Two years ago, Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, writing in Architectural Record, lamented the “shrinking fraternity” of fellow newspaper critics focusing on the built environment. “At American dailies,” he wrote, “there are fewer than a dozen writers covering architecture with any regularity, and perhaps just four or five full-time critics.” The Dallas Morning News, however, is bucking the trend. In April, Mark Lamster, an editor at Architectural Review and contributing editor for Design Observer, will become the newspaper’s architecture critic. Lamster’s position is a partnership with the University of Texas at Arlington; he’ll teach a graduate seminar at
Filmmaker Su Friedrich discusses Gut Renovation, a personal and impassioned documentary about the transformation of a Brooklyn neighborhood. Still from Su Friedrich's documenatary Gut Renovation. This week, When SHoP Architects unveiled plans to overhaul the Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, it marked the most recent chapter in the area’s transformation from low-rise industrial zone to inexpensive artists’ enclave to in-demand residential district. In her impassioned new documentary, Gut Renovation, director and Su Friedrich chronicles that change over the course of several years. The film is at once a documentary about 21st century urbanism and an extremely intimate look
RECORD speaks with the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art about an exhibition devoted to the 19th-century French architect Henri Labrouste (1801-1875). Bibliothèque Sainte‐Geneviève, Paris, 1838‐1850. View of the reading room. Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), opens a major exhibition devoted to the 19th-century French architect Henri Labrouste (1801-1875) on March 10. The show, Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light, on view until June 24, 2013, looks at the major accomplishments of this progenitor of modern architecture,
Elemental is at the fore of socially conscious design. Gary Hustwit featured the Chilean design office’s subsidized-housing units in Santiago in his well-received 2011 documentary Urbanized. And the firm’s monograph Incremental Housing and Participatory Design Manual appeared in time for the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale last August. Record caught up with Elemental’s executive director, Alejandro Aravena, to talk about the firm, its soon-to-be-completed housing in the Chilean city of Constitución, and Aravena’s stance on the role of architects in sheltering the world’s expanding population.
We may be in the era of the end of men (as recent headlines and Atlantic writer Hanna Rosin’s zeitgeisty book suggest), but it’s hard to imagine that the field of architecture will ever run out of them. Though roughly 41 percent of U.S. architecture students are women, they account for only about 17 percent of firm principals and partners, according to a membership study by the American Institute of Architects.
The renowned Spanish engineer and designer is the subject of an exhibition opening today at Russia's Hermitage Museum—the institution's first retrospective devoted to a contemporary architect. Calatrava speaks candidly with Architectural Record about the show, his work, and the criticism he often faces.
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