Urbanism

Matthew Soules’s Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin looks at how finance-driven architecture is disrupting cities “not through gentrification but rather through zombification.”

Making urban history visible. 

“Tiny Tim lived there, stirring beans and frying eggs in a kitchenette in the closet.” 

The artist talks about the genesis, composition, and execution of a recently completed work.

An architect talks about her data maps of urban conflict from Brooklyn to Aleppo.

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

After Hurricane Katrina, Brandan “Bmike” Odums realized that the graffiti he and other artists were making in the abandoned buildings around New Orleans had an inherent political value, not just because of the subject matter (though Odums himself had always had an affinity for depicting civil-rights icons) but also because creating art in those depopulated spaces foregrounded their meaning, calling attention to what they had once been, what they had been allowed to become, and why.

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?

“A solar is a peculiar multicultural habitat; the apartment tenements represent the complex layers of Cuban society. Everyone lives in tiny converted rooms with almost no privacy.”

“The best comedy is sad comedy.”

Cities haunted by ghosts, ghosts that are a metaphor for language in their haunting doubling and mistranslations, language that’s full of holes, while the holes themselves are suggestive of abandoned places and writing that fails to describe anything accurately enough—this is Valeria Luiselli’s terrain.

The 17th-century townhouses that Gordon Matta-Clark and his friends chipped away at in Conical Intersect (1975) did not collapse immediately—like, say, flimsy clapboard ranch styles built where neighborhood site plans had been rushed and mistaken.

Terence Gower’s latest video, New Utopias, is a lecture filmed in the style of a 1950s Walt Disney documentary. 

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. 

Danielle Drees on Kate Christensen’s fifth novel The Astral, an examination of marriage and middle-age from a Brooklyn poet’s perspective.

If your knowledge of the San Francisco collective Futurefarmers ends at the Twitter logo (which they designed in 2007), you’re in for a surprise. This multifaceted design team runs the gamut, both in terms of production and strategies of audience engagement. 

Departing a clandestine appointment in a San Francisco office tower, Jejune Institute inductees puzzle over an encrypted instruction key.

Anti urban segregation through zoning. 

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.