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Reviews
How to Blow Up a Pipeline, directed by Daniel Goldhaber, opened in the US on April 7, 2023.
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is no different.
The Laboratory of the Future, the Eighteenth International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, is open through November 26.
Lesley Lokko’s sprawling, dense Biennale asks us to engage different representational languages. It’s a slow burn, but finding new legibility takes a moment.
The Laboratory of the Future, the Eighteenth International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, is open through November 26.
Lesley Lokko’s curation of the Central Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale offers a bright future.
Various national pavilions at the Venice Architecture Biennale
A tour through the Venice Biennale National Pavilions
New York’s foremost memoirist-crank blames the “normals”—influencers, neo-yuppies, consumers with bland taste—for the city’s decline.
Architect, Verb: The New Language of Building, by Reinier de Graaf. Verso, 272 pp., $26.95.
In which a nascent futurist, seasoned operator, and master craftsman attends to his legends
Metropolitan Transportation Authority R211 Subway Car, built by Kawasaki Railway Manufacturing, 2023
The new R211 subway cars represent a high-tech distraction from the system’s deeper woes.
The Constant Future: A Century of the Regional Plan was on view in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall from October 7 to October 25, 2022.
An RPA-themed exhibition performed the usual lip service to social equity without addressing the inequality baked into prevailing models of development.
SOS BRUTALISM—Save the Concrete Monsters! was open at the Yale School of Architecture from August 25 to December 10, 2022.
Just as the theory that image-based feeds instigated the brutalism revival never quite checked out, neither does SOS Brutalism’s stated raison d’être.
Notes on Downtown: Los Angeles 2007–2022 by Désirée van Hoek, 2023 (self-published).
Downtown LA represents an intentional failure of the built environment.
In Praise of Caves: Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico by Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, and Javier Senosiain, curated by Dakin Hart, was on view at the Noguchi Museum from October 19, 2022 to February 26, 2023.
On finding optimism at the Noguchi Museum
Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman. The MIT Press, 140 pp., $22.95
Architectures of Spatial Justice by Dana Cuff. The MIT Press, 304 pp., $34.95
As if the concept of “justice” alone weren’t complicated enough, adding spatial to it moves things into labyrinthine territory.
Unsupervised: Machine Hallucination by Refik Anadol is installed in a lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In Unsupervised, everything comes to you from the giant LED screen and aiming straight for your eyeballs. Call it blunt force psychedelia.
Gaetano Pesce Unframed was on view at Galerie56 from March 2 to May 8.
On the work of wily Italian designer Gaetano Pesce
Blank: Speculations on CLT, edited by Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara. Oro
Editions, 240 pp., $50.
It would be tempting to lump CLT in with the “post-digital” tendency in architecture. But that would be wrong.
Titanic: The Exhibition is on view at 526 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10011 through November 2023.
Like many disaster stories, the story of the Titanic continues to compel us because it contains so many traces of human choices and fallibility.