The New Republic
Don’t believe it when you read that Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect who died this week only days before he would have turned 105, was the one who took the chill off modernist design with his flamboyantly curving, white thin-shell concrete buildings. That’s the sort of nonsense that gets peddled in obituaries and haigiographies, particularly when a charismatic charmer distorts the historic…
The New Republic
Architecture occupies a peculiar place in the life of democratic societies. Most buildings get built because some private concern, an individual or a corporate entity, commissions it. Because procuring land and constructing buildings is expensive, the private concerns that do so typically enjoy the benefits of wealth, which include social and political influence in excess of the democratic credo …
The New Republic
Globalization, climate change, and digital technology have thoroughly reshaped architecture as a profession and as an art. 2014 Pritzker Prize winner Shigeru Ban is leading the revolution.
The New Republic
Most educated Americans can recite the names of at least a few of the principal figures of twentieth-century art—Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock, maybe Jasper Johns—but ask about the architects of the same era and the only name you are almost guaranteed to hear is Frank Lloyd Wright.
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The New Republic
The uncanny beauty of Peter Zumthor’s out-of-the-way buildings.Over a decade ago, I trundled my good-natured family across miles of southern Switzerland to see every building I could by Peter Zumthor, who is this year’s winner of the Pritzker Prize. Then as now, most of Zumthor’s work was off the beaten track, not only literally but metaphorically, little known to the general public although …
The New Republic
Jean Nouvel
The Pritzker Architecture Prize is commonly described as “the Nobel Prize of architecture.” It was indeed modeled on the Nobel, and its winners, like Nobel laureates, receive a bronze medal and a cash award. Yet the imputed equivalence between the two prizes is misleading. Alfred Nobel created his prize to reward specific and identifiable accomplishments that advance knowledge or create…
The New Republic
A FRIEND RECENTLY TOLD me that his most important pedagogical tool as an architect is this maxim: the architect’s primary ethical responsibility is to be the guardian of the public realm, in contrast to the myriad others who currently configure our built landscape— clients, politicians, contractors, developers, and NIMBY-driven “community action” committees. The public realm includes not only cult…
The New Republic
The High Line New York City Millennium Park Chicago Citygarden St. Louis A common plaint of contemporary social criticism is that American society has become more an archipelago than a nation, increasingly balkanized into ethnic, class, faith, and interest groups whose members rarely interact meaningfully with people whose affiliations they do not in large measure share. The pervasiveness of this …
Bridging disciplines—literally and figuratively—has become a concern du jour for colleges and universities as multidisciplinary collaborations continue to proliferate.
The Met Breuer, housed in the revamped concrete building that Marcel Breuer designed for the Whitney Museum, launched with a survey show whose “unfinished” theme chimes with the rough materiality of the modernist architectural landmark.