Reporting From the Affront

[Text published in art4d magazine #238] The Venice Biennale is a huge event; architecture’s biggest. It’s so big, if we … More

Architecture that Only an Artist can Get Away With

New York’s Guggenheim Museum has just announced plans to install a new artwork by Maurizio Cattelan consisting of a toilet made … More

Farewell Zaha

Zaha Hadid left us yesterday. She won’t be forgotten for a long time, as she was an architect who actually changed architecture. … More

But is it Architecture?

The recent adjudication of Britain’s Turner Prize to some Liverpool houses regenerated through neighborhood participation by a young collective known as Assemble speaks … More

Why is BP sponsoring an architecture biennial?

Why is BP sponsoring an architecture biennial; specifically the Chicago Architecture Biennial, titled “The State of the Art of Architecture”, … More

Size Isn’t Everything

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #57] It’s been said that the most difficult thing to design in architecture is a … More

How to Find Work as an Architect

The perennial problem for the 99% of architects who are not stars is: how and where do you find work? There are many ways … More

Beauty

‘Beauty’ is one of the rarest words used by professionals when talking about architecture, yet it is one of the most used by … More

Architecture and Crime

A recent escape from a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, in which two convicted murderers cut through steel jail-cell walls to … More

From Baukunst to Kunstwelt: The Biennalization of Architecture

There is no doubt that architecture is an art. The eternal question is which kind. Is architecture a building art? A … More

A Response to Marc Kushner’s ‘A New Golden Age of Architecture’

[Originally published on medium.com] Dear Marc Kushner, Like yourself, I also want people to love architecture. But unlike yourself, I don’t … More

Death of a Manifesto

“Architecture Must Blaze” is the title of a 1980 manifesto by Coop Himmelb(l)au. In it, the architects declare: “we don’t want to exclude everything … More

Emot-Icon Building

Considering the recent spate of ‘icon’ buildings, you would think that an Emoji would exist for ‘Architecture’ by now, but no, this is in fact … More

Observations on Attitude

[Originally published in Log Journal #32] Visiting “Fair Enough,” the satirical exhibition in the Russian Pavilion, I was reminded of … More

Seeing Things

Mountain architecture is very different from its flatland counterpart. This may be stating the obvious, but I’m referring here to … More

Pure Shit (II)

This building in the Catalan Pyrenees is a perfect example of the kind of “pure shit” that, according to Frank … More

The STEM Turn

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. It’s an acronym that can be heard a lot coming from the … More

Barcelona’s Disappearing Green Façades

Barcelona’s ‘green façades’ are disappearing at an alarming rate. A part of this city’s vernacular tradition, the small balconies typically used by apartment … More