Articles
Reviews
Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains by Chad Oppenheim and Andrea Gollin. Tra Publishing, 296 pp., $75.
Lairs are kingdoms for one, perfectly designed to each villain’s dystopian vision. Or utopian, depending on how you slice it.
Prior Art: Patents and the Nature of Invention in Architecture by Peter H. Christensen. MIT Press, 400 pp., $50.
Prior Art trades in architectural alembics: spaces that distill, refine, and elucidate Christensen’s crucial triad: “creativity, novelty, and property.”
Vivian Maier: Unseen Work is on view at Fotografiska through September 29.
Vivian Maier didn’t aim to exhaustively catalog her surroundings. What her work declares is that the ordinary cannot be exhausted.
Spatializing Reproductive Justice was on view this summer at the Center for Architecture.
Political art so often feels like a wish; Spatializing Reproductive Justice represented something like a real plan.
Dream House is a light and sound installation created by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, located at 275 Church Street.
Mercer Labs Museum of Art and Technology is located at 21 Dey Street.
Dream House does a lot with a little. Mercer Labs does a little with a lot.
Mapping Malcolm, edited by Najha Zigbi-Johnson. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 304 pp., $28.
Mapping Malcolm takes Harlem as a starting place for a global project of Black liberation.
Life and Trust, by Emursive, is currently running at 20 Exchange Place.
Life and Trust occupies Wall Street with craft cocktails and prebatched bromides.
Manor Lords, developed by Greg Styczeń (a.k.a. Slavic Magic), was released by Hooded Horse in April.
If Sim City arguably inspired legions of thirtysomething urban planners, there’s a strong chance Manor Lords will make at least one good historian of the medieval peasantry.
Jenny Holzer: Light Line, organized by Lauren Hinkson, is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through September 29.
At the Guggenheim, Jenny Holzer presides over a crumbling Babel of mixed messages.
Zachary Violette, The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019)
Zachary Violette’s insistence on the relevance of the norm over the exception leads to a more synchronic mode of analysis.
Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980, organized by Ana Elena Mallet and Amanda Forment, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through September 22.
A shockingly unfeeling and vague idea of home
On the Appearance of the World: A Future for Aesthetics in Architecture by Mark Foster Gage. University of Minnesota Press, 80 pp., $10.
For Mark Foster Gage, the main issue with suburbanization is its ugliness, for which the alleged failings of architectural education are held responsible.
The Architecture of Influence: The Myth of Originality in the Twentieth Century by Amanda Reeser Lawrence. University of Virginia Press, 280 pp., $50.
Is the myth of “pure originality” still a worthy target of criticism in 2024?
The Murder Factory: Life and Work of H. H. Holmes, First American Serial Killer by Alexandra Midal. Sternberg Press, 96 pp., $20.
In his fanaticism for capitalist optimization, H. H. Holmes was the equal or better of any industrial baron.
Walls, Windows and Blood was on view at Lehmann Maupin in New York City from February 8 through March 9.
harmony is fraught was on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles from January 11 through March 3.
Once radical in their challenge to religious and monarchical power, the assumptions undergirding the liberal humanist tradition—and its artwork—now feel
entrenched and flawed.
Vincent Scully: Architecture, Urbanism, and a Life in Search of Community by A. Krista Sykes. Bloomsbury, 278 pp., $115.
His supreme, tweedy confidence was softened with a vulnerability and kind of underdog spirit.