Over his 60-year career, Roberto Burle Marx established himself as a key figure in South American Modernism by designing more than 2,000 gardens and landscapes around the world for private residences, civic buildings, and public spaces.
In late 2013, Kanye West visited the Harvard Graduate School of Design and said, “I really do believe that the world can be saved through design,” and “everything needs to actually be ‘architected.’” For many, this collision of hip-hop and architecture was unexpected, and the staid crowd of architectural professionals reacted, let’s say, defensively.
House model; Nayarit, Mexico, 100 B.C.–A.D. 200 Long before rendering two-dimensional designs into three-dimensional models became standard architectural procedure, the indigenous peoples of Latin America represented buildings in small-scale forms to much different ends. Andean and Mesoamerican cultures crafted replicas of temples and houses for funerary and burial rites, and to honor loved ones at shrines. This ritualistic use of the architectural model is the focus of Design for Eternity: Architectural Models from the Ancient Americas, a compact and enlightening exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that opened Monday and runs through Sept. 18, 2016. The first such show
A new exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art reconsiders urban renewal in Pittsburgh — and America. Aerial view of Pittsburgh, 1954. After years of combating its soot-covered-metropolis-on-the-skids image, Pittsburgh is on the march. It has remade itself from a smoky blue-collar steel town into a green white-collar information hub that lures tech companies like Google and Uber. The resurgent Pittsburgh was named America’s most livable city last year by the Economist, and, for the first time in decades, it’s a place people go to by choice rather than necessity. But this isn’t Pittsburgh’s first rebrand. From the early 1950s
A new PBS documentary explores Frank Lloyd Wright’s little-known architectural photographer. The best architecture photographers use light and perspective to elevate what could be static images into single-frame movies, documenting places as organisms full of verve, mystery, and life. Ezra Stoller might be the first name in the architectural photography conversation, but PBS’ American Masters series makes a strong case that it should be Pedro E. Guerrero. The inspiring, albeit limited, 60-minute documentary profile Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey, which aired Friday, September 18 and can be viewed online at PBS.org, introduces us to a photographer who deserves far
In recent years, Pittsburgh has become the envy of the Rust Belt. After years of hard work, the city shed its grimy, “Hell with the lid off” image and recast itself as one of America’s most livable (and attractive) cities. Today it’s a midwestern tech hub, a center of higher education, and a national health care leader. Drive 15 miles east of downtown and the story is grimmer. In the small town of Braddock, once a thriving community of laborers and immigrants manning some of the most important mills in the country, there’s no end in sight to the city’s