Architecture
Architecture is generously sponsored by Adam Bartos and Tony Bechara.
In this era of overwhelming digital production in architecture, it is unclear what gets discarded and what gets maintained in the ocean of virtual tools and information. Contemporary digital archives and contemporary, digitally-designed buildings both seem to continually overwrite themselves.
Sleek and shiny, and tall enough to create its own private cloud cover, the City of Austin’s first supertall seeks to be “a building for our time.” I take this declaration as an invitation to question the assumptions being made about my hometown. What versions of past and present Austin would allow such an unequivocal claim?
Hiroshi Kaneko and Edgar Rodriguez have a conversation around Herzog & de Meuron’s Calder Gardens, Philadelphia.
In their still young career, Bruther, the French architecture office founded by Stéphanie Bru & Alexandre Theriot, has shifted architecture into a direction characterized by spatial richness and exposed, technical construction. Their impact is clear to architects in the field.
The “Birth of Magic Design,” states Kiesler in the first chapter of part three, describes the moment when “man discovers his capacity to convert his own body into a dream image through painting or make-up.”
Public Sentiment, curated by artist Peter Scott, is an exhibition at Citygroup exploring how New York’s built environment and inhabitants are changing.
In the summer of 2025, I set out to recreate the iconic Route 66 road trip memorialized in popular culture from the 1930s to the 1980s. While images may last forever in memory, materials cannot.
Today, the housing crisis is affecting cities and their inhabitants globally. The house and its larger type, “housing,” are amongst the most prevalent structures that architects and designers are commissioned to design. Can the work of architects de-commodify the home, giving agency to alternative ownership models and familiar configurations?
In a highly technologically mediated present where questions concerned with dis/embodiment become more urgent, the continued work and practice of sound-art pioneer Bernhard Leitner is increasingly relevant.
Bruce Goff, the flamboyant, high-pitched, soft-spoken man who Hollywood star Leslie Jordan would have been perfect to play in a biopic, is the brilliant architect who redefined living in his long-standing career. From Oklahoma to Chicago and beyond, Goff brings queerness into the limelight for his long awaited showcase, rightfully named Material Worlds, at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Regenstein Hall.
As house lights dim, the skeletal frame of a car appears; gliding, it seems to drive itself from the wings towards center stage. Its welded steel form is partially clad in transparent plastic that cocoons fog rolling across the stage, at once evoking a bootleg greenhouse and the cybernetic endoskeleton of an assassin from The Terminator.
MOS Architects opens Public Spaces, NY with a straightforward conceptual assertion: “Public spaces are legal constructions as much as they are spatial.” This claim dislodges public space from any assumption of neutrality or inevitability.
What follows is a triptych in prose: a painting, a film, and another painting. At center, a film of an architect building a pavilion in a garden; on the left, an image of an old tree trunk; on the right, a handsome floral still life.
A day after interviewing Thomas Phifer, the New York City architect, I went to the Glenstone Museum’s Pavilions outside of Washington, DC which he designed and which opened in 2018. The fascinating impact of that trip was not about my experience visiting, but my memory the days and weeks afterwards.
The recent exhibition Four Five Six at a83 in SoHo is a sharply focused presentation of architecture through the lens of OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen (hereafter OFFICE), or more accurately, through the photographers and artists they have chosen to frame their practice.
Jeanne Gang is state-of-the-art. The work of her office Studio Gang is embedded in the contemporary world of building. One unexpected realization of this interview is the dominance of architecture models in the design process—this explains the novelty and formal experimentation across projects that might otherwise be non-specific.
Developed from a theory seminar and a design research studio at the UIC School of Architecture, All Magnificent and Wild: Notes on Chicago Residential Hotels reconstructs the controversial history of Chicago’s residential hotels through forty case studies, each redrawn in plan and cabinet axonometric and correlated with archival material, texts, and historical maps
In Relapse, the penultimate number of Erin Cuevas’s Ouroboros, three dancers appear suspended within a field of projected digital images. Striped vertical lines mark each body. As they begin to glide up and down the thirty-six dancing poles installed in the Everson Museum of Art’s lower-level gallery, the lines contort, producing languid contour maps across the surface of each warped figure.
I was recently walking around NoHo and stopped by Herzog & de Meuron’s apartment building on Bond Street—an undisputed icon of the early 2000s that gleams with the enthusiasm and excess proper of the architecture of its time. Today, these qualities for a new building would raise more than a few eyebrows—still, I like this building; it is eccentric, bold, and, unsurprisingly, precise.
The Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture in Almaty, Kazakhstan emerges somewhat in reverse, envisioned from the outset as an institution to fill a specific building. Tselinny’s mission was largely shaped by navigating the technical and ideological limits prompted by renovating a historic structure.
Temptation of Influence is a collage. Multiple cameras, mismatched textures, a refusal to include a 6K drone shot.
Architect Frida Escobedo is the newly appointed designer of a major addition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work articulates a form of architecture that resists easy legibility. Drawing from language, textiles, and numbers, her work is notably recessive rather than heroic—a new vision of architecture for a major institution.
The proximity to real imperial power makes the presence of Armin Linke’s Negotiation Tables (2025) and Margherita Moscardini’s The Stairway (2025) much more jarring, although neither work, at least in the wall text, makes explicit mention of genocide or land displacement underway in Palestine today.
The exhibition Public Pools is on view at Citygroup downtown. The show takes a historic subject and animates it, using architectural imagination to show us how community really is rooted in design—and that we can activate existing spaces rather than always building, selling, and consuming new ones.
In our conversation, the French architect talks about the innovative vision at the core of this particular design. Nouvel reflects on the tension between permanence and mutability, speaks of his notion of the “plasticity” of the contemporary museum space, and of architecture as an act of quietly radical experimentation.
The architects Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg, who founded their office SO–IL in 2008, are important figures in New York City architecture. They make it look easy, but they’re doing something hard—helping New York change its mind.
History repeats itself; so does our reaction to it. The overwhelming presence of crisis today, from self-righteous wars to the rise of alt-right politics, throws us back into the turmoil of the early twentieth century, which fueled the pioneering view of Mannerism as an art proper to a troubled world.
The Giardini: a garden, a respite, an origin, a problem. The place where the Biennale began in 1895 is a park carved out of Venice by Napoleon. As you escape the blazing sun and the cacophony of group exhibitions into this thicket of green, six pavilions want to tell you about themselves.
Art Basel and its satellite fairs, Liste and the Basel Social Club (BSC), operate as sites of spectacle that occupy a fragmentary urban temporality. The art fair does not construct space but rather manages flows, where circulation and infrastructure replace form.
Cutting up a building is not a new idea. Gordon Matta-Clark, an American artist trained in architecture and a New York native, famously took up a chainsaw to violently cut into buildings bare-chested.
A Capsule in Time, designed by Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), the Dhaka-based firm led by the eponymous Bangladeshi architect, this year’s Serpentine Pavilion is now open, but always, delicately, closing.
Perched on a rocky bluff along the southern coast of France, the modernist villa E-1027 occupies a singular position in architectural history—both a paradigmatic work of early modernism and a site of erasure, appropriation, and contested authorship.