Architecture and Design News

By Norman Weinstein
February 2020 12:45 GMT

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Christopher Alexander

North Antelope Rochelle Mine, Powder River Basin, Wyoming. [Wild Earth Guardians]

Christopher Alexander was an Austrian-born British-American architect and urban theorist. As a builder, he also constructed over 100 buildings in different places worldwide. But he is most known for his influential theories on architecture and urban design, with classic books such as Notes on the Synthesis of Form, The Timeless Way of Building, The Nature of Order Volumes and A Pattern Language. He has died on March 17, 2022 in his home in the south of England after a long illness. – Archinect

kecho.Kecho Collective is honored to be exhibited at Vietbuild Hanoi 2022, taken place at the National Architectural Planning & Construction Exhibition Center. Together with other professionals in bamboo and sustainable construction and design, we are committed to provide sustainable solutions for the built environment. – Kecho Collective

ad hoc architecture. Camp Code. Camp is not only tent but rather concrete buildings. From the Palestinian camp of Bourji Al Shamali to Lebansese Army checkpoints, refugee camps attest for urban informality with uncharted spaces, where living without a map is “to exist without a future.” Despite its desperate hope, the article portrays a comprehensive image of this kind of “informal city.” – Places Journal

ecology. Toward a Political Ecology of Architecture is an article in places journal that criticizes the capitalist mode of production in the building industry and architecture. – Places Journal

sustainability. What we don’t see. “Thus it’s vitally important that architects, both as responsible citizens and creative professionals, strive to expand the boundaries of pedagogy and practice. Schools of design could enrich their programs by offering courses and sponsoring research in which sustainability is understood to comprise not only constructed sites but also zones of extraction, manufacture, and assembly. Likewise professional architects could exert collective pressure in order to expose wasteful or nefarious environmental practices and labor abuses associated with the building industry, and they could boycott the offenders. But more important than any particular strategy is the recognition that the status quo — as exemplified by the LEED certification system with its manipulatable criteria, or by the proliferation of green design competitions that produce fantastically skillful renderings of projects that will never be built — is not sufficient. Intensifying environmental and political crises demand that we enlarge the frameworks for action and responsibility.”– Places Journal

landscape. Accelerated and Decelerated Landscape is an article in places journal that argues for the temporality of landscape and the implication of time in human’s interventions in landscaping. The author encourages designers to become “experts of bending time,” and concludes “Time is not a given in the Anthropocene. Rather, it is designed, intentionally or accidentally. And so much of what has been designed for the industrial, colonial, capitalist legacies we inherit needs refuturing. We cannot control the future, but we can participate in its choreography, intervening in the many rhythms and formative processes that constitute the temporal medium of landscape.” – Places Journal

 

 

Kecho at Vietbuild Hanoi 2022

Timeline

Kecho Journal | Archive

Architect: John Pawson

The MFAH’s program includes 240,000 sf structure that hosts permanent collection of modern and contemporary art. The building is a synthesis of Holl’s revisited program and the trapezoidal site of the Museum District. Porisity and light continue to be the central theme for Steven Holl in this building, emphasized by the use of translucent glass tubes for cladding. The assembly could reduce cooling requirements by 40 percents, according to Kendall/ Heaton Associates. While the exterior pays tribute to Mies, the interior natural lighting is inspired by Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, but “more organic, more dynamic – like the clouds.” Architectural Records

Typology

The MFAH’s program includes 240,000 sf structure that hosts permanent collection of modern and contemporary art. The building is a synthesis of Holl’s revisited program and the trapezoidal site of the Museum District. Porisity and light continue to be the central theme for Steven Holl in this building, emphasized by the use of translucent glass tubes for cladding. The assembly could reduce cooling requirements by 40 percents, according to Kendall/ Heaton Associates. While the exterior pays tribute to Mies, the interior natural lighting is inspired by Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, but “more organic, more dynamic – like the clouds.” Architectural Records

City Architecture

The MFAH’s program includes 240,000 sf structure that hosts permanent collection of modern and contemporary art. The building is a synthesis of Holl’s revisited program and the trapezoidal site of the Museum District. Porisity and light continue to be the central theme for Steven Holl in this building, emphasized by the use of translucent glass tubes for cladding. The assembly could reduce cooling requirements by 40 percents, according to Kendall/ Heaton Associates. While the exterior pays tribute to Mies, the interior natural lighting is inspired by Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, but “more organic, more dynamic – like the clouds.” Architectural Records

Sustainability

Toward a Political Ecology of Architecture is an article in places journal that criticizes the capitalist mode of production in the building industry and architecture. In the author’s own words:” To state it axiomatically: the sweat of production evaporates in the sweetness of consumption. But is it really, truly possible to grasp architecture in relation to an entire cycle of production? To pursue such a holistic vision may appear quixotic. But I would argue that today the implications are not just geopolitical but ethical. At stake is not only the future of the architectural project but also the future of the planet. In other words, by recognizing that architecture is just one moment in the overall cycle, we can better appreciate its role and function as the aesthetic moment. Architecture is literally the form of production. Since capitalism systematically occludes the production cycle in its totality and renders it opaque, to oppose obfuscation is to begin to comprehend the disparities of what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.” 21 It is to acknowledge that buildings do not fall from the sky but emerge from the ground, from multiple grounds, not as acts of sovereign creation but as assemblages of contingencies, chance events, obstacles, bodies with organs, and sometimes also crime scenes and distant suffering. To recollect, within the design project itself, architecture’s initial formlessness and the multiple, separated sites of its construction is what I am proposing here to call the political ecology of architecture. It could also be called empathy.”

Places Journal

Landscape

Accelerated and Decelerated Landscape is an article in places journal that argues for the temporality of landscape and the implication of time in human’s interventions in landscaping. To clarify this point, the author states: “In a sense we have refashioned time itself, making it a function of our spatial infrastructural practices. If we cannot literally play “the role of time,” we try to trick time, altering environmental rhythms and cycles, choreographing material flows. 2 But the trick is on us: the world is filled with protagonists, known and unknown, who are not subject to design intent.” One of the contemporary challenges in landscape design, according to the author, is how to “speed up” or “slow down” landscape processes, and thus designers need “better conceptual tools and practices.” Landscape design practice is a spatial practice that alters temporal conditions. The author argues for an alternative of the singular, continuous time, or in his own words, a “colonial understanding of time,” and asks a question that: “what if we shattered this ideology and replaced it with something more pluralistic? Can we learn to see landscapes through and across time? Can we embrace the phenomena of multiple, shifting temporalities, overlapping in the present? If we are able to perceive the Alameda Creek watershed in this fuller sense, how might that change our activities as designers?.” Influenced by the book Timescapes of Modernity (1998) or the sociologist Barbara Adam, in which she investigates the many temporalities in the chronical of life and dwelling –  geologic, biologic, technological, ecologic, climatic, social, political, and innumerable hybrids – the author suggests a distinction between time and temporalities. The author quotes Adam’s own words on the “Newtonian or Clock time,” in discussing the example of the Alameda Creek Flood Control Channel, as an example of a design (and spatial production) that falls into this kind of time: “Newtonian time is invoked whenever technology is designed atemporally for specific functions only, that is interaction with the environment, without recognition that the created artifact forms an integral part of the world-wide-web of interconnected processes. That is to say, technological products are premised on the Newtonian principles of decontexualization, isolation, fragmentation, reversible motion, abstract time and space, predictability, and objectivity, on maxims that stand opposed to organic principles such as embedded contextuality, networked interconnectedness, irreversible change and contingency.” Another influential opinion from the anthropologist Laura Bear on the book Timespace (2001), by geographers Jon May and Nigel Thrift, is quoted here, with her clarification on the triad relationship of “skillful making,” namely technique, knowledge, and ethics, in which ethics is to inform what techniques and knowledge are used for, which entails accouting for “what time is and what it should be used for.” The author states that “the discipline of landscape architecture has many established methods for fostering and designing for biological and cultural diversity. We must now develop tools for pluralizing, spatializing, and contextualizing time, and engaging with the multiple temporalities that exist concurrently within landscapes.” The author encourages designers to become “experts of bending time,” and concludes “Time is not a given in the Anthropocene. Rather, it is designed, intentionally or accidentally. And so much of what has been designed for the industrial, colonial, capitalist legacies we inherit needs refuturing. We cannot control the future, but we can participate in its choreography, intervening in the many rhythms and formative processes that constitute the temporal medium of landscape.”

Places Journal

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Design Magazines

AA School 

The AA Archive holds a large collection of recordings of lectures,conferences, symposia and other public programme events presented at the AA. Dating back to 1968, the collection includes titles by leading architects, artists, historians, and theorists of the last 50 years including Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Kenneth Frampton, Peter Cook, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid.

Arch News Now featuring news from other magazines, including latest debates on the profession, projects and competitions. It also has its own op/ed section.

Architects Journal featuring Building Studies, Specifications,  Practice, Podcasts, Film, Magazines, Library and Events.

Architectural Record features Houses, Building Types, Interviews, Book Reviews and Podcasts.

Art News: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Designboom: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

DETAIL: Topics include Sustainability, Researches on Components & Material, Energy & Resources, as well Structure.

Dezeen: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Divisare: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Domus: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Dwell: Photo section dwells on rooms and components: kitchen, bath, bedroom. living, dining, outdoor, kids, office, exterior, storage, doors, windows, staircase, laundry, hallway, garage, shed & studio. The Home Tours section includes Tiny Home, Prefab and Renovations projects.

FORM: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Frame: focuses on interior design across typologies: Retail, Hospitality, Work, Institutions, Residences and Shows.

Havard Design Magazine: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Inhabitat: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Juxtapoz: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Metropolis: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Places Journal: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Tạp chí Kiến Trúc: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

The Architects Newspaper: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

The Art Newspaper: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

The Guardian: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Uncube: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Zinio: on architects to “draw the line on designing jails [and such] until America repairs racial injustice,” and “shift their efforts towards ‘supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies'” (it’s not a ban on designing justice facilities).

Appeared in Kecho Journal, 321 March 2020
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