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Review – Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture
“Considering ideal conditions is a waste of time,” Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner write in their 2005 book, Informal City. “The point is to avoid catastrophe.” The two architects, partners in...
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Buildings must die
Architecture seems increasingly limited to the production of shiny renderings of shiny buildings (replete with the obligatory blue skies and well-to-do passers-by). Filling up your facebook-wall or...
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Radical Cities – Latin America’s revolutionary housing solutions
The Venice Architecture Biennale is usually a grand gathering of the biggest names in architecture, where they can display their brilliance to their peers. In the 2012 edition, however, the Golden Lion...
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Call for Entries: Pamphlet Architecture 35
Following the success of the inaugural call for entries, which produced the Pamphlets 23–30, Pamphlet Architecture, with renewed support from the National Endowment for the Arts, announces the 2014...
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Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made
In August 1965, Le Corbusier‘s body was found washed up on a beach on the French Riviera, a possible suicide. Perched on the cliff above was a modernist villa designed by Eileen Gray, a sleek, white...
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Architectures for Emergencies – Volume II just released
To face an emergency means to deal with problems of a different nature, some requiring immediateness, whilst others needing longer subsidence times. Sometimes it is a matter of providing housing to...
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Vacancy Studies – Designing Temporariness
Because of economic shifts, changing tastes and other developments, certain buildings and building typologies become obsolete. Although sometimes aesthetically fascinating, the resulting vacancy is not...
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The Life and Death of an Impossible City
City of Darkness Revisited is a photo book and cultural history of Kowloon Walled City, a largely ungoverned, densely populated enclave within Hong Kong. Originally a military fort, the Walled City saw...
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Metropolis Summer Reading List
There are few things creative types like more than books. Metropolis polled a handful of architects, designers, curators, and our staff members about what they read this summer. Utopia or Bust: A Guide...
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Erotic architecture: the sexual history of great buildings
Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made Tom Wilkinson – Bloomsbury, 352pp Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture Justin McGuirk – Verso, 288pp At...
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Book Review – How Paris Became Paris
“How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City,” by Joan DeJean, is full of creative insights on the symptoms of urban modernity as well as bold statements about how Paris came to be one of...
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Furniture, Structure, Infrastructure: Making and Using the Urban Environment
A life drawing teacher once taught me that drawing was about seeing: “Everyone can look, but not everyone can see,” he said. The act of drawing involves sharpening one’s ability to see, challenging the...
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Book Review – The Architecture of Paul Rudolph
When Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building at Yale opened in 1963, architectural historian Vincent Scully wrote that the design “puts demands upon the individual user which not every psyche...
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Here’s an Inside Look at North Korea’s Dystopian Architecture
The book, North Korea: Anonymous Country, documents Leeb’s travels, peeling back the shroud that covers the country and stealing moments to take testimony for the rest of the world. Because...
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Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud review – meeting Charles Rennie Mackintosh
The reaction to the fire that ravaged the Glasgow School of Art earlier this year indicated how deeply architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh is loved. Yet at the onset of the first world...
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The bible of the modern American city
Take an interest in the history of New York City, and someone will soon ask if you’ve read “The Power Broker.” This is, in part, a good-natured gauge of your interest and experience; the urban affairs...
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‘Radical Cities': 3 lessons from Latin America’s activist architects
Anyone following the architectural profession at the turn of the millennium might be forgiven for thinking that it was all about splashy icons: Frank Gehry’s undulating titanium sails in Bilbao and Los...
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Buddhist architecture in focus
FORGET the hustle and bustle of the modern world and prepare to be transported into serenity by Vikram Lall’s Architecture Of The Buddhist World: The Golden Lands. The first of six volumes on Buddhist...
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“The Algae House” book launches at Venice Biennale
“The Algae House”, a new book on the world’s first building equipped with an algae bioreactor façade was launched on 8th November at the 14th Venice International Architecture Biennale. The book has...
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A Monograph Celebrates the Architecture of Mario Botta
The Swiss architect Mario Botta once described his hometown as “madre e matrigna” — “mother and stepmother” — an apt description for the Italian-speaking Swiss province of Ticino, which possesses...
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