Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, Zone Books, New York, 2017. 368pp., £32.95 hb., 978 1 93540 886 4 Unequal access to visibility, along with the erasure of traces, determine the partial undetectability of various events of violence, crimes and human rights violations. Such thresholds of detectability consist, according to Eyal […]
'Architecture' tag archive
Adorno and the Weather
Adorno and the weather Critical theory in an era of climate change Ackbar abbas In Beckett’s Endgame – about which Adorno wrote an important essay – nature is in ruins (‘corpsed’, as Clov describes it), yet the weather is still important.* The pathetic story that Hamm tells (and he has to bribe Nagg to listen) […]
Architectural Deleuzism
Architectural Deleuzism Neoliberal space, control and the ‘univer‑city’ Douglas spencer For many thinkers of the spatiality of contemporary capitalism, the production of all social space tends now to converge upon a single organizational paradigm designed to generate and service mobility, connectivity and flexibility. Networked, landscaped, borderless and reprogrammable, this is a space that functions, within […]
Architecture or art? (Response to Leslie); War between philosophy and art (Response to Bernstein); Frank significance (Response to Orozco)
~’, LETTERS Architecture or art? Esther Leslie’s sour dismissal of the wrapping of the Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude (RP 77) contains a number of doubtful and contradictory arguments. Permission to wrap the building required a parliamentary vote; approval was by 295 votes to 226. This democratic act by an institution of the state is […]
English Conservatism and the Aesthetics of Architecture
English Conservatism and the Aesthetics of Architecture Michael Rustin Prologue Architecture seems a ‘natural’ subject for conservatives, and it is therefore fitting that it has become one of the maill t·:!rrains for the advocacy of the intellectual perspectives of the New Right. Particularly, that is, of the New Right in England, where organic and traditionalist […]
Going into the mould
Going into the mould Materials and process in the architectural specification Katie lloyd thomas To know the true hylomorphic relation it is not enough to go into the workshop and work with the artisan: one must go into the mould itself to follow the operation of form-taking at different levels and scales of physical reality. […]
Clouds of architecture
Clouds of architecture Mark dorrian According to the newspapers, the recent unveiling of Frank Gehryʼs design for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation – to be built in the Jardin dʼAcclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne – left observers struggling for a suitable metaphor. However, as the Guardian reported it, the architect himself seemed in […]
Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf
Interview rem koolhaas and reinier de graaf Rem Koolhaas is perhaps the most feted and influential figure in architecture today, as well as one of the most original contemporary theorists of its changing relations to urban and socio-economic forms. Co-founder in 1975 of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), he is also Professor in Practice […]
On Rem Koolhaas
and fleeting; the city as empty spaces, panic, insecurity, screams and rags, infrastructural parasitism, and so on. The postmodern, a fundamental category in regard to Koolhaas, which he had already inaugurated in his retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New York, is here defined as an irreversible category and as a way of seeing the present. […]
Longing for a greener present
Commentary Longing for a greener present Neoliberalism and the eco-city Ross adams In recent years, architects have found themselves increasingly commissioned to design entire new cities: a phenomenon that has been accompanied by a commitment to those terms of ‘sustainability’ which now seem inseparable from the urban project itself. While ‘sustainability’ remains a vague concept […]
What’s so great about timeless?
What’s so great about ‘timeless’? Architecture and the Prince, again Victoria mcneile Whoever succeeds in redeveloping the Chelsea Barracks site will probably produce a small book to mark its completion. This will include an account of the site’s history, illustrated with maps and engravings, rather furry black-and-white photographs and a selection of press cuttings. There […]