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Reviews
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.
Julie Becker (W)hole, curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan, was on view at Del Vaz Projects in Santa Monica, California, from February 4 to April 8, 2023.
Julie Becker spent her life in Los Angeles. She ended it there too.
Mass Support, curated by Curatorial Research Collective and designed by Office ca, was on view at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture from March 21 to May 7.
Unlike the city’s current modes of participatory planning, a recent City College exhibition seemed genuinely concerned with realizing the desires of residents.
Modern Architecture in Japan by Manfredo Tafuri. Mack Books, 256 pp., $28
Manfredo Tafuri’s first book—a study on Japanese modern architecture—offers a picture of a brilliant historian as a young critic.
Who Is the City For?: Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago by Blair Kamin, with photography by Lee Bey. University of Chicago Press, 312 pp., $29.
Blair Kamin’s “activism” is carefully modulated and deeply liberal in that it wants to preserve the status quo—in this case, a beautiful city skyline.
Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City by Robert M. Fogelson. Princeton University Press, 408 pp. $40
Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York by Annemarie H. Sammartino. Cornell University Press, 320 pp., $33
A pair of new books takes stock of Co-op City’s idealistic origins, brutal challenges, and lasting successes.
Radical Pedagogies, edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister. MIT Press, 416 pp., $60
Architecture builds norms, and Radical Pedagogies’ project is to question the discipline’s fundamental assumptions.
Vacant Spaces NY by Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, and MOS Architects. Actar, 608 pp., $50
Peeling back the brown paper on Manhattan’s vacant retail spaces
Edward Hopper’s New York, curated by Kim Conaty with Melinda Lang, was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 19, 2022, to March 5, 2023.
For Edward Hopper, New York was a fount of sights that he never tired of seeing or, indeed, painting.