Architecture

The artistic directors of the Chicago Architecture Biennial discuss their new Menil Drawing Institute and the role of history in contemporary architecture.

An architect conjures the ghosts of New York’s unbuilt past.

This year’s Architectural League Prize for Young Architects & Designers convenes work that probes an “unstable environment.”

What began as an art project with the overt purpose of confronting and confounding “straight” society ended up as something resembling a pro football game for people on psychedelics, and nearly as profitable.

Buildings are big, expensive, and they have a tendency to stick around a long time. So what’s an artist who wants to disturb “the repressive architecture of bureaucracy and luxury” to do?

“The idea of misunderstanding is very much part of our time. In our firm, we are from all these different backgrounds, working in this Babylonian city, so we are also interested in process and the unintentional things emerging from that. It acknowledges our contemporary chaos.”

For Tatiana Bilbao, an architectural project’s limitations are opportunities to experiment with new approaches. With artist Terence Gower she revisits recent ventures and Mexico’s architectural tradition.

A swarm of biotechnological robot drones defends a fragile Eden from invasive species. The Earth’s hydrology cycles through a vast suspended infrastructure; 2,000 synchronized parts dance for droughts, rains, and floods.

Stan Allen’s seminal essay, “Field Conditions,” written almost 15 years ago, still resonates among architects. He confers with Nader Tehrani on landscape urbanism as well as building and teaching “from a position of uncertainty.”

Commodity fetishism or a city as art? Architect Richard Serra and others add to the panoply of voices in Hal Foster’s new collection of essays, The Art-Architecure Complex.

Terence Gower opens the gray flannel cover of Stan Allen and Marc McQuade’s Landform Building, an architectural manifesto that rethinks “organic” as “geologic.”

Peter Eisenman prefers Milan to Istanbul. He is an architect and theorist whose work is firmly grounded in the European classical tradition from the Italian Renaissance to the present. 

Driven by collaboration, combining old and new methods, and a unique symbolism, Deborah Gans speaks to Richard J. Goldstein about the rose window she and Kiki Smith designed for the landmark Eldridge Street Synagogue.

Drifts and Derivations: Experiences, Journeys and Morphologies, an exhibition currently at the Reina Sofía in Madrid, documents Brazilian and Chilean architectural concepts that all espouse ideas concerning ties between public space and collective life.

The mastermind behind Medellín’s urban transformation is Sergio Fajardo, a mathematician, professor-turned-mayor, and a Colombian presidential hopeful.

Anti urban segregation through zoning. 

“So we do have this way of breaking down the country in these different interpretive units, these zones that have predominant themes but aren’t necessarily totally obvious either.”

One of my greatest motivations has always been to make those doors not depend on social conditions; to make them not a privilege but a right in a just society.

En los últimos años Medellín se ha vuelto visita obligada de los arquitectos que vistan Colombia y América del Sur.