On the 18th of February I will be speaking in Yale University’s symposium, Philip Johnson : The Constancy of Change. More on my talk later in the month, but for now, you can look at We Cannot Not Know History, the article on Johnson I wrote in 1996.
Technorati Tags: architecture, history, philip johnson
In response to a call for the Seven New Wonders of the World, BldgBlog presents some incredible suggestions. To these, I would certainly have to add Quartzsite, Arizona, which I hope to visit again in the next two weeks.
I took this set of photographs back in the early 1990s—probably in 1993—while visiting a friend on Long Island. Shot in good old TRI-X, these images document the damage done by the The Great Nor’easter of December 11, 1992 and the subsequent Superstorm of March 13, 1993 to the homes on the Westhampton barrier island. You don’t need hurricanes to wreak havoc.
more here
Technorati Tags: architecture, disasters, photography, storm damage, west hampton
I wish I’d found this a week ago, but Christopher Gray has a brief piece on the spectacle of the 1931 Beaux-Arts ball in the New Year’s Day edition of the New York Times. Read here.
Technorati Tags: architecture, history
I just discovered treehugger.com, a fantastic site claiming to be about the “green lifestyle” but also about much more. Pawing through the back entries, I noticed this post pointing to a Wall Street Journal article on the ongoing looting of New Orleans’s architectural heritage. Read the article here.
Technorati Tags: architecture, cities, historic preservation, new orleans
Through Bruce Sterling’s Beyond the Beyond, I found this link to an article on the continued importance of Utopian thinking today. But, of course, what is the multitude if not a Utopian idea?
On a related note, Reinhold Martin’s Critical of What? Towards a Utopian Realism is a good read by one of the best thinkers in architecture today. Martin bursts the bubble of post-criticism prior to outlining his thoughts on the emergence of a “utopian realism.”
Virgin Galactic announces a spaceport for its new fleet of Scaled Composites designed suborbital tourist vehicles. Surprise! It’s not in Mojave, it’s in New Mexico. Design by Philippe Starck. Read the announcement here. Photographs of the first launch by Steve Rowell and myself will be available in 2006 in a book on the Desert, to be published by ACTAR. See this link for the photos.
I dug up an old post that I wrote the other day. Not only is it evidence of just how long I’ve been on the Internet (actually, it’s not, I’ve been on the Net continously since 1989 and at least to some degree since 1987), it contains some good suggestions for tunneling, in case you ever wind up in the Cornell area.
The Getty is showing the 1972 video “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles” tonight. Although I won’t be able to make it, I thought it’d be appropriate to post a draft of this essay that I’ve written on Banham and Los Angeles. Footnotes not included. This is a teaser. For the notes””?and much more””?you’ll need to buy Pat Morton’s edited book on Taste, which should be out in 2006 and promises to be well worth the money.
The collective An Architektur releases two new publications, An Architektur 14 on the Camp for Oppositional Architecture that the group sponsored and An Architektur 15 on European Migration Geographies. Since the brief for issue 15 is not available in English online, I#039ve reproduced it below:
bq. An Architektur 15 / FFM Heft 11: European Migration Geographies, Poland
Borders and camps are spaces of migration control. They both serve the supervision and organization of migrants and at the same time are used as rest and transit zones of migration. It is exactly in their juridical and spatial antitheses where a specific feature of the migration regime manifests itself. This aims less at a final stage of a hermetic sealing-off, than at a strategic regulation and disfranchisement and thus reacts on the independent dynamics of migration.
An Architektur 15 / FFM 11 is a cooperation of the Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration and An Architektur within the project TRANSIT MIGRATION. It is also part of the exhibition “Projekt Migration”, which can be seen in Cologne at present. See www.projektmigration.de, www.ffm-berlin.de
My essay, Towers of Concentration, Lines of Flight appeared in An Architektur 05, Mission Critical Facility.