Viewpoints

The Politics of Adobe Architecture

Recent scholarship on earth architecture in America highlights larger issues concerning power, extraction, and Indigenous resistance to the settler state and capitalism. 

Viewpoints

How Dune and Poor Things Rely on Architecture History

This year's sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters are the latest in an ongoing relationship between architecture and science fiction.

Viewpoints

From Victorian Gardens to Corporate Biophilia, Nature Inside Unearths a History of Interior Plantings

Despite differences in motivation, context, and aims, Penny Sparke shows that bringing flora inside stands as a token of unspoiled nature, a reminder of what’s gone.

Viewpoints

With the Reissue of Reyner Banham’s Classic, Tracing the Megastructural Moment

The recent reissue of Banham's Megastructure helps mine the typology's precedents and points toward the ambitious movement's contemporary heirs.

Viewpoints

The Task at Hand: 100 Years of the Adjustable Desk Lamp

A technological breakthrough and a little-acknowledged bellwether of Modernism, the task lamp finally gets its due.

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How Russian Architects Tried to Build a New Socialist World Using “America” as Their Guide

Americanizm , an exhibit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, examines the USSR's ardent fascination with American technology and culture.

Viewpoints

That ’70s Thing: Why Young Architects Today Are Enthralled by Vintage Technologies

Designers have fixated on the visual culture that wrought Casio wrist watches and Superstudio. Mario Carpo explores the reasons why.

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In X-Ray Architecture, the Metaphor Escapes Control

Beatriz Colomina's new book overlooks the concrete cruelties of the designed environment.

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Sitting Alone in Public: How the Café Chair Defined Modern Urban Culture

Beginning with Thonet's innovations two centuries ago, the development of the café chair typology reflects upheavals in cities and design.

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Far from Being a Temple to Rationality, the Bauhaus Was a “Cauldron of Perversions”

Architectural historian Beatriz Colomina explores how the Bauhaus harbored deeply transgressive ideas and pedagogies.

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For a Time, Josep Lluís Sert’s Brawny Buildings Defined Modern Boston

Through his campus work, Sert left an incredible built legacy on the Boston area. But his building have taken some getting used to.

Viewpoints

How Landscape Architecture Hoped to Save the City

An exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum explores the intersection of landscape architecture and social reform at the turn of the 20th century.