Archive for the 'Theory' 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 [...]
The terraforming device from Star Trek II — “The Genesis Device” — is a bomb that completely remakes the surface of a planet into a biological and geological version of the earth. It’s like a nuclear weapon that produces an ecosystem. In the video above we see the genesis device [...]
[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 anti-ecosystem [...]
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 [...]
Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments goes to press next week. I can confidently say that it’s going to be one of the most provocative books in the “nature” section of your bookstore/architectural bookstore/amazon list. What do the following three, illustrated spreads from this book have in common? Check out Subnature, better yet, BUY Subnature and find [...]
I was putting together drafts of syllabi, and I kept coming across the term “fiction” in specific writings of architectural theory. As frequent readers of this and many other sites know, the term “architecture fiction” has been bouncing around the blogo-twitto-tumblo-sphere. It’s emerging as an alternative and experimental form of architectural writing and as a [...]
I just finished reading Anthony Vidler’s Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism; it’s his examination of the historiographical techniques of Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham and Manfredo Tafuri, and their impact on the unfolding set of concepts that we call architectural modernity. It was, with some qualification, a page-turner, at least for [...]
Yesterday, I presented some notes and images from my forthcoming book Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments at the CCA/Stanford conference “Rising Tide: The Arts and Ecological Ethics.” Here are my notes, collected together:
1. Architecture does not have an environment but environments. [i]
2. These environments are found within the theories of architecture stretching from early modernity to [...]
“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 [...]
As the architectural journal Assemblage approached its end, the so-called “theoretical turn” — promoted by authors within Assemblage and in its parent journal Oppositions — came to a cross roads. One avenue led to “post-criticism” and the other led to the “historical turn”.
As the name suggests, authors of post-criticism argued for a “cool” response to the architectural [...]
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 [...]
Installation by Los Carpinteros at the Hayward Gallery, London
I am intrigued by the recent coinage “architecture fiction.” If you don’t know the term, you can read a little about the idea here, here and here. I am using this post to help me define the term, its uses, history, and to come to grips with [...]
Thank you to Metropolis, Pruned, and BldgBlog for covering/linking the Urban Ice Core/Indoor Air Archive project this past week. I appreciate all the new visitors. I always think of the immensely popular, latter two sites, (particularly Bldgblog) as an uncanny reverse engineering of the London and Oxford schools of urban/nature thought — albeit in a [...]
Immediately to the right, I have put permanent links to some of my recent print essays and articles. This is just a small portion of my material circulating “out there;” and, as contracts permit, I’ll post more. The recent essays are re-linked and described below:
“Architecture’s Geographic Turns” explores the geographical sense of contemporary architecture theory, [...]
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 [...]
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. It’s [...]
{Above, David Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear]
While some of my very favorite texty types are predicting the future, we might reflect on our more traditional role as commentators on the past.
Five years ago when my partner and I were beginning our PhD’s we sat at a restaurant table with [...]
A few days ago I looked at new posts on some of the most popular architecture blogs, and I left wondering why the overall mood of these blogs is so consistent when the particular content of them is not? Why does it seem that posts on subjects as different as military landscapes, tunnels, or moving [...]
Probably all of us who work in the architectural HTC area have heard stories about how architectural thought–particularly architectural theory–increases in times of economic hardship. When the markets are down and the economic indicators turn south, the architect begins to think, to write, to theorize. When the markets are up we “do” and don’t think [...]
Architectural theory is often considered a process of writing (and often denigrated as a result), but the production of architectural thought always engaged other tools of expression besides quill, pen, pencil, typewriter, or computer. Some of the most significant written innovations in architectural theory are interlaced with tools of inquiry that lie outside those directly [...]
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