Critical Essays on Architecture
The academic year just wouldn't be over without one last dose of critical essays on architecture. This month, in issue 24 of the Avery Review, Karen Abrams attempts to dislodge “placemaking” from architectural vocabularies; Galen Pardee reports on Myanmar’s new capital; and Camila Reyes Alé weighs the possibility of a dissident practice in architecture.
As we break for our summer hiatus, we’d like to encourage all our readers to keep an eye out for buildings, books, landscapes, histories, and ideas that demand critical and rigorous consideration. We always welcome submissions, along with general queries and correspondence, to editors@averyreview.com.
A stack of new books has just arrived at CBAC!
Add Architecture is All Over edited by Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter, Wright's Writings: Reflections on Politics and Culture 1994–1959 with essays by Kenneth Frampton, Trace Elements by Aranda\Lasch and Blue Dunes: Climate Change by design edited by Jesse Keenan and Claire Weisz to your summer reading list!
Projects currently underway include:
Environmental Communications: Contact High (eds. Mark Wasiuta and Marcos Sánchez) documents the work of this West Coast media collective, whose “environmental photography” aimed to alter architecture and transform the field through the institutional slide library.
A Year Without Winter develops a project led by Dehlia Hannah, with four science fiction writers exploring climate futures at Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti in Arizona.
The Empire Remains Shop (ed. Cooking Sections) speculates on the possibility of selling back the remains of the British Empire in London today.
The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016 (ed. Mark Wasiuta) collects texts, documents, and commentaries from fourteen exhibitions over the last ten years, recounting the gallery's sustained experiment in archival exhibitions.
CBAC will be spending some time at the Center for Architecture this March, with presentations related to recent book projects.
On Tuesday, March 7, Amale Andraos will be presenting The Arab City: Architecture and Representation. And toward the end of the month, join Michael Maltzan, author of Social Transparency: Projects on Housing, will be discussing some of his housing projects on Wednesday, March 29.
Excerpt
Join us to discuss and preview Columbia in Manhattanville, a new book from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. Amale Andraos, Reinhold Martin, and Eric Washington will be in conversation with Caitlin Blanchfield at 1pm on Nov 4, Ware Lounge, Avery Hall.
Home to the famed Cotton Club, Alexander Hamilton’s grange, the Manhattan Project, and a Studebaker factory, West Harlem has been an ever-transforming pocket of New York City. With the arrival of Columbia University’s Manhattanville expansion, it is now also a site of experimentation in the future of the twenty-first century university. Bringing together conversations with the architects and planners designing the Manhattanville campus, the educators who will inhabit its buildings, and essays from urban and architectural historians, this book documents the making of Manhattanville and critically engages the University’s own history of expansion.
The editors of five fresh publishing projects gathered at GSAPP on February 12, 2016, for a rousing conversation on the varying concerns, approaches, and stakes of contemporary architectural publications practice. Joining us were Anthony Acciavatti of Manifest; Shumi Bose and Jack Self of The Real Review; Alfie Koetter of Project; Jimenez Lai of the Treatise series; and Lily Wong of :.
A complete recording of the event is available here.
Excerpt
“I first became aware of Amaza Lee Meredith two or three years ago. I had no idea that there had been a black woman architect practicing in Virginia as early as the 1920s and ’30s. And to be a modernist within that context! I thought that was quite extraordinary...”
Mario Gooden speaks with Artforum about his recently-released Dark Space—which the magazine describes as “a subtle reading of a number of African American cultural institutions [and] a consideration of the politics they spatialize”—in an interview from December 2015.