Archive for the ‘preservation’ Category
This post spins out of a talk I gave recently; a question I dodged a bit at the end of the talk; and considering it’s content, it’s also a great way to celebrate this site’s first anniversary! I often wonder how architectural reconstructions can serve an agitational role in contemporary architectural, urban and infrastructural debates. [...]
[To be expanded for a forthcoming article] If a stable, humidity, temperature, dust, and pest controlled environment is the ideal setting for preserving historical material, could we produce the inverse environment? In other words, if late-modern history relies on a type of ecosystem for the preservation and study of historical material, could we produce the [...]
I always enjoy talking to my friend and colleague Ron Rael. Ron is the author of Earth Architecture, an excellent book that outlines the history and explores in-depth contemporary uses of earth in architecture. Ron’s book is a book about design, but it’s also a powerful corrective to those commentators that view buildings made of [...]
I recently received my copy of Sean Lally’s Energies issue of AD. Sean invited me to contribute an essay that explores some of the recent experimental historical work I completed these past few years, much of it on the theme of energy. It includes new descriptions of my posts on the Plume/Idling project, Urban Ice [...]
There is so much discussion of infrastructure these days — from efforts to rethink infrastructure to efforts to rethink buildings as infrastructure, and hundreds of ideas in between. I would like to enter this discussion with another idea, that is not discussed as much — the relationship between infrastructure and history; and I would also [...]
“Historical Practice” was the driving theme of my presentation at Storefront for Art and Architecture’s Postopolis! LA. I spoke on Wednesday, April 1st; stuck around to hear extremely interesting presentations, interviews, and impromptu thoughts; and then headed off to the SAH annual conference in Pasadena (a much different scene). At Postopolis! I enjoyed seeing Mary [...]
An ongoing obsession here involves the possible links between architecture and geography. There are so many different ways to think about this: the historical use of geographical thought in architecture, the development of geographical methods for architectural and architectural historical research, the architectural history of geographical exploration, etc. It’s one of my favorite subjects. Lately, I have [...]
My forthcoming book — Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments — is now in production with the good people at Princeton Architectural Press. It will be out in about six months. Subnature examines those forms of nature that architects, architectural theorists and historians have imagined in potential conflict with the ideas, forms, and inhabitants of architecture. In [...]
The swamps at the edges of my childhood town in Bergen County, New Jersey were strange zones of muddy flats and reeds that ended in the Manhattan skyline. If you grew up in New Jersey and were not that interested in going to the mall, you probably went to the swamps. We “swamp kids” were [...]
In addition to admiring the experimental history of Mt. Rushmore by artist Matthew Buckingham, I am also intrigued by a project from 2005— a proposed “historic preservation” of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (a roadway completed in 1955). This roadway, like much of the country’s transit infrastructure requires significant repairs — but a preservation? In this proposed [...]
this poster by the artist Matthew Buckingham — “The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E., 2002″ I first saw this poster 6 years ago, and I finally bought it from Cabinet Magazine. This is Buckingham’s description of the image: “This is what geologists believe the Six Grandfathers will look like in the year [...]
My favorite works of architectural criticism (by authors Cesar Daly, Montgomery Schuyler, Lewis Mumford, and Ada Louise Huxtable) are put to shame by pre-modern forms of architectural criticism. If today we consider the criticisms of buildings in newspapers and magazines to partially determine their value and fate, in the pre-modern era one might look to strange [...]
Malcolm Gladwell’s discussion of the possible forgery of the Getty Kouros sparked the following post/thought/project. If the Kouros was forged, then those that pulled off this particular forgery applied a type of mold (potato mold) to the Kouros to give it the appearance of something ancient — something buried in the earth for hundreds of [...]
News item….You must see the latest issue of the Architectural Association journal — AA Files 57. Not only does it have excellent articles by — most-favored-historian-status types — Mitchell Schwarzer and Briony Fer, but it contains the brilliant “Olfactory Reconstruction of Philip Johnson’s Glass House” by Jorge Otero-Pailos. It’s the first, “scratch and sniff” history [...]
This will sound a bit grandiose; but it was a fun exercise: I was putting together readings for this semester’s classes while also examining the UK Royal Collection of architectural theory. The Royal Collection holds the tutorial images and texts that the architect and theorist William Chambers made for the future King George III. [...]
I was responding to a comment today about “Maintenance Criticism,” and I remembered that two years ago I completed an earlier installation engaging with the subject of architectural maintenance as critique. The images below were for a student-run, faculty competition in 2006 (at my previous gig at PSU). Faculty were asked to design something that [...]
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 [...]
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"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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