The Eyes of the Skin is the "gentle manifesto" that grew out of the Finnish architect, teacher, philosopher, and designer Juhani Pallasmaa's concern about the "dominance of vision and the suppression of other senses in the way architecture was taught, conceived and critiqued."
Goldman Sachs shapes the spaces around its NYC headquarters. Photo courtesy Preston Scott Cohen A glass-and-steel canopy by Preston Scott Cohen covers an alley between the Goldman Sachs headquarters by Pei Cobb Freed and the Conrad New York, a collaborative design effort. Anyone looking for a dream career in architecture—without having to practice—could do worse than to emulate Timur Galen, who, after receiving his M.Arch. at the University of Pennsylvania, noticed, he says, “a real deficit in the world of clients.” (Who hasn't?) In his current job as global head of corporate services and real estate for Goldman Sachs, Galen
David Chipperfield looks for common ground at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. Almost by definition, the Venice Architecture Biennale is a wildly uneven affair. It combines a main exhibition overseen by a major architect, critic, or curator with a scattered collection of separately organized national pavilions. And it seems to get bigger and flashier with every edition, as ancillary exhibitions, press conferences, and Bellini-soaked parties in rented palazzi sprawl across most of the city of Venice. The odds that these diverse elements will come together to offer a compelling message about architecture, architects, buildings, or cities would seem close to
Why isn't sustainability a hot issue on the campaign trail? Illustration by Brian Stauffer Those fast-payback, high-efficiency lights you just specified? Job-killing. The daylighted, naturally ventilated workplace you've created that delights your client and decreases sick days? A drag on the economy. When it comes to sustainability, the political debate of 2012 relies on misinformation—if those issues are addressed at all. In many places the term "global warming" can't be uttered in polite company. The building industry has recognized the urgency of embedding sustainability deeply in product development, design, standards setting, and construction. A broad range of public and private
Edited by Philipp Meuser, with essays by Ahn Chang-mo and Christian Postho. Berlin: DOM Publishers, 368 pages, two volumes in slipcase, $50. Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, is probably the most isolated city in the world, both physically and culturally. Since there are few ways to learn about the city, a veil of isolation stimulates curiosity. Few publications have addressed the city's built environment; most focus instead on economic, political, and social issues. Architectural Guide: Pyongyang feeds this curiosity to some extent, providing unique information about Pyongyang, including both its architecture and its urban planning history. In an odd
By Andrew Blum. New York: Harper Collins Ecco, May 2012, 309 pages, $26.99. There's a revelatory scene in Terry Zwigoff's film, Crumb, in which the titular artist demonstrates his signature technique for revealing the grittiness of the real— telephone poles, cables, all of the varied rooftop flora of our urban infrastructure—in his cityscapes. When we think of the Internet (and often when we write about it) we generally see it as an ethereal realm of boundary-erasing placelessness. But our data actually makes its way through tangled knots of wire and fiber-optic cable, pulled through subterranean (and suboceanic) depths by workers
In an episode of the television show Portlandia, a sketch comedy that lovingly skewers the lifestyle quirks of the young and creative, a woman (played by indie rock star Carrie Brownstein) arrives on her first day at the Portland, Oregon, offices of advertising powerhouse Wieden+Kennedy.
By David Adjaye. New York: Rizzoli, 2011, 568 pages, boxed set, $100. This handsome book is a culmination of a series of exhibitions held in Massachusetts; London; Bern, Switzerland; Lisbon; and Tokyo that showcased architect David Adjaye’s photographic survey of Africa’s urban environment. Architect David Adjaye’s new book, “African Metropolitan Architecture,” is a photographic survey of Africa’s urban environment. Click the image above for the slideshow. Six of the seven paperback volumes in this boxed set, edited by Peter Allison, consist of pictures of the diverse architectural forms that exist on the continent. The author, who was born in Tanzania
By Jean-Paul Bourdier and Trinh T. Minh-ha. London and New York: Routledge, 2011, 192 pages, $75. Jean-paul Bourdier, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, has published several books on vernacular architecture, particularly in Africa. His latest, co-authored by Trinh T. Minh-ha, also a professor at UC Berkeley and a filmmaker, looks at dwellings designed by hundreds of ethnic groups in Africa, with the premise of helping to resolve the tension between Western architects who wish to step away from modernization and non-Western practitioners who need to square traditional building practices with the benefits of technology. Using
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