Line above criticism?



Observed
NYC Architecture Design Film Festival
Now in its fourth season, the Architecture Design Film Festival will offer more than 25 films from around the world and panel discussions with design leaders and filmmakers.


Alexandra Lange
Shopping With Sandro, and Other Tumblr Delights
Digitizing the Miller House Collection, and other museum and corporate visual archives on Tumblr.


Alexandra Lange
Having Fun at the Museum
Blocks, rocket ships, playgrounds and balls: the hidden meaning of playthings at the Museum of Modern Art.


Alexandra Lange
Let’s Talk About Women in Architecture
A panel on Women in Design, and questions about whether such panels should exist.


Alexandra Lange
Someone Else’s Shangri La
An exhibition of Doris Duke's Honolulu mansion, Shangri La, proves a “Spanish-Moorish-Persian-Indian complex” works as theater.



Alexandra Lange
Art Matters to Architecture
In Indianapolis, a restored Milton Glaser mural allows us to see its Brutalist home as its architect intended: with color!


Rob Walker
The City In Your Dreams
A blog collecting stories for mapping the "collective unconscious" of NYC.


Alexandra Lange
Hiking the Museum
Ennead Architects’ new Natural History Museum of Utah works to make natural history seem like the ongoing process of discovery that it is, layering geology and topography, paleontology and interactivity.



Observed
CRITICAL: Lisbon
CRITICAL: Lisbon is a one-week workshop in July dedicated to talking, writing, and publishing critically about architecture.


Rob Walker
The Built Villain
A Dallas condo dispute considered as a monster movie, starring a built villain.


Alexandra Lange
The Charismatic Megafauna of Design
Identifying the "charismatic megafauna" of design and the critical uses of their popularity.


Alexandra Lange
Introducing Strelka Press
On Strelka Press, a new "digital first" publisher of longform architecture and design criticism.


Alexandra Lange
Dress Your Family in Formica and Faux Bois
The materials of architecture and interiors in the fashions of Schiaparelli and Prada.


Alexandra Lange
The Well-Tempered Environment
Water features, old trees, food trucks. Three elements of the architecture of outdoor civic life in North Texas.



Observed
The Hypothetical Development Organization
The Hypothetical Development Organization will be included in the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale.



Observed
The Architecture of Television
Brandi Roberts is an interior designer by training and TV afficionado by choice who draws fictional floorplans of classic television shows.



Observed
Women, Equity, Architecture
Parlour, a new Australian site with the tagline"Women, Equity, Architecture", has a dual project: creating a forum for discussion of and opportunities for women in architecture, and reporting on research, scholarship and the history of the same.


Alexandra Lange
The Mother of Us All
Reyner Banham on Esther McCoy: "She speaks as she finds, with sympathy and honesty, and relevantly to the matter at hand." Could there be a better definition of the role of the critic?



Observed
A Pattern Language
Alexandra Lange reviews A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.


Alexandra Lange
Against Kickstarter Urbanism
You can Kickstart an edible spoon, but not a city.


Alexandra Lange
Fixing South Street Seaport: Is New Architecture Enough?
Fighting over Ben Thompson's postmodernist landmark Pier 17 at South Street Seaport. Should it stay or should it go?


Alexandra Lange
Carlo Scarpa, Quilter
Olivetti and Doges: How Carlo Scarpa updated the Venetian treasure chest.


Alexandra Lange
Frank Lloyd Wright + Katniss Everdeen
On photographing architecture as sculpture and telling stories via architecture.


Alexandra Lange
City of Shoes: Is Urbanism Scalable?
Can Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh scale his online shoe business into a city?


Nancy Levinson
Design Indaba 2012
Design Indaba 2012 gathered creative people from graphic and product design, architecture and landscape, film and video, not to mention Danish gastronomy and Bollywood movies.


Alexandra Lange
Reassembling the American Dream
"Foreclosed" at the Museum of Modern Art asks what people really like about suburban living. And then, Can they do that with less?



Debbie Millman
James Biber
In this audio interview with Debbie Millman, James Biber discusses growing up in a house with a womb chair, visual illiteracy and designing the Museum of Sex.


Alexandra Lange
Downton Abbey: Fell In Love With a House
Downton Abbey, for all its melodrama and dropped teacups, is really the story of falling in love with a house.


Alexandra Lange
Round Thermostats and Crystal Lanterns, Revisited
Old designs, new tricks: updates on lawsuits filed against the new Nest thermometer, and on behalf of midcentury masterpiece Manufacturers Hanover.


Alexandra Lange
A Memorial to (Random Access) Memory
What does "RAMAC Park" mean to you?


James Biber
Vestige(s) of Empire
Comparing the repurposing of two monuments to lost Empire: London's Commonwealth Institute and Berlin's Palast der Republik.


Alexandra Lange
Girard the Magnificent
Is it enough to be gorgeous? If so, Todd Oldham and Keira Coffee's 15-pound Alexander Girard wins Book of the Year.



Alexandra Lange, and Mark Lamster
Lunch With The Critics: Second-Annual Year-End Awards
From Twitter to Apollo, Barbie to Occupy Everywhere: The best and worst moments in design for 2011.


Alexandra Lange
Decorating Brutalism: The Interiors of Kevin Roche
How do you decorate a brutalist building? For architect Kevin Roche, the answer was brown, mirrors, and trees.



John Cary
Architecture's Internship Requirement Needs a Redesign
An argument for rethinking architecture's internship requirement



Alexandra Lange
Architecture Research Office
Interview with Stephen Cassell and Adam Yarinsky on the occasion of their National Design Award


Alexandra Lange
TWA: Still Kicking
Not a disappointment: a first thrilling visit to Eero Saarinen's legendary flight center.


Alexandra Lange
Should We Boycott the New Barnes?
More ethical quandaries about buildings and food.



Julia Cooke
Cuba Libre: Contemporary Architecture in Havana
Young architects struggle to update the face of Cuba.


Alexandra Lange
Thinking in Tumblr
Don't write a book, make a Tumblr.


Alexandra Lange
Up From Zero, the Novel
A post-9/11 fiction scooped by reality.


Alexandra Lange
Reading in Public
A new book club with an unusual topic: architecture and design.



Alexandra Lange
Welcome Back, Overbite
Albert C. Ledner's mid-century scallops and portholes have staying power.



Nancy Levinson
A Dream House for Architect Barbie
Just in time for the midsummer heat, Architect Barbie's got a competition-winning new dream house in Malibu.




Alexandra Lange
Let’s Go! World’s Fairs of the 1930s
"Designing Tomorrow" at the National Building Museum showcases the optimisim, futurism, and dreamy design ideas of the 1930s.



Alexandra Lange
New Apple HQ, 1957
Wouldn't it be more radical for Apple to move back to town?


John Thackara
Sweat Equity Infra
The Millau Viaduct is a tourist attaction in the making. Future vistors will gawk at it and wonder: “how *did* they build that?”



By Alexia
My Studio H Experience
Adventures in design crits: A high school junior recounts her Studio H year working with onerous classmates and power tools.


Mark Lamster
The Unsung Genius of Flemish Architecture
The New Flemish Architecture should not be underestimated, though it usually is.



Alexandra Lange
Manhattan Museum Musical Chairs
Bye, bye Museum of American Folk Art. Hello the forward march of the Modern.


Alexandra Lange
Science Gets Around to Architecture
Why are we still privileging scientific studies over visual thinking?



Gavin Browning
Community Hero: Queens Museum of Art
Queens Museum of Art, a model for community service, breaks ground on new addition.


Alexandra Lange
City Beautiful of Kazakhstan
Why is Norman Foster the go-to guy for new capitals?






Alexandra Lange
Making the Modern House Home
The Miller House, designed by Saarinen, Roche, Girard and Kiley, has been largely out of sight to the design world since its publication in House & Garden in 1959. Until now that is...


Alexandra Lange
Bad Faith Towers
Atlantic Yards trades titanium dream for prefab reality.



Julie Lasky
Design Indaba 2011
Review of Design Indaba 2011 conference in Cape Town, South Africa



Maria Popova
D-Build
A streamlined approach to dismantling and recycling buildings.


Nancy Levinson
Architect Barbie
Architect Barbie: the world's most famous doll has a new career.



Julie Lasky
DesigNYC, Round 2
Report on second round of pro bono design initiatives fostered by DesigNYC.



Mark Lamster
An Empire State of Mind
Join in a running commentary on Andy Warhol's film "Empire," at MoMA.


Mark Lamster
Cities from the Sky
A new exhibition of urban photographs by Sze Tsung Leong.


Alexandra Lange
I Was an Unhappy Hipster
In a renovation by an architect, for a critic, the bookshelves can be a battleground.


Mark Lamster
MoCA Loco
A weekend visit to MoCA, and barren downtown LA.



Ernest Beck
BOOM
Report on a visionary residential complex for aging gay boomers.



Magda Biernat
The Hard Sell
Images from "Betel Nut Beauties": photos by Magda Biernat.



Ernest Beck
Hester Street Collaborative
Report on Hester Street Collaborative's pro-bono design model.



Rob Walker
Go Figure
A recurring feature in architectural renderings: the little human figures who inhabit the rendered world.


Rick Poynor
On My Shelf: Nairn’s London
Inside the architecture critic Ian Nairn’s classic, idiosyncratic guide to London’s buildings and spaces.



Ernest Beck
Mensch at Work
Review of The Power of Pro Bono


Rick Poynor
How to Chew Gum while Walking
We go round in circles but the central issue doesn’t change: what can a designer add to a project beyond fulfilling the client’s brief?



Photo by Jason Orton
Built Not to Last
Photo of prefab London housting development slated for demolition.



Alexandra Lange, and Mark Lamster
Lunch With The Critics: Year-End Awards
Mark Lamster and Alexandra Lange pick the best and worse moments in design for 2010.


Mark Lamster
The Once & Future Whitney Museum
The Whitney: An Architectural Tour.


Mark Lamster
British Incursion
Stirling, Foster, and a new association with the Architectural Review.



Constantin Boym
Out of Sight: Qatari Workers' Housing
Constantin Boym reports on efforts to improve the living conditions of Qatar's migrant workers.


Mark Lamster
Beauty on the Border
Stop-you-in-your-tracks beauty on the US/Canada border.


Mark Lamster
The Ugliest Object I Have Ever Owned
What's the ugliest object you've ever owned (and loved)?


Mark Lamster
Road Trips: Louwman Museum and Powers Field
Thinking about new(ish) projects by Michael Graves and Rafael Vinoly



Alexandra Lange
Dan Wood
A conversation with WORKac architect Dan Wood about design, food and cities.


Mark Lamster
Design Writing: Vital Field or Museum Piece?
Is traditional architectural criticism dead?


Alexandra Lange
Ornament & Time
Another loss to the digital age: the architectural clock.


Mark Lamster
Glass Houses
A new blog on architecture, design, art, new york, books and sport by Mark Lamster.


Alexandra Lange
Super 8
Is BIG's 8 House just another version of the 'burbs?


Mark Lamster
LOMEX: Paul Rudolph’s Plan for Lower Manhattan
Does anything not look great as a model? Paul Rudolph’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway modeled by Cooper Union architectural students.


Alexandra Lange
Keeping Faith
A church and a cemetery reawaken my faith in a higher architectural standard.


Alexandra Lange
GourmetLive: The Architecture of Food
Now that we know we produce too much waste, now that aesthetics are suspect, now that we must compost or perish, how do design and architecture retool themselves for less, or better, or tastier consumption?


John Thackara
Design Steps to Heaven
I recently visted Luzern, in Switzerland, for a workshop at the oldest art and design school in Switzerland, Hochschule Luzern. My host, Andy Polaine had asked me to set students in the first semester of the MA Design, a challenge.


Alexandra Lange
Join the Conversation!
I am hosting this week's Glass House Conversations, inspired by the comments (on and off the blogosphere) in reaction to my negative review of the Museum of Modern Art's "Small Scale, Big Change" exhibition.




Mark Lamster
Chased
Chase has
shuttered its iconic bank branch at 43rd and Fifth, and I’m pissed and sad about it at once.


Alexandra Lange
Northern Highlights
I don't usually do photo posts, but while I am mentally processing my trip to Denmark and Sweden, I thought I would share some architecture, design, foliage moments from the trip. I think the theme is texture.



Andrew Blauvelt
Designer Finds History, Publishes Book
Andrew Blauvelt takes stock of the graphic design history movement that began in the 1980s.


Mark Lamster
Modern Views, Home and Abroad
What would Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson have thought of sharing the billing in Modern Views, the new book celebrating the Farnsworth House and the Glass House?


Alexandra Lange
In Dwell: Platner’s Opulent Modernism
I see Warren Platner as a missing link between modernism and post-modernism, and another hero of the interior ignored by architectural history.


Alexandra Lange
FT Weekend: People in glass houses
UUsually it feels churlish, biting the hand that feeds, to draw back the curtain on reporting. But in the case of my story, “People in Glass Houses,” for FT Weekend, every step of the process of spending the night in two National Trust properties was such a contrast to my assignment to experience living in a glass house and an 18th century plantation, I just can't help it.


Mark Lamster
Stirling’s Gold
James Stirling's drawings on view at Yale are extraordinary — it’s a shame that this skill, which was obviously so central to the design process, has become all but obsolete.





Alexandra Lange
Uncommon Ground
Exhibition review of "Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement," Museum of Modern Art, New York.


Mark Lamster
Center of Controversy
By now you’ve surely seen the new renderings by SOMA architects for Park51, the Muslim cultural center in Lower Manhattan.



Alexandra Lange
Not Afraid of Color
Alice Rawsthorn and I think alike on the Le Corbusier palette.


Mark Lamster
Upside Dome
Gijs Van Vaerenbergh’s “Upside Dome” installation at St. Michiel’s in Leuven is so beautiful I can’t help but post a picture of it here



Alexandra Lange
Masdar: So Many Questions
I was not planning to post anything about 
Sukkah City. It all just looked like an architecture studio: so much effort, such worked-over results, and an inability to see the forest for the trees.



Alexandra Lange
Rendering v. Reality in Sukkah City
I was not planning to post anything about
Sukkah City. It all just looked like an architecture studio: so much effort, such worked-over results, and an inability to see the forest for the trees.



Alexandra Lange
The Still-Expanding Airport
In 1958, after some failed attempts by the Saarinen office to make a stop-motion film of their model for Dulles Airport, Eero Saarinen called upon his old friend Charles Eames to help him out.



Thomas de Monchaux
In Search of Sukkah City
Sukkah City: NYC, a design/build architecture competition taking place at Union Square Park in New York City, Fall of 2010.


Mark Lamster
Sukkah City
The sukkah, a (green!) temporary structure erected to celebrate the Jewish harvest festival, is an ideal form for an experimental architectural competition.



Alexandra Lange
If These Walls Could Talk
On the ABC sitcom Modern Family, three different families are visually defined by their living rooms.



Mark Lamster
The Old Ballpark in the Bronx
The new Yankee Stadium is heading toward the close of its second season, and though I can't say I love it, I think I've come to terms with its existence.



The Editors
Lella and Massimo Vignelli: A Celebration
Vignelli Celebration: The opening and dedication of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies, set to open September 16, 2010 at Rochester Institute of Technology.



Mark Lamster
Highboy Hullabaloo
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Sony (nee AT&T) Building, as I research my Philip Johnson bio.



Alexandra Lange
Make It Bigger
Anthropologie, the latest tenant of the Design Research Headquarters, simply doesn't get it.



Alexandra Lange
Coming to the V&A: Tower of Power
It is not often that 
a museum blogs about Postmodernism, Michael Sorkin (one of the great take-downs) and credits the (female) renderer who made the AT&T Building look the best it ever has.



Alexandra Lange
Lunch with the Critics: Park51 and 15 Penn Plaza
In my 
second critical lunch with Mark Lamster, in the creepy climes of the Hotel Pennsylvania, we discuss the urbanism, politics and skyline posturing of Park51 and 15 Penn Plaza.



Mark Lamster
At Home with Bob & Denise
Over the weekend I had the very good fortune to spend an afternoon with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown at their home in suburban Philadelphia.



Mark Lamster
Eero Saarinen at 100
Eero Saarinen, who died prematurely in 1961, would have been 100 years old today.



Mark Lamster
The End of the Worldport as We Know It
A couple of weeks ago we learned that I.M. Pei's JFK Terminal 6 was slated for replacement. Today comes news that the Delta (originally Pan Am) Worldport, aka Terminal 3, is to meet the wrecking ball.



Alexandra Lange
Damned Icons
Terminal 3 sits there, empty, next to JetBlue’s so-so Terminal 5, as an object lesson about how preservation and redevelopment have to operate in tandem.



Mark Lamster
Philip Johnson’s “Lost” Archive
Yes, there's an archive of Johnson material for sale. Was it unknown? The Times seems to think so, and just about anyone who knows anything about Johnson was aware of it.



Mark Lamster
Lou Kahn’s Trenton Bath Houses: The Best Buildings in New Jersey?
Lou Kahn's Bath Houses in Trenton, NJ, the best buildings in the state?



Mark Lamster
Do-Gooder Architecture: Then & Now
I don't think Philip Johnson would much care for Croon Hall, the new and very green building for Yale's school of forestry and environmental sciences.



Mark Lamster
Lunch with the Critics: Lincoln Center
Over on DO, Alexandra Lange and I launch our new feature, Lunch with the Critics.



Alexandra Lange
On DO: Lunch with the Critics
Please weigh in on 
Mark Lamster and my new Design Observer feature, "Lunch with the Critics," in which we observe the new Lincoln Center.



Mark Lamster
The Complexity of Simple Design: A Note on the Shakers
When I think of the Shakers I think of a kind of homespun simplicity: ladderback chairs, straw hats, an unfettered (if somewhat loopy) relationship with the almighty.



Alexandra Lange
Time to Move On
A very nice 
house in Montauk embodies the most recent cliches in architecture: floating staircases, pocket doors, and glass floors.



Alexandra Lange
Up in the Air
For spires in New York, height doesn’t matter, style does.






Alexandra Lange
Below Black Rock
While the plaza around the 
CBS Building in Manhattan has always seemed perverse, it is now made worse with the addition of a bank.



Mark Lamster
Philip Johnson’s Plan for America
We Americans are a can-do, optimistic lot.



Alexandra Lange
Whatever Happened to Architecture Critique?
Sometimes it feels like everything is shrinking: the magazines, the word counts, the outlets, and especially the critics.


Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
New Visions of Home
Report on new housing models for the elderly.





Steven Heller
Fascist Seduction
A visit to Mussolini’s Esposizione Universale Roma makes evident that one can be fervently anti-fascist and still admire — indeed savor — aesthetics for their own merits.



Alexandra Lange
Diana Center & Architectural Bull----
Though rave reviews (
Architect, Metropolis, previously New York) are rolling in for Weiss/Manfredi’s Diana Center at Barnard College, every review has praised two things that I quickly dismissed as the most basic architectural bullshit: the copper glass and the street-level transparency.



Mark Lamster
Terminal City: I.M. Pei & Philip Johnson at JFK
Back in the day, when the airport was a destination in and of itself.



Alexandra Lange
In Metropolis: Blue Sky Thinking
What’s really happening at Inland Steel?



Alexandra Lange
Pomo Time Machine
I’m writing more about
Warren Platner, my favorite terribly wonderful or wonderfully terrible architect.



Mark Lamster
An Empire State of Mind
Everyone seems to be weighing in with pieces on the new edition of the AIA Guide to NYC, which is as it should be.






Alexandra Lange
My .02 on the Whitney
Everyone has taken their shot at outrage regarding the Whitney's move to a Renzo Piano building at the base of the High Line.



Mark Lamster
Lady Di of 117th Street
My first encounter with the work of Manfredi/Weiss came more than a decade ago, at a lecture at the Architectural League of NY attendant with their winning the League's Emerging Voices award.



Jessica Helfand
Rome’s MAXXI: Force Field as Field Space
The MAXXI center in Rome opens with a glorious, international exhibition and showcases a building that is likely to be as controversial — and as celebrated — as its designer.






Mark Lamster
Ballet Schooled
The latest alterations to Lincoln Center were rolled out to the press at the end of last week.



Mark Lamster
SOM: They’re #1
What is the top architectural firm in the United States? The friendly staff at Architect magazine established a set of criteria, surveyed the profession and crunched the numbers.


Kate Andrews
Dori Gíslason
Interview with design educator Halldór Gíslason about his work in Mozambique.



Mark Lamster
The Outlier: Philip Johnson’s Tent of Tomorrow
The latest World's Fair, Expo 2010, opened earlier this month in Shanghai. The US entry is pretty weak (someone and I can't recall whom, recently commented that it looks like a Lexus dealership).



Eric J. Herboth
Eames the Typeface
A look at the new Eames Century Modern typeface, designed by Erik van Blokland, and developed by House Industries in collaboration with the Eames Office.



Alexandra Lange
Straw Men Redux
I can't help but compare and contrast Nicolai Ourossoff's opening sentences of his recent work.



Alexandra Lange
For My German Readers
As time goes on my negative impressions of Morphosis's 41 Cooper Square are coloring my previous positive feeling about all of Mayne’s work.



Alexandra Lange
Now What? Or, Beware Panels
Last night after I got back from The Changing State of the Design Press: Now What? I wrote a long crabby post about how boring it was, and also tweeted to that effect.



Mark Lamster
Gores House
Of the many individuals who found themselves in the orbit of Philip Johnson over his long life, Landis Gores stands as one of the more fascinating.



Mark Lamster
The Guru Track
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, win the Pritzker Prize and Denise Scott Brown’s “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture,” becomes a topic of discussion.



Mark Lamster
Philip Johnson: A Biography
This seems like an opportune moment to make public the news that I am at work on a new biography of the late architect Philip Johnson, to be published by Little, Brown.



Alexandra Lange
Moynihan on Design
At
tonight’s lecture at D-Crit, Casey Jones, director of design excellence and the arts for the U.S. General Services Administration, quoted from Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, written in 1962.



Azby Brown
Bent by the Sun
What a longtime American-born resident of Japan has learned about his adopted country's ancient practice of sustainability.






Alexandra Lange
The World's Foremost Female Architect
Not to belabor the point, but Martin Filler takes up the discussion of female architects and puts Denise Scott-Brown in her rightful place.



Alexandra Lange
Scarano's School for Scandal
What was so terrible about Robert Scarano’s practice is what is terrible about Scarano’s practice.



Mark Lamster
Quarantines, Physical and Otherwise
I suppose it was ironic, but mainly just unpleasant, that I was kept from the opening party of Storefront's Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition by a case of pneumonia.






Alexandra Lange
Tearing Down
At the end of a session at the Architectural League's On Criticism reading group, the non-journalists in attendance began to ask the journalists whether architecture critics had any power.






Mark Lamster
Bruce Graham, 1925-2010
It's been a tough stretch for muscular, brooding architecture. Last week, Raimund Abraham, the uncompromising architect of New York's Austrian Cultural Forum was killed in an automotive accident.









Alexandra Lange
Welcome to Fort Brooklyn
Let us sincerely hope that the Atlantic Terminal Entrance in Brooklyn, a gateway to the LIRR and the hub’s many subways, marks the end of empty transport monumentality.



Mark Lamster
The New Barnes: Triumph or Travesty?
There's been no more contentious subject in the art world over the last decade than the status of the Barnes Foundation and its decision to forsake its suburban home for a new museum on Philly's Benjamin Franklin Parkway.



Mark Lamster
Three Days in Vegas
My stab at narrative travel journalism.



Mark Lamster
London Calling
Back in my old life as an editor at Princeton Architectural Press, I had the great pleasure of editing (and designing) the Architecture of Diplomacy, which remains the definitive history of the American embassy building program.



Mark Lamster
What Am I Doing Here? Tall Buildings and High Anxiety in Las Vegas
I spent three days in a new entertainment complex, CityCenter, in Las Vegas. What follows is a diary of my experience in that time.


Alexandra Lange
Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough
Nicolai Ouroussoff might turn out to be the last architecture critic, which makes it even more imperative to say: He is not making a good case for keeping the breed.






Alexandra Lange
Still Ugly After All These Years
What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates provoked some excellent commentary.



Alexandra Lange
More! Women! Architects!
A lot of attention — in Chicago, at least — has been given to the fact that Aqua is the tallest building in the world designed by a woman.



Mark Lamster
(Not) Basic Training
The J-E-T-S are out of the playoffs following a valiant effort yesterday afternoon. That's not a shocker, though their appearance in the AFC Championship Game certainly was surprising.



Alexandra Lange
Pay No Attention to Me
In one of those strange topical coincidences, this Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section has a profile of Iwan Baan, a Dutch architectural photographer who is the post-Stoller-Shulman-Molitor savior of architectural photography.



Alexandra Lange
Buildings That Aren't There
Photography needs to prove itself again as an interpretive medium for architecture somewhere this side of art.



Alexandra Lange
A Real Modern Monument
Peter Behrens’ AEG Turbine Hall is still in use and is still as striking as the day it was completed — so shouldn't that be the goal for every building?


Jane Margolies
Rising Currents
Report on "Rising Currents," an exhibition of New York City design solutions to the flooding predicted by climate change experts, which will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, March 24–August 9, 2010.



Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Moshe Safdie
Review of architect Moshe Safdie's Mamilla Alrov Center in Jerusalem.



Alexandra Lange
On DO: Skating on the Edge of Taste
The American Restaurant in Kansas City, designed by Warren Platner, is subject of a long essay on that architect and interior designer’s career.



Mark Lamster
Ralph Rapson: Forgotten Hero of Design Merch
If you're familiar with Cambridge, or just Harvard Square, you probably know Ben Thompson's wonderful Design Research building, now celebrating its 40th anniversary.



Alexandra Lange
Size M
Nicolai Ouroussoff, Paul Goldberger, and Ada Louise Huxtable may live here in New York, but in general they have become too big to pay attnetion to the small stuff.



Mark Lamster
Criticizing the Critics
The two men who controlled the architectural conversation in New York (and hence America and the world) for better than two decades have recently published collections of their criticism.



Alexandra Lange
Last Post of 2009: Interview, Casey Jones
I interviewed the GSA’s newish head of Design Excellence,
Casey Jones, earlier this month about the future of this government program to ensure better architecture for government buildings



Alexandra Lange
After Buildings
Looking over the 10 Best architecture lists for this year and this decade I notice one thing: no buildings.



Alexandra Lange
The Women
While Manohla Dargis rants about the lack of women in charge in Hollywood save for Nancy Meyers, Zaha Hadid similarly represents the dirth of women in architecture.



Alexandra Lange
Want to Make an Architect Cry?
Want to Make an Architect Cry? Give him (or her, but she’s less likely to mind) Robert A. M. Stern’s latest monograph, which, at 600+ pages, covers just his last five years of work.



Alexandra Lange
Casey Jones
Interview with Casey Jones, director of design excellence and the arts for the U.S. General Services Administration.



Alexandra Lange
In a F.O.G.
I am thinking about adding films to my undergraduate class at NYU, namely Sketches of Frank Gehry.



Mark Lamster
The City in Pictures
Every great city is unique. Each has its own special character, a certain cosmopolitan energy that is its own, the product of its people, its history, its culture, its physical form.



Alexandra Lange
UN, Now and Then
On the United Nations five-year renovation, systems and sustainability upgrade and preservation effort.



Alexandra Lange
Skating on the Edge of Taste with Warren Platner
Viewed today, the work of 70s and 80s interior designer Warren Platner seems just one reflection away from disco, one black room away from S&M. Each of his projects comes with the question, can he hold himself back? Can he convince us that brass is back? Is there any such thing as bad taste?



Alexandra Lange
XL
On the High Museum of Art's tribute to John Portman, Atlanta’s ur-architect and greatest claim to urban influence.



Alexandra Lange
Look Again
When visiting the Eero Saarinen exhibit at Museum of the City of New York, be sure to look at the photographs from Look Magazine.



Alexandra Lange
See the USA
My husband and I took a three-week modern architecture tour of the Midwest.



Alexandra Lange
Texan Capitals
I don’t usually like to write about architecture that isn’t there, but I can't resist commenting on Zaha Hadid's MAXXI and Robert A. M. Stern Architects' design for the George W. Bush Presidential Center.



James Wegener
Metabolic Dark City
In 1993, the City of Darkness, or the Walled City of Kowloon was demolished. To the 35,000 people living in this dense urban slum, the change was the end of a lawless existence.



Alexandra Lange
Paper Revelations
Reading a lot of architecture criticism for those same classes, I also start to develop a running mental list of the writerly tics of critics like Paul Goldberger.



Alexandra Lange
Smaller Wonder: Brooklyn Children's Museum
My first encounter with the expanded Brooklyn Children’s Museum made me ask several questions.



Alexandra Lange
Love & Architecture
My somewhat racy, somewhat serious take on one of the first architecture power couples, Aline and Eero Saarinen



Mark Dery
Dawn of the Dead Mall
Mark Dery surveys the landscape of failing malls and speculates about the future means and venues of mass consumption.



Jonathan Schultz
Kick4Life
AIDS education mixes with soccer in plans for a new Lesotho stadium.



Alexandra Lange
Small Wonder: 41 Cooper Square
41 Cooper Square might as well be set in the middle of a parking lot in Mayne’s native L.A.



Alexandra Lange
Petting Zoo
On Thursday I took my class on a field trip to
One Bryant Park, the sustainable skyscraper that is almost complete at the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue.


Alexandra Lange
Love & Architecture
When Aline met Eero in January 1953, she was the associate art editor and critic for the New York Times. A little over a year later she would become Aline B. Saarinen.


Ernest Beck
Medellín, Colombia
Report on the city officials who turned around a notorious drugs-and-murder capital, winning the 2009 Curry Stone Design Prize for Transformative Public Works.



Alexandra Lange
Architecture in Transit
An SVA student of mine from last year, Frederico Duarte, alerted me to the New York NOW exhibition, which opened October 7 in the West 4th Street subway station.



Alexandra Lange
The Sound of Waves
There’s a lovely confluence of modern architecture and waterfalls on the east side of Manhattan, and we managed to hit three excellent examples of the type during Open House New York.



Alexandra Lange
Small Wonder: 41 Cooper Square
I never thought I would say this about a work by Thom Mayne of Morphosis, but I think 41 Cooper Square is too small.



Alexandra Lange
The Wall Vanishes
Just another contemporary house in the East Village.



Alexandra Lange
Home Range
I write about three contemporary houses by up-and-coming New York firms for The Architect’s Newspaper


Bradford McKee
Float House
Report on a floating house designed by Morphosis and UCLA architecture students for the Make It Right Foundation,



Steven Heller
People in Glass Apartments
People in glass apartments shouldn’t throw stones or other projectiles. Nor should they engage in private acts directly in front of their floor to ceiling windows.



Mark Lamster
We Regret to Inform You That Love Will Not Save the Day
The big story on East 7th Street these days is the opening of Thom Mayne's new student center for Cooper Union, on Third Avenue.


Karen Stein
The Plain Beauty of Well-Made Things
Judd worked as an art critic in his early years in New York as he established himself as an artist. From 1959 until the mid-1960s, his art criticism was his primary, if not only, source of income



Mark Lamster
Underground Architects
The one question people often ask that I don't enjoy answering is, "Who's your favorite architect?"



Alexandra Lange
White Columns
In Valentino: The Last Emperor, one dress is followed in all of its incarnations, while architecture is put in its place.



Alexandra Lange
Higher and Higher
In his back-page New York Times Book Review essay on The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, Jonathan Lethem makes many good points about Ballard’s visionary writing, “desolate landscapes” and his linkages with other arts.


John Cantwell
The Big Screen in Big D
The brand new $1.2 billion home of the Dallas cowboys has a design feature that promises to turn football games there into a weird mashup of football and pinball.



Alexandra Lange
Won't Get Fooled Again
News of the redevelopment of the Atlantic Yards keeps getting worse.



Mark Lamster
Fire at Rubens's St. Charles Borromeo
An electrical fire has done severe damage to the interior of Antwerp's St. Charles Borromeo.



Mark Lamster
The Om in Home: Kripalu's New Dorm
I'm not a big yoga fan, and always looked at the Kripalu Yoga Center, in Lenox, with a fair degree of skepticism.



Alexandra Lange
Shiny and New
On this week's Mad Men, three words I never thought I would hear on a dramatic television show: Ada Louise Huxtable.



Richard Ross
No Place Like Home
Image from photographer Richard Ross's latest project, "Suitable Placement: Juvenile Justice in America"



Mark Lamster
Barrington Fair
There's something romantic, eerie, and pathetic all at once about any work of abandoned architecture.



Mark Lamster
Too Much Stuff
In one of his classic routines, George Carlin wondered that there could be a "whole industry based on keeping an eye on your stuff."



Alexandra Lange
Arks of Knowledge
My review of Yale University's Kroon Hall was especially fun to write.



Mark Lamster
The Curious Architecture of Albert Spalding
The house that the Spaldings — of baseball fame — built for themselves was an oriental fantasy.



Alexandra Lange
Waiting On the Dream
I wrote a piece on the (lack of) development in Midtown West , also known as the Hudson Yards.



Owen Edwards
Remembering Julius Shulman
Looking back on an afternoon of chocolate, pastrami, and Scotch with modern architecture's iconic photographer.



Alexandra Lange
Kroon Hall
With its vaulted roof, communal spaces, and casual materials, the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies’ new Kroon Hall is designed to float Yale into the 21st century, training the world’s future green leaders along the way.



Mark Lamster
Ezra & Julius
Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller were the alfa and omega of American architectural photography.



Mark Lamster
A Plea for Crazy in Architecture
John Beckmann of the firm Axis Mundi is promoting an alternative to the Jean Nouvel tower that looks like a half-baked amalgam of several MVRDV projects.



Alexandra Lange
Numbers Game
In an attempt to skirt around the Landmakrs Preservation Commission, modernists in my neighborhood are declaring their taste through their house numbers.



Mark Lamster
Architecture for Sale (Wright vs. Johnson)
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House and Philip Johnson’s Farney House are both on the market.



Mark Lamster
Antwerp Central
Built at the turn of the twentieth century, Antwerp's central rail station is a resplendent mash of neo-baroque forms and oriental detail.



William Drenttel
Report from Hale County, Alabama
Greensboro Alabama is a city of contrasts, and a place where new design thinking is revealing itself in a surprising number of ways. An occasional report from Winterhouse Institute on its Design for Social Impact & Innovation Project.



Mark Lamster
Delayed Gratification: On Architectural Criticism
Caught up in the formal design aspects of a building, critics like Nicolai Ouroussoff overlook the social context.



Mark Lamster
The Most Beautiful Crapper in the World
In 1772, the Antwerp alderman Adrien van den Bogaert purchased a historic property in the center of the city and then hired architect Engelbert Baets to renovate the place.



Alexandra Lange
The Beauty of a Park
My review of the High Line can now be found on Design Observer.



Alexandra Lange
The Beauty of a Park
The High Line in Manhattan, whose first section opened Monday, would seem to be Olmsted’s nightmare.



Mark Lamster
House in the Hills
We spent this past weekend at the beautiful weekend home of the Woo family, a masterwork of modernist architecture sequestered high in the rolling Vermont hills.



Mark Lamster
Memorial Day
It's Memorial Day in America, so let's talk for a moment about memorials.



Julie Lasky
This End Up: Renzo Piano's Modern Wing

Julie Lasky reviews the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing.





Mark Lamster
Back to the Future
Over on the Itinerant Urbanist, Karrie Jacobs recently wrote about her first impression of Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in San Francisco.



Mark Lamster
Tbilisi's Hotel Iveria: A Defense
There's a piece on Oobject today that lists what that site claims are the fifteen worst “housing projects from hell.”



Thomas de Monchaux
The Mystery of Peter Zumthor
Thomas de Monchaux on architect Peter Zumthor's disarming, and perhaps even dangerous, appeal. Pritzker Prize Winner 2009.



Mark Lamster
Internally Yours
Is it me, or did the New Yorker just retroactively invent a new architectural movement?


Ken Worpole
Tidal Pools: Photographs by Jason Orton
Tidal pools were once common along the coast of Britain, particularly at seaside holiday resorts. Although many such pools have been destroyed or exist as ruins, others are being revived thanks to the energies of lido enthusiasts. This photo essay captures their beauty, even in decay.



Michael Sorkin
On Paul Auster
The annual Lewis Mumford Lecture has become an intellectual rite of spring for urbanists, architects, and students of both. Here is Michael Sorkin's introduction to novelist and filmmaker Paul Auster.



Mark Lamster
Bronx Cheer
To say that I've been disappointed by coverage of the new Yankee Stadium by the design press would be an understatement, as noted in this "rant" column for ID magazine.


Alexandra Lange
Standard Operating Procedure
From the earliest days of the High Line hoopla, the park’s future was literally entwined with that of Andre Balazs’s first ground-up hotel, the Standard New York. The reason the Standard is so good is that it is a 21st Century mash-up of one of Marcel Breuer’s most destructive ideas and one of Morris Lapidus’s best tweaks of the U.N. model of modernism.



Mark Lamster
Save the Library
These are tough times for those of us who care about books. The publishing industry is in a tailspin; electronic readers and the Internet are challenging the primacy of the printed page.



Mark Lamster
Defending Alice
The new Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center opens on Sunday — it looks great — and the reviews are starting to flow in. The response has been overwhelmingly positive and fairly dismissive of the original hall, by Pietro Belluschi and Eduardo Catalano.



Alexandra Lange
Rebooting the Festival Marketplace
The plans for New York's South Street Seaport aren't terrible. But the question to ask, now that the project is one hold, is: does New York need a fake fair?






Mark Lamster
Yankee Stadium: Remembered
Memories of Yankee Staidum vary for every fan, but the feeling of pure American nostalgia is the same for all.



Mark Lamster
Memories of Yankee Stadium
The opportunity to sit in the Yankee Stadium cheap seats close to the field and to become a part of a community was very special. One of the things I find most troubling about the new ballpark is that this opportunity will be dramatically compromised.



Alexandra Lange
The Brooklyn Children's Museum
The Brooklyn Children's Museum is hardly subtle in its attempt to please the Toys "R" Us crowd.




Alexandra Lange
JetBlue Terminal 5 (and TWA Terminal)
It feels like JetBlue has lost its sense of surprise in its middle age.



Glen Cummings
Athos Bulcão, The Artist of Brasilia
Athos Bulcão was a public artist, interior designer, muralist, furniture and graphic designer who collaborated with Oscar Niemeyer and others to define Brasilia — one of the 20th century’s most radical and controversially received urban experiments. Bulcão died on July 31 at the age of 90, and left behind an astonishing body of work.



Michael Bierut
The (Faux) Old Ball Game
Since 1992, every ballpark in America has been designed on the nostalgic model of Baltimore's Camden Yards, including the new parks for the Yankees and the Mets. Why is it impossible to build a baseball stadium that looks like it belongs in the 21st century?



Rick Poynor
Lost America: The Flamingo Motor Hotel
I found this old photo in a box at the back of my attic. It shows a motel in Flagstaff, Arizona where I stayed for a couple of nights in May 1978. I was 20, it was my first visit to the US, and for three weeks I had been touring around on Greyhound buses.



Dmitri Siegel
Learning from North Philadelphia
Dmitri Siegel visits Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour's post-modern classic Guild House in Philadelphia and rereads Learning from Las Vegas.



Tom Vanderbilt
Discipline and Design
On a sweeping and fully realized scale, Richard Ross's photographs probes the disciplinary dynamics in the cruel hidden places you would expect them, and in the banal everyday places you might not have even noticed them.



Michael Bierut
Rest in Peace, Herbert Muschamp
Officially published for the first time as a posthumous tribute: a loving parody of the writing of the late, great architectural critic Herbert Muschamp.



Michael Bierut
Donal McLaughlin’s Little Button
In 1945, architect-turned-graphic-designer Donal McLaughlin designed a lapel pin for a conference in 1945 that became one of the most widely seen symbols in the world: the emblem for the United Nations. Tomorrow is his 100th birthday.



William Drenttel
Koolhaas and His Omnipotent Masters
Koolhaas recounts the story: he chose between working on NYC's Ground Zero and the Beijing CCTV project based on a fortune cookie he was given at a Chinese restaurant — in it, the goofy prognostication "Stunningly Omnipresent Masters Make Minced Meat of Memory." Instead of responding to fortune cookies, Rem Koolhaas could have changed the world.



William Drenttel
Diversity as Form: The Yale Architecture Posters
Since 1998, Michael Bierut has worked with Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, designing more than 40 posters. Mohawk Fine Papers has published a book celebrating this collaboration: Forty Posters for the Yale School of Architecture.


Michael Bierut
New House
In 1967, just after my tenth birthday, we moved from a cramped 1940s bungalow in an older Cleveland suburb to up-and-coming Parma, Ohio. I had been walking the earth for a full decade, but that fall I felt I was finally assuming my birthright as an American: a brand new house.



Tom Vanderbilt
Small Worlds
One of the first things I like to do upon visiting a new city is to visit the scale-model version of itself. From Havana to Copenhagen, I’ve hunted down these miniature metropolises in dusty historical museums and under-visited exhibition halls. Surely one reason for their ineluctable allure is that simple Olympian sense of being able to consume as large as entity as Beijing or New York in a single eyeful.



Michael Bierut
Where the Happy People Go
The ferociously positive letters column in Architectural Digest magazine demonstrates that design can make people almost unnervingly happy.



William Drenttel
Move It Down . . . A Little to the Right
That some years ago, some poor sign installer went to put the first letter of the name of the museum up on the wall, and someone screamed, "No, you idiot! Lower! Much Lower! Get it down close to the edge. And a quarter-inch to the right." That the building is the Guggenheim Museum, and that the architect was Frank Lloyd Wright, makes this photographic detail especially interesting.



Debbie Millman
Steve Sikora, Thomas R. Wright + Charlie Lazor
Steve Sikora, Thomas R. Wright and Charlie Lazo discuss the finer points of pre-fab houses and modern design.



Julie Lasky
The Photography of Mark Robbins
Mark Robbins'
Households is a collection of portraits in which the sitters are sometimes sitting rooms (or kitchens or bedrooms), and the people are polished, draped, and arrayed like furniture. Composed to resemble architectural plans or elevations — or in some cases the triptychs of medieval altarpieces — the images represent home dwellers and their environments. Flesh, bone, brick, stone, contoured torsos, and varnished chairs assume equal status. The message is simple: You may not be what you eat, but you most certainly are where you live.



Alissa Walker
Why Scientology is Good for Hollywood
If you live where I do, in the actual city of Hollywood, just a few blocks away from where the Oscars are held, you see the Church of Scientology as somewhat of a savior. Within a two-mile corridor along Hollywood Boulevard, the Church owns eight historic buildings, four of which are on the National Register of Historic Places. In a neighborhood where architectural triumphs evaporate with little remorse, Scientology is the most ardent preservationist force in town.



Mark Lamster
Return of the Prodigal Son
Can Alexander Brodsky reinvent Russian architecture?



Michael Bierut
When Design is a Matter of Life or Death
When structural engineer William LeMessurier realized that his work on Manhattan’s Citicorp Center was flawed, he was faced with a choice: he could keep quiet and gamble with thousands of lives, or he could speak up. What would you do?



William Drenttel
Meet Me in St. Louis: The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts makes the radical assumption that the experience of art is about contemplation. Take your time. You are alone here. The light will change if you stay long enough.



Rob Walker
Original Tastemaker
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia announced a 650-home community near Raleigh, N.C., designed and built in a collaboration between Stewart and KB Home, a builder of residential houses.



Michael Bierut
Design by Committee
"Design by committee" is usually thought to be a bad thing, but it has produced one great piece of architecture, the United Nations Headquarters Building.



Michael Bierut
Looking for Celebration, Florida
An assessment of Celebration, Florida, a town built by the Walt Disney Company on "New Urbanist" planning principles in its tenth anniversary year.



Michael Bierut
Four Years After
After four years of ambiguity and contention and the World Trade Center site, Ellsworth Kelly's 2003 proposal seems wiser than ever.



Rick Poynor
Vladimir’s House and Garden of Earthly Delights
Spending two weeks in Vladimir Beck's house on the island of Vrnik in Croatia made me question, yet again, rigid distinctions between artist and designer. Here, it's impossible to separate the two. Beck has designed every feature with a high degree of thought for what might make a domicile located in such a setting pleasurable and practical to live in.



Lorraine Wild
Exhibitions by Renzo Piano and 2x4
Both architect Renzo Piano and graphic designers 2x4 are at the top of their respective games as designers, but the way they approach their own exhibitions (at LACMA and SFMOMA, respectively) places them at opposite poles of a style of communication, and maybe even belief.



Michael Bierut
The Supersized, Temporarily Impossible World of Bruce McCall
Illustrator Bruce McCall's vision of an exhuberant, overscale America is evoked by the opening of a new McDonald's in Chicago.


Lorraine Wild
The Scourge of "Tuscan"
Where whole new neighborhoods are still being constructed Tuscan is the style du jour.



Rick Poynor
Why Architects Give Me the Willies
No matter how central graphic communication might be to our lives, architecture always dominates press coverage because it is very expensive, expresses the conditions of power, and is just plain big.



William Drenttel
Moving the Axum Obelisk
In the mid-1990s, I saw an exhibition at the New York Public Library of the greatest illustrated books of the 19th century. One book stood out for me: a massive tome by Henry H. Gorringe, titled Egyptian Obelisks and dated 1882. It’s in my design collection because of a dubious memory that it’s the first book to document a from-start-to-finish design process. Of course, the process it documents is how one moves an obelisk.



William Drenttel
Stop The Plant: The Failure of Rendering
There is no single rendering ominous enough to create public fear; no image so compelling as to create political momentum; and no symbol so memorable as to unite the opposition. Whether through artistic renderings or compelling information design, no one has made a visual case against these plants that is wholly effective. This is, I believe, a fundamental failure of design.



Michael Bierut
The Comfort of Style
The design process at the World Trade Center site has attracted enormous interest on one hand, and marginalized the role of designers on the other, as described in Philip Nobel's book Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero.



Michael Bierut
Robert Polidori's Peripheral Vision
Robert Polidori's photographs depict contemporary architecture in the context of a decidedly imperfect world.


Michael Bierut
The Other Rand
The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand, continues to exert its influence over generations of architects and designers.



Jessica Helfand
Time, Space and The Microsoft Colonialists
If Microsoft displayed its marketing genius by introducing "Spaces" three weeks before Christmas, its failure as a compelling editorial product — as evidenced by its restrictive format, its templated narrowcasting, its uninspired design parameters — illuminates its ultimate weakness: these spaces have nothing to do with space, in all its rich, fascinating and deeply human complexity.



Michael Bierut
What We Talk About When We Talk About Architecture
Architectural critiques, such as those conducted at Yale University and documented in its student publication Retrospecta, can have the same drama as good theatre; like the public radio show "Car Talk" the subject at hand is merely a springboard for diverting digression.



William Drenttel
Learning from Las Vegas: The Book That (Still) Takes My Breath Away
Why did its authors hate the design of Learning from Las Vegas so much?



Michael Bierut
Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School
Architect Michael McDonough delineates the difference between educational theory and professional practice with “The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School.”



Michael Bierut
(Over)explaining Design
From the murals at Rockefeller Center to the proposals for the World Trade Center site, designers demonstrate an eagerness to explain, and perhaps overexplain, their ideas. Can the explanations get in the way of the work? Should the work speak for itself?



William Drenttel
Rationalizing Absence
James Turrell's influence on World Trade Tower memorial design.



Jessica Helfand
Mind the Light, Light the Mind
As I began to describe Quaker Meeting for Worship — where one sits in silence for some period of time, in a large room with any number of other congregants, and where one stands to speak, on virtually any topic, when moved to do so — I realized that this presented a compelling metaphor for blogging.



William Drenttel
Shallow Water Dictionary
A couple of years ago I stumbled across a little out-of-print tract called the Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English by John R. Stilgoe, a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard.



Jessica Helfand
Sign Language: Endangered Species or Utopian Uprising?
At turns provocative and peculiar, photographs of a new building in Birmingham, England, hint at a utopian uprising: No angles. No signs. In other words: no branding?



Observed


Cheryl Holmes's next book documents the history of the question she has been asking for decades—where are the Black designers?— along with related questions that are urgent to the design profession: where did they originate, where have they been, and why haven't they been represented in design histories and canons? With a foreword by Crystal Williams, President of Rhode Island School of Design, HERE: Where the Black Designers Are will be published next fall by Princeton Architectural Press.

Can ballot design be deemed unconstitutional? More on the phenomenon known as "Ballot Siberia," where un-bracketed candidates often find themselves disadvantaged by being relegated to the end of the ballot.

Designing the Modern World—Lucy Johnston's new monograph celebrating the extraordinary range of British industrial designer (and Pentagram co-founder) Sir Kenneth Grange—is just out from our friends at Thames&Hudson. More here.

Good news to start your week: design jobs are in demand!

An interview with DB | BD Minisode cohost and The State of Black Design founder Omari Souza about his conference,  and another about his new book. (And a delightful conversation between Souza and Revision Path host Maurice Cherry here.) 

What happens when you let everyone have a hand in the way things should look and feel and perform—including the kids? An inspiring story about one school’s inclusive design efforts

Graphic designer Fred Troller forged a Swiss modernist path through corporate America in a career that spanned five decades. The Dutch-born, Troller—whose clients included, among others, IBM, Faber Castell, Hoffmann LaRoche, Champion International, and the New York Zoological Society—was also an educator, artist, and sculptor. Want more? Help our friends at Volume raise the funds they both need and deserve by supporting the publication of a Troller monograph here.

The Independence Institute is less a think tank than an action tank—and part of that action means rethinking how the framing of the US Constitution might benefit from some closer observation. In order to ensure election integrity for the foreseeable future, they propose a constitutional amendment restoring and reinforcing the Constitution’s original protections.

Design! Fintech! Discuss amongst yourselves!

The art (and design) of “traffic calming” is like language: it’s best when it is extremely clear and concise, eliminating the need for extra thinking on the receiving end. How bollards, arrows, and other design interventions on the street promote public safety for everyone. (If you really want to go down the design-and-traffic rabbit hole with us here, read about how speculative scenario mapping benefits from something called “digital twins”.)

Opening this week and running through next fall at Poster House in New York, a career retrospective for Dawn Baillie, whose posters for Silence of the Lambs, Little Miss Sunshine, and Dirty Dancing, among countless others, have helped shape our experience of cinema. In a field long-dominated by men, Bailie's posters span some thirty-five years, an achievement in itself. (The New York Times reviews it here.)

Can't make it to Austin for SXSW this year? In one discussion, a selection of designers, policymakers, scientists, and engineers sought identify creative solutions to bigger challenges. (The “design track” ends today, but you can catch up with all the highlights here.)

Should there be an Oscar for main title design?

Design contributes hugely to how we spend (okay, waste) time online. But does that mean that screen addiction is a moral imperative for designers? Liz Gorny weighs in, and Brazillian designer Lara Mendonça (who, and we love this, also self-identifies as a philosopher) shares some of her own pithy observations.

Oscar nominees, one poster at a time.

Ellen Mirojnick—the costume designer behind Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and Oppenheimer, for which she is 2024 Oscar nominee—shares some career highlights from forty years in film. (Bonus content: we kicked off Season Nine of The Design of Business  | The Business of Design with this conversation.)

Erleen Hatfield, of The Hatfield Group, is the engineer behind many innovative buildings, including the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home to the Atlanta Falcons, whose roof opens like a camera aperture to reveal the sky. Now, she's also one of the newly-minted AIA fellows, an honor awarded to architects—only 3% of their 98,000+ AIA members—who have made significant contributions to the profession.  

Anamorph, a new filmmaking and technology company co-founded by filmmaker Gary Hustwit (of Helvetica fame) and digital artist Brendan Dawes, wants to reshape the cinematic experience with a proprietary generative technology that can create films that are different every time they’re shown.

Viewers seem more concerned with Biden's rounded smartphone than with his policies. (We're not discussing the age of the man, here—just his phone!)

Claiming he is “not very good at design,” Riken Yamamoto, a 78-year old Japanese architect, wins the coveted Pritzger Prize. Notes the jury: "Yamamoto’s architecture serves both as background and foreground to everyday life, blurring boundaries between its public and private dimensions, and multiplying opportunities for people to meet spontaneously”.

Citizen outcry over Southwest's new cabin design—and in particular, it's new-and-improved-seats—may not be likely to  result in changes any time soon, but the comments (Ozempic seats!) are highly entertaining. (“Is there an option to just stand?”)

More than 50 years ago, a small group of design educators tried to decolonize design in Africa, hoping to teach African designers how to use research and design for their people and their nations by leveraging their own indigenous knowledge and local customs. While their pioneering effort was suppressed after a few short years by the colonial authorities, their approach to teaching design still resonates today: consider the story of François-X. N.I. Nsenga, an indigenous African designer who grew up in Belgian Rwanda and studied in British Kenya at Africa's first university-based design program. For more on the cultural history, design philosphy, and the "Europeanisation" of colonial Africa, you'll find a conversation with Nsenga in Gjoko Muratovski's book, Research for Designers: A Guide to Methods and Practice

At turns dystopian and delightful, the future of AI-based digital assistants seem poised to communicate through the “emotion and information display” of new constellations of hardware. (Including … orbs!) Like concept cars, they're not on the market just yet, but developmental efforts at more than a few telecoms suggest they're clearly on the horizon. More here.

Jha D Amazi, a principal and the director of the Public Memory and Memorials Lab for MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) Design Group, examines how spatializing memory can spark future collective action and provide a more accurate and diverse portrayal of our nation's complicated past. She gave this year’s annual Richard Saivetz ’69 Memorial Architectural Lecture at Brandeis last month, entitled, “Spatializing Memory”.

Self-proclaimed “geriatric starlet” and style icon Iris Apfel has died. She was 102.

“You know, you’ve got to try to sneak in a little bit of humanity,” observes Steve Matteson, the designer behind Aptos—Microsoft's new “default” font. “I did that by adding a little swing to the R and the double stacked g." Adds Jon Friedman, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for design: “It’s both quirky and creates a more natural feel that brings in some of the serif font ‘je ne sais quoi’ to it”. Resistant to change (or simply longing for Calibri), font geeks are not having it. Fun fact? Aptos was originally called Bierstadt. You may well imagine, as we did, that this was a nod to the 19th century German-American landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt—but the actual translation is “Beer City”. 

In Dallas, the Better Block Foundation is sponsoring a design contest called Creating Connections, aimed at addressing the growing epidemic of loneliness by exploring the impact of design on how people connect with others.

Good design is invisible, but bad design is unignorable. Elliot Vredenburg, Associate Creative Director at Mother Design, bares it all.

Arab design is a story of globalism, evidenced through collaborations with the Arab diaspora living, working, and creating abroad, and with the expatriate community in the Middle East and North Africa. More on the highlights (and insights) from Doha Design 2024 here.

Organizations that embrace diversity tend to foster innovation, challenge ingrained thought patterns, and enhance financial performance. Its true benefits emerge when leaders and employees cultivate a sense of inclusion. How architecture is reckoning with the cultural and economic challenges of—and demands for—a more inclusive workforce.



Jobs | March 19