Word: architect
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. JOHN HEJDUK, 71, architect whose brooding ruminations on the field filled 21 books and made him a revered educator and theorist; of cancer; in New York City...
...oldest question in the various worlds of design. If it weren't for constant change, how could anyone prove he or she was designing in the first place? Priests, waiters, violinists--some people can go on doing pretty much what they did 30 years ago. But if an architect proposes the same building today that she would have produced in 1970, she isn't designing things, she's just making them, the way Colonial American cabinetmakers used to bang out identical highboys from the diagrams in old British copybooks. Innovation is one of the engines of a market society...
What impressed senior writer Richard Lacayo, who wrote the opening essay and profiled architect Greg Lynn, was the evangelical zeal of his subject, Lynn, who has a degree in philosophy as well as one in architecture. "He's a very animated talker, really a proselytizer." Senior editor Belinda Luscombe found herself fascinated with the social consciousness of Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who has made ingenious use of cardboard to build elegant homes for refugees. Senior reporter Daniel S. Levy writes about landscape architect Julie Bargmann, who turns industrial wastelands into places of beauty while preserving their gritty heritage. Says...
There are a few ineluctable facts about buildings. They are expensive, time consuming and labor intensive to make. They are strongest if built from the sturdiest materials. Well, no, on all counts. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has built homes, pavilions and churches, some of them permanent, using little more than cardboard tubes. "I was interested in weak materials," says Ban, 42. "Whenever we invent a new material or new structural system, a new architecture comes out of it." Ironically, Ban may be closer to the old modernist ideals than many who build today in glass and steel. He wants beauty...
...proper-thinking modernist architect in the mid-1950s would have given London's Bankside Power Station much chance of making it into the canon of modern architecture. An enormous, darkly lowering hulk of brick, it dominated the south bank of the Thames like a factory, which in fact it was. But more valuable buildings have been lost to economic boom and proactive aesthetics than were ever ruined by decay and indifference. Nobody tore down the Bankside Power Station because none could agree on a use for its site. It just lay there, an unloved, comatose and grimy princess, waiting...