American Institute of Architects
AIA
AIA
‘Do you want to be relevant?’, was Ole Bouman’s rhetorical opening. ‘Yes’, nodded his audience. Of course, agreed Bouman, and he then showed them five ways to be relevant. - You keep doing your work like you’ve always done- You try to be contemporar…
Peter Nietzke and Elisabeth Blum, both architects and authors of the publication FavelaMetropolis, delivered an optimistic story about Brazilian slums like Copacabana and Favela-Bairro. It wasn’t that they were positive about life in the slum, which …
The turnout for both days was somewhat disappointing. Were architects too busy working? Or were they enjoying a long Pentecost weekend? The room has only half filled, mainly with speakers, most of them architects attached to schools and architects fr…
The story is familiar to everyone by now. Last year the volume of construction work in Peking equalled that in whole Europe; a skyscraper is completed every single day in Shanghai; and Chongqing numbers 31.7 inhabitants. Every well-intended study of …
How can you be engaged in a polemic about something that doesn’t even exist? That depressing thought hit me during the ‘Projective Landscape’ debate staged by Stylos. The aim was to pinpoint the latest developments in architectur…
'The clues of what we created during our career and wrote about architecture and urbanism can be found in Bob's first building »Mother's House«. From contradiction and complexity to communicative architecture, and from interior public spaces to the »…
Given the wider economic and social context of late capitalism and all the intensively discussed problems of globalisation today, one has to question the role that architecture and architects play and should play. Oppositional architecture must of co…
Roemer van Toorn introduced Dubai with a quote from the American writer Mike Davis. In his article ‘Fear and Money in Dubai’ (New Left Review, 2006), Davis writes that Dubai is one big gated community, a neo-liberal dream turned real in…
Building ProcessThough even his complex forms cause many a mouth to drop open in wonderment, Greg Lynn's design method is every bit as interesting as the end result. In recent years, however, his pioneering work has shifted emphasis - spurred no doub…