One of the few to appreciate his work consistently was Banham who, in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment got it just right, citing: “Paul Valery’s contrast between Eupalinos, the architect, and Tridon, the shipwright. The former was preoccupied with the right method of doing the allotted tasks, and deploying the accepted methods of his calling, and seemed to find a philosophical problem in every practical decision. Tridon, on the other hand, applied every technology that came conveniently to hand, whether or not it was part of the shipbuilding tradition, and treated the sayings of philosophers as further instruction on
One of the results of the current Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is the rediscovery of historical prefab housing on the opposite coast.
Making new demands It’s important to understand that this kind of sophisticated climate control was still fairly new at the time Otto was designed. Art conservators were making demands that neither the world of architects nor the world of engineers and contractors had quite caught up with. Okay, that’s the art guys’ story. The weather guys—the architect, his engineering consultants, and the builder—created pretty much the kind of wall they’d always built. Its primary purpose was not to nurture the art but to keep out the weather. They built a cavity wall, a sandwich of materials including a vapor barrier.
Amy Archer began making large-scale, photographic art works by accident. In 2005, she was meeting a friend for breakfast at the Rockefeller Center Club in Manhattan. While waiting, she snapped some photos of the light glinting off the restaurant’s Art Deco-style chairs.
The conjunction this season of four architecture exhibitions on Midcentury Modernism at its most promising and exuberant seems less a coincidence of timing than proof of a new attitude, telling us much about the present even while illuminating the past. This transcontinental grand slam began in New York in June with Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through September 21); continued in July with Between Heaven and Earth: The Architecture of John Lautner, at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum (through October 12), and Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, at the Museum of Modern
A firsthand account of the Chinese capital's struggles to preserve its past in the face of rapid development and Olympic glory. In 1988, national policy was changed to allow local governments to raise resources through the property market. The state still owned the land, but it could transfer usage rights. Municipalities put a parcel of land on the market; developers bid for its rights; the winning bidder paid for its long-term lease, usually 70 years. The developer could build on the land or apportion the property and sell off parcels. Given a lack of property taxes or municipal bonds, property