Viewpoints

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

At Rem Koolhaas’s Countryside, the Medium Doesn’t Fit the Message—If There is One

The memelike exhibition will please crowds of most stripes, but it’s doomed by an excess of unorganized, sentimentalist content.

Viewpoints

Paris Exhibition Gives Charlotte Perriand Her Due

Inventing the Modern World foregrounds the French architect-designer's inimitable talent, while also playing up her spirit of collaboration.

Viewpoints

You Can’t Spell SOM Without Gordon Bunshaft

Relatively little was known about the driving force behind many of SOM's most accomplished buildings. A new book fills in the gaps of Bunshaft's biography.

Viewpoints

Humans Must Be Displaced From the Center of Design

In probing the relationship between humans and nature, two major exhibitions question the very foundations of design practice.

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Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism Offers a Snapshot of Modern Architecture’s Beginnings

Though still largely unknown, the Belgian-born architect and artist forged ideas and places—including the Bauhaus’s predecessor—that defined 20th-century design.

Viewpoints

In X-Ray Architecture, the Metaphor Escapes Control

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

Viewpoints

Exhibitions on Both Sides of the Atlantic Ponder Future Life—on Earth, and Beyond

In London and Philadelphia, curators prod at the ethics, anxieties, and material culture of humanity as we gear towards a future interplanetary society.

Viewpoints

At the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Wondering “Can Architects Curate?”

Despite some smart research, this edition's glut of information and ignorance of context reflects architecture's crisis of curation, our critic writes.

Viewpoints

Deconstructing Degrowth at the Oslo Architecture Triennale

The 2019 edition of the triennale imagines a world free from the pursuit of GDP—but is it enough?

Viewpoints

“Southern Exposure” Uncovers the Proud Architectural Legacy of Chicago’s South Side

In his new book, the journalist and photographer Lee Bey directs readers to some of Chicago's greatest architectural treasures, nearly all of them hiding in plain sight.

Viewpoints

RIBA Exhibition Tells the Oft-Neglected Story of the “British Bauhaus”

Before moving on to America, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and other Bauhaus protagonists spent a productive spell in the U.K.

Viewpoints

London Exhibition Interrogates the “Radical” in Radical Architecture

At the Royal Academy of Arts, scores of architects—Denise Scott Brown, Peter Cook, and Patrik Schumacher, among them—show what being radical means to them.

Viewpoints

Urban Renewal, A Blight on Other American Cities, Sparked an Architectural Renaissance in Pittsburgh

The editors of the new volume Imagining the Modern argue that the reviled federal program was responsible for creating the postcard Pittsburgh.

Viewpoints

Finding Women Architects in Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

Fictional depictions like Bernadette form a vital accompaniment to initiatives that seek to help women architects flourish.

Viewpoints

Despite Its Oft-Copied Look, the Sea Ranch Still Provides Rich Architectural and Social Lessons for Today

An exhibition at SFMOMA doesn’t dwell on the development’s prehistory and afterlife, but rather tries to recover some of its original sensibility.