Tented love: how Senegal created a spectacular new African architecture
After independence in 1960, the country cast off western influences and forged a new African style full of triangular forms, rocket-shaped obelisks and rammed earth.
https://theguardian.com/artanddesig…
San Francisco’s Debt to Finland
Eighty years ago, two California designers traveled to Helsinki to see master architect Alvar Aalto.
https://altaonline.com/culture/arch…
Can Companies Force Themselves to Do Good?
A new kind of corporate structure, the perpetual-purpose trust, can make the values of pro-social companies permanent.
https://newyorker.com/business/curr…
Tauba Auerbach @ SFMOMA
Tauba Auerbach’s first museum survey at SFMOMA reveals a comprehensive body of work that exhibits no signature style.
https://squarecylinder.com/2022/01/…
Scholar Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, Justice for Palestine, Critical Race Theory & More
World-renowned author, activist and professor Angela Davis talks about the prison abolition movement from her time as a Black Panther leader to today.
https://democracynow.org/2021/12/28…
Tracing a Winding Path from Cuba to Florida to Maine with Poet Richard Blanco
A poet’s journey toward home.
https://newengland.com/yankee-magaz…
Ai Weiwei Is Trying to Find His Way Home
The artist and activist on his new memoir, the true cost of freedom, and why home is sometimes about much more than where the heart is.
https://harpersbazaar.com/culture/a…
Joan Didion and the Voice of America
No country but America could have produced Joan Didion. And no other country would have tolerated her.
https://newyorker.com/culture/posts…
Nikki Giovanni Has Made Peace With Her Hate
“The door is open,” Nikki Giovanni told me, “and if I’m saying something that you don’t like, you can go out the door. Because I’m going to say what I think I should say.”
https://nytimes.com/interactive/202…
Frederick Fisher and Partners’ Municipal Building is a Green Systems Champion
Santa Monica City Hall East features state-of-the-art green building systems behind its straight-laced facade.
https://metropolismag.com/projects/…
Tribute: Richard Rogers (1933-2021)
When the author Deborah Copaken Kogan opened Richard Rogers’s sock drawer, she started to cry.
https://architecturalrecord.com/art…
Full Circle: The Holt/Smithson Foundation
A poem is both a centripetal and centrifugal force. It concentrates and distills language at the same time that it spins off sparks of meaning.
https://brooklynrail.org/2020/12/ar…
Not Everything Is “Architecture”
Politics are currently polarized. This creates volatility and the potential for violence in the public realm. The form of political messages matters. Sometimes that form is violence, which is bad. Not everything has to be binary.
https://commonedge.org/not-everythi…
Design: A Happening Life
In memory of bell hooks.
https://lionsroar.com/design-a-happ…
Michael Murphy on the Architecture of Health
It has been a surprisingly rapid ascent for MASS Design Group.
https://commonedge.org/michael-murp…
A Bold New Environmental Center Helps Redeem a Former Brownfield Site in Chicago
From our pals at Valerio Dewalt Train and Media Objectives.
https://metropolismag.com/projects/…
On Jasper Johns
“I think that there’s a clear and strong ethics in the way in which he conducts himself, a deep respect for the viewer that is just in everything he says and everything he does, and it’s fully, deeply reflected in the work.”
https://brooklynrail.org/2021/12/ar…
My 15-Minute City: Lake Merritt, Oakland, California
I'd dreamed of living in San Francisco since I was a teenager. In my early 30s, I finally moved there from my native Michigan.
https://commonedge.org/my-15-minute…
Frantz Fanon’s Enduring Legacy
The post-colonial thinker’s seminal book, “The Wretched of the Earth,” described political oppression in psychological terms. What are its lessons for our current moment?
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2021…
Tony Kushner, Oracle of the Upper West Side
When Steven Spielberg asked Kushner, America’s most important living playwright, to take on ‘West Side Story,’ he thought, ‘He’s lost his mind.’ But he dared.
https://nytimes.com/2021/11/30/t-ma…
How to Deprogram a Parent in 7 Easy Steps by LiAnne Yu
Do you have an elderly parent who has fallen victim to internet conspiracy theories?
https://theseventhwave.co/how-to-de…
Watch a Never-Before-Aired James Baldwin Interview From 1979
Buried by ABC at the time, the segment reveals a unique glimpse into Baldwin’s private life—as well as his resounding criticism about white fragility, as blisteringly relevant today as it was in 1979.
https://esquire.com/entertainment/b…
A Wider Patch of Sky
Javier Zamora and Francisco Cantú met at a literary event devoted to the US–Mexico border in the winter of 2018. The two writers struck up a friendship that was at first tentative and uncertain.
https://granta.com/wider-patch-of-s…
Opinion: We can’t pedal our way out of the climate crisis
On September 1st, three days after Hurricane Ida’s deadly landfall in Louisiana, what was widely billed as the storm’s “remnants” swept through the New York City metro area, submerging massive portions of its roads and transit system in floodwater and leaving at least 52 dead in stranded cars and illegal basement apartments.
https://archpaper.com/2021/11/opini…
The End of Editors: The New Practice of The Self-Promoting Architect
When the 2008 Great Recession destroyed advertising revenue for all of publishing and limited the cash that architects had for PR and photographers, the established way of promoting architects and architecture was brutally compromised.
https://archdaily.com/971985/the-en…
Adam Pendleton’s Radical Typography as Protest
Spray paint, bold black, and capital letters are everywhere in Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/adam-p…
