Emily Talen, Co-editor, Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City Readers: Michael Sorkin sounds tired, and who can blame him? This master of critique has made a career out of eviscerating buildings, architects, fellow writers, and anyone who rubs him the wrong way. How unexpected of him to now propose a why-can't-we-all-get-along harmony when so many are already lying dead on the Sorkin battlefield. We too would like to move on from this old and distracting debate. Unfortunately, while Mr. Sorkin tries to reinvent himself as the great peacekeeper, billions are wasted on efforts to ruralize the city.
Ichihara, Japan Forty miles southeast of Tokyo, Sou Fujimoto's transparent outhouse beside a railroad station provides visitors with a restroom–and a view–of their own. Photo by Iwan Baan A single glass-encased stall in the middle of a meadow, Sou Fujimoto's new public toilet is a loo with a view. Located in Ichihara, Japan, a city of 279,000, the tiny restroom is ringed by an oval fence that shields patrons without severing visual ties to the surrounding landscape: low mountains and blossoming cherry trees that draw tourists from near and far. Adjacent to the local railroad station, Fujimoto's facility caters to
The future of food is already here. Everyone's favorite bit of technological wizardry, the 3-D printer—coveted by architects for models and others for its ability to extrude raw materials into three-dimensional forms—could one day be the standard in personal and commercial-scale food prep.
Image courtesy Leon Krier In all his writings I only encountered one instance when James S. Russell lost his natural cool, notably when reviewing my book on the architecture of Albert Speer. “Gushing, swooning, sputtering ,“ his words for qualifying my writing, apply perfectly to his own uncharacteristic outbursts. Related Links: James S. Russell Reviews Albert Speer: Architecture 1932–1942 The problematic and censorious reception of the book by modernist critics has, with very rare exceptions, been uniform around the world and unchanging for 27 years [editor’s note: when it was first published]. It was Robert Lister’s dissertation about this
Restaurants, bars, and cafés have long shaped the character of neighborhoods, cities, and entire cultures, but in recent decades, architecture took its place alongside the cuisine as a defining feature of a meal. Now, as chefs reach for local ingredients in their craft-focused cooking, designers are creating a new idea of authenticity with their food-focused spaces. In her captivating memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, the chef Gabrielle Hamilton writes about opening her signature New York City restaurant, Prune, on a block of the Lower East Side still populated by “random derelicts” who would leave their messes behind in her side
Designer shelters for the birds and the bees elevate our view of food production. Nogg, by Matthew Hayward and Nadia Turan A Modernist roost for a chicken? A bespoke cow barn on an English country estate? A luxury high-rise for a colony of bees? Some people might say that these structures are unnecessarily extravagant, given the simple programmatic needs of the occupants. But, as architect Stephen Taylor says of the barn he designed at Shatwell Farm in Somerset, England, that responds to the dignified, centuries-old architecture around it: “Every building is always part of something bigger.” While it was a
Since it was founded in 1993 by Samuel Mockbee and Dennis K. Ruth, Rural Studio has provided first-rate architecture for disadvantaged populations in and around Hale County, Alabama. Houses, chapels, and community centers are among the structures designed and built by the firm with undergraduate architecture students at Auburn University.
Zaha Hadid's first tower, completed in September 2011 for container-shipping company CMA CGM, is visible beyond low-rise buildings in Marseilles's Grands-Carmes district.
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