“Instead of experiencing our being in the world, we behold it from outside as spectators of images projected on the surface of the retina.” Juhani Pallasmaa Photography: © Jeff Goldberg/ESTO At WGBH, Polshek Partnership turned part of the facade into an LED mural. Is architecture turning into a purely visual sport? Will it be just like video games, except that it won’t have all those crashing noises? In my home city of Boston, two recent designs are both terrific in their own way. But they’re scary in what they portend for the future of architecture. Of our five, six, or

Before digital was born For many years I’ve held in my mind, as a counter to the headlong rush to a purely visual architecture, the memory of approaching a small church in an Italian hill town. This was an experience of architecture of all the senses. First came the feeling of a slight ache in the knees, an ache that told me I had climbed to an elevation. Then the entry into the building, the sudden drop in temperature, the increase in humidity. Photography: © Bruce T. Martin Elkus/Manfredi designed a Neiman-Marcus facade as a rippling ribbon. The hushed yet

In the catalog for Antony Gormley’s recent exhibition, Blind Light, at the Hayward Gallery in London, the curator Jacky Klein cites Brancusi’s dictum that “architecture is inhabited sculpture.” But since the onset of the Constructivist movement in Russia in the early 20th century, sculpture itself has become architectonic and inhabited, if not physically, then mentally, in the seductive manner that the imagination allows the viewer to experience its interiority.' Photography: © Michele Lamanna/Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch Gallery For the Venice Art Biennale in 2007, Putrih created Venice, Atmospheric (above two), which recalls old movie palaces. Not satisfied merely

After landing at the dock and walking through the parklike serenity of this walled island, you finally catch a view of the cinema, a pavilion with the same oval rondeur, says the artist, as the great Fenice Theater. Though it functions as a theater showing documentary films and holds an audience of 35 to 40 on its stepped rows of square seats, the pavilion retains a special intimacy and scale that make viewers feel they are entering an architectural model itself. On the outside, Putrih assembled a seemingly random (though actually precise) criss-cross installation of rusted trusswork bolted into place.

As part of his recently released plan for New York by the year 2030, entitled PLANYC: A Greener, Greater New York, Mayor Michael Blooomberg is actively promoting a scheme for congestion pricing in the busiest parts of Manhattan. Modeled on programs in Singapore, London, and Stockholm, the system is intended to curb vehicular traffic (and raise money for public transportation) by imposing charges ($8 for cars and $21 for trucks) to enter the borough below 96th Street. The proposal has the support of virtually every bien-pensant urbanist in town, although it has met some resistance, particularly from the outer boroughs

Spaces of free access The contraction of the public realm, however, extends beyond these Orwellian developments. Public space is produced from the private: In democracy, the commons is always a compact about what is to be shared, what reserved; about where we choose to interact with the other. There’s been a lot of criticism from certain academic quarters about traditional notions of public space, about overidentifying the idea with streets, squares, parks, and other historic settings for face-to-face interactions. This critique is predicated both on the idea that these spaces fail to acknowledge the existence of multiple publics and that

For too long, too much of the discussion about urban mobility and its relationship to sustainability has been locked into an increasingly sterile debate between proponents of public transit and advocates of the automobile. Both sides ignore some inconvenient truths. Image: © Franco Vairani/MIT Smart Cities Project Six to 8 stacked City Cars can fit into one traditional parking space. When located at major origin and destination spots, such as transit stations, they can carry people the last mile to their final destinations. Transit enthusiasts point out the inherent efficiencies of high-capacity public-transportation networks, but often neglect to mention that,

Although City Cars can work quite nicely as privately owned vehicles, they provide the greatest sustainability benefits when they are integrated into citywide, intelligently coordinated, shared-use mobility systems. The idea is to locate stacks of City Cars at major origin and destination points, such as transit stops, airports, hotels, apartment buildings, supermarkets, convenience stores, universities, hospitals, and so on. You just swipe a credit card, drive a vehicle away from the front of the stack, and return it to the rear of another stack at your final destination. From the user’s perspective, it’s like having valet parking everywhere. Image: ©

“The development of an official style must be avoided. Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa.” The words are those of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They’re part of his famous "Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture" (1962), which helped inspire a revolution in government architecture. The revolution was the Design Excellence program in the General Services Administration (GSA—sorry, it’s hard to write about government without bogging in multisyllables). From 1994 to 2005, under the GSA’s chief architect, Ed Feiner, the program tried to choose the best architects in the country for the design of courthouses

An architectural language I find it increasingly hard to get very excited about these style battles, and I suspect a lot of people feel the same way. Thomas Gordon Smith spoke at the conference, and he sounded entirely sane. (As one nationally known architect said to me on the way out of the hall, “The dragon turns out not to be such a dragon.”) He presented Classicism as an architectural language of well-understood conventions, a language that can and should be used inventively. I’ve visited his school and liked the student work. Photography: © Scott Frances/Esto Richard Meier’s Phoenix courthouse