Clouds It was the year 1954 when the “Department of Tropical Architecture“ was founded at the Architectural Association (AA) London, by Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and their colleague James Cubbitt. Tropical architecture had been a topic before the study programs foundation, large conferences like the “Conference on tropical architecture” March 1953 at University College, London or two years before in Venezuela had established the issue internationally. The AA Tropical Architecture study program ran till 1971 and was afterwards transferred to the University of London and proceeded there as the “Development Planning Unit” that is active till today. The AA program included lectures ...

A screening and conversation with artist, writer, and filmmaker Renée Green. This program highlights Renée Green’s two recent short films, “Americas : Veritas (2018)”, and “Commemorative Toile: Mise-en-scène (2020)”. “Americas : Veritas” features Le Corbusier’s only two structures built in the American continent–Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Casa Curutchet, in La Plata, Argentina–while “Commemorative Toile: Mise-en-scène” revisits a homonymous wallpaper and textile installation made by Green in 1991/1993, which focused on the history of a pervasive textile and its motifs, as well as the artist’s interpretation of them. Tracing an arch that connects a European ...

This conversation with Fabiola López-Durán is primarily structured around her work exploring Le Corbusier’s eugenic ideology from 1925 Paris to 1941 Vichy. At a moment when many events and debates are organized around his paradigmatic work, the main critiques seem to focus on his personal political engagement and ideology without fully engaging with the work and its consequences. What Fabiola proposes in her work is to take his claims for the orthopedic power of architecture seriously, and look at the vision of society it is therefore promoting. Although Le Corbusier’s example might be canonical, her argument is that the entire ...

Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski listen to the post-colonial loudreaders of Puerto Rico; Louise Hickman takes stock of the devices and affective labor involved in flying while disabled; Evan Kleekamp browses the “impaired commodities” of Emily Barker’s art; Jen Rose Smith traces Native resistance to seasonal salmon fisheries in coastal Alaska in the summer of COVID-19; and Francisco Quiñones looks behind Luis Barragán’s walls to consider the role of domestic labor in shaping Mexican modernism.

Bella Carmelita Carriker complicates the “public” memory of 9/11, recording the long-term violences enacted against low-income communities of color; Supriya Ambwani exposes histories of spatial violence and colonial extraction entangled in the Great Hedge of India; Gealese Peebles traces the historiographic silhouette of Norma Merrick Sklarek to scrutinize architecture’s diversity narratives; and Peter Paul Walhout unsubscribes from the internet-as-utility rhetoric in NYC that has come to stand in for questions of inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Preservation is ordinarily reserved for architecture that is unique. So how would we go about preserving buildings that are utterly generic? Such is the case with Belyayevo, an ordinary residential district in Moscow. Belyayevo is a classic microrayon, the standardised neighbourhood system that successive Soviet regimes laid out across the USSR in what was the most expansive programme of industrialised construction the world has ever seen. Belyayevo’s buildings, and the desolate spaces between them, are identical to thousands of others, but is it different? Kuba Snopek argues that is. Home to many of the artists of the Moscow Conceptualism school, the ...

At the beginning of the 20th century, Georg Simmel published one of his most important and well-known texts, “The metropolis and mental life”. He focused on the changes he observed in the relationship between spatial configuration and society (and other forms of sociability) within the urban landscape of the emerging big cities (or metropolises), namely, Berlin at the turn of the 19th century. When he published his essay in 1903, the metropolis was a recent occurrence signaling the beginning of a new urban phenomenon. It was brought about by the advances of industrialization and capitalism which, subsequently, would permanently change ...

This second conversation of the series complementing the latest issue of The Funambulist Magazine dedicated to “Design & Racism” borrows its title from Audre Lorde’s words cited by Mabel O. Wilson at the beginning of the “Critical Dialogues on Race and Modern Architecture” that she organized at Columbia University in February 2016. Throughout this discussion, we talk about architecture’s historical and contemporary contribution to the American structural racism against Black bodies. Professor Mabel O. Wilson teaches architectural design and history/theory courses at Columbia University’s GSAPP. She is also appointed as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) ...

Projections of the future that were made in the past are often striking in their bold naïvete—didn’t people understand then that future projections always end up looking like caricatures of past concerns? But whereas these projections do little to actually activate the future they foresaw, they do function as expressions of pure intention, and in this sense they are probably not so naïve. Rather, they indicate a certain bold willingness on the part of people of a certain time to define in explicit terms exactly how the future should function, and indeed, most of these projected futures never come to pass—they remain ...

The processes of the factory have entered the museum in ways that Warhol and Duchamp could never have dreamed: the amount of art production now by far exceeds what can be processed or understood, and this often creates a degree of mistrust and an absence of common points of reference with which to not only discuss, but also to gain anything from the sheer volume of artworks placed on display today. The time to engage and digest work is often replaced by additional work—it just keeps coming down the line… Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Concerning Matters to be Left ...

Stereotypes regarding modernist architecture, and in particular the negative discourse on Amsterdam’s Bijlmer estate, have been quite crucial in shaping Failed Architecture’s way of thinking in its early years. Can we really blame the architecture for what went wrong? How can an entire neighbourhood, where thousands of people continue to live their lives on a daily basis, be simply dismissed as a grand failure? In recent years, however, there has been a slow but steady reappreciation of modernist architecture taking place, but rather for its aesthetics than its social ideals. While architecture from that era is still being demolished at a ...

Selected writings of Max Bill – this collection makes many of his key texts available in English for the first time. Max Bill (1904-1994) – a product of the Bauhaus at Dessau, pupil of Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee – was a virtuoso designer whose work overleaped disciplinary boundaries, encompassing architecture, painting, sculpture, industrial and graphic design, as well as education. What unites all the work is a clarity and precision of expression. Through both his designs and his writings Max Bill has long been a major figure of reference in the German-speaking world. This collection makes many of ...