Archive for September, 2008
Last year (soon after moving to the SF Bay Area) I decided to pay a visit to one of the buildings that established my interest in modern architecture — The Oakland Museum of California (Roche Dinkeloo, 1968). The Oakland Museum combined three independent museums into a huge, block-long building that includes galleries, exterior terraces and [...]
I want to thank all of the visitors that have made the first week of this site such a success. It’s hard to imagine that a website about the methodological minutiae of architectural history, theory and criticism could have more than 20 visitors in one week; but according to my “stats bar” we have reached [...]
Due to the relatively recent, but large investment in studying the history of architectural photography, we are now able to see architectural photographs as non-textual forms of architectural theory. The staging, manipulation, doctoring and transmission of photographs cycles content in ways analogous to those forms of architectural theory that appear, somehow, more about “content” than [...]
Snowdon Aviary, London Zoo, Cedric Price, Frank Newby, Tony Armstrong Jones, 1964 The people in the house next to ours own an African Grey Parrot (we will call him “Abraham” to protect his identity). Abraham is quite sweet and friendly, but his sounds are distracting, to say the least. His squawks and squeaks stress the [...]
Julian David Le Roy’s 1770 Travelogue of the Bay of Piraeus I recently completed teaching an undergraduate course (“Emerging Territories”) which reviewed architects’ writings on globalization and theorists of globalization’s writings on architecture. For one of the assignments I asked the students to develop a focused, audio travelogue/guide focused on recent spatial transformations or spatial [...]
It is a map, a proposal, a fantasy archive for the retrieval of future data related to the indoor atmosphere of cities. During the course of my dissertation I spent a great deal of time exploring the politics surrounding indoor air in Western cities in the 1970s. This was way before debates about sick building [...]
Two students of mine at CCA, Judy Wu and Jessica Miller, developed a fascinating and funny (!) mockumentary for their final project in my class on theories of Space and Nature in architecture. I had asked my students to consider new methods for conducting environmental histories of buildings, using one building as a case [...]
In a recent project I wondered if one could use the type of spatial production evident in the work of Superstudio as a form of historical visualization and reconstruction. I made the above image as part of an effort to reconstruct the smokey air of Pittsburgh at the early 20th century. Architectural reconstructions often involve [...]
In 2005 when I was living in Baltimore, someone (never caught) was shooting bullets at the glass curtain walls of a few of the city’s modernist buildings. The shooter only “attacked” buildings at night — when they were lit — and when they were clearly empty. When the Maryland Institute College of Art’s (MICA) new [...]
A student of mine manipulated this famous image of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial for an assignment on myth and architecture. I had asked my students to read Roland Barthes’ Myth Today and to then select an important image from the history of architecture and to recode its “mythic” content based upon a select manipulation of [...]
I made this image when I was the curator of architecture at the National Building Museum (2000-2002). I had just purchased Robert Augustyn and Paul Cohen’s book “Manhattan in Maps” (Rizolli, 1997) and enjoyed examining the most recent efforts to map the midtown sector of the city. But I felt that none of the [...]
In this project I explored the possibilities of “mock history” in architectural and urban history. As a friend of mine recently pointed out, the idea of “What if?” scenarios are a long-standing trope in comic book concepts. But in history they are generally considered forms of historical projection, and inherently irresponsible. The historians task is [...]
Model of an 1870 pool (David Pascu, model maker) Yale University and The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, NYC The project started my consideration of “historical practices,” which in this context implies the operation of historical work in which all of the aspects of historical production are thrown into question. In [...]
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Monumental Environments [Tarp, Not Nature]
"Examining Architecture's Other Environments" [Interview in SA]
Thoughts on a Heap of Rubble [Kerb Jorunal, RMIT]
Infrastructure Preservation [Quaderns]
Architectural Reconstruction of Nature [Landform Building, Stan Allen, ed]
Architectural Reconstruction of Geography [Coupling]
Energy Histories [AD, Energies, Sean Lally, ed.]
The Architectural Production of Nature, Dendur/New York [Grey Room]
Architecture's Geographic Turns [Log]
Anxious Climate: Architecture at the Edge of Environment [MICA]
Thermopolis: Conceptualizing Environmental Technologies in the Urban Sphere [JAE]
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