Parsing distinctions between architecture and “mere” building has been a preoccupation of thinkers and practitioners since ancient times. The very difficulty of defining neat disciplinary boundaries ...

Adolf Loos suffered from progressive hearing loss. As a child, his hearing was poor, and by the time he reached his mid-50s, his condition had deteriorated to the point that he became dependent on a ...

Sean Canty, assistant professor of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and founder of Studio Sean Canty, invited Casey Cadwallader, American fashion designer and Creative Director of ...

It is increasingly clear that one of the major female architects of the 20th century was the Italian Lina Bo Bardi, who emigrated to Brazil in 1945 and made a name for herself there. But this claim is ...

I grew up in a domestic world that seemed to hospitably reconfigure itself around our family’s evolving interests and enterprises. As my younger brother’s model horse and airplane collections expanded ...

March 2006 is the fiftieth anniversary of the First Urban Design Conference at Harvard—an event that, under the leadership of José Luis Sert, marked a beginning of the self-conscious pursuit of urban ...

SmithGroup, rendering of the renovated Michigan Central Station, Detroit, 2018. Today, the lures of corporate investment are baited with promises of jobs and revitalized urban economies. Cities, in ...

Perhaps the most telling thing I found is that the definition of a charrette has changed. Most professional architects now equate charrettes with interactive brainstorming sessions. These kinder, ...

Like all animals, humans are programmed for survival. Fight or flight? Duck! Run for cover! Our reflex, when we register fear, is to protect ourselves. Architecture’s answer, “shelter,” is said to ...

I was born a Sloterdijkian. When, thirty years ago, I was preparing the proofs of Laboratory Life, I had included in the pictures, to the disgust of my scientist informants, a black-and-white ...

Shortly before his untimely death, the Spanish theorist and critic Ignasi de Solà-Morales commented to me that “If European architects or architectural scholars wished to study contemporary ...

It’s 2017. The millennium is in its teenage years—and it shows. The world is acting out—making rash, impulsive decisions whose […] ...