Common Edge: The Latest Architecture and News

This article was originally published on Common Edge as "Kate Wagner on McMansion Hell, Criticism, and Her Love of Cycling."

Contrary to movie myth, there is no such thing as an overnight sensation. The moment when a cultural presence bursts upon the scene, seemingly fully formed, is almost always preceded by unwitnessed years of DIY training and single-minded obsession. Such is the case for Kate Wagner, who broke the architectural internet in 2016 with the introduction of McMansion Hell, a sharp and hilarious skewering of the bloated American home, in all its garish and desperate striving. A year later, the real estate listing site Zillow served the then-23-year-old Wagner with a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that her use of photographs violated copyright (even though they didn’t own the photographs either!). It was a clumsy move, resulting in an eventual corporate about-face and scads of free publicity for McMansion Hell.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

My mother is a psychologist, so our family talks a lot about emotion. More specifically, we discuss the experience of emotion, because, as she  likes to remind me and my sisters, “We don’t think our feelings—we feel them, in our bodies.” According to my mother, it’s this experience of emotion that gives our lives a sense of meaning and vitality; as a result, her work isn’t about intellectual insight or abstract theories, but rather about giving her patients a new experience of themselves in the world.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Nathaniel Kahn’s 2003 documentary, My Architect, was at its beating heart a son’s search for his father. The film, which was nominated for an Academy Award and will be re-released later this year, explored the complicated domestic life of Louis Kahn: three children, by three different partners, all of whom were kept largely in the dark about the existence of each other. But the film was as much about the work of Louis Kahn as it was about his personal life. And, as a result, it ignited a renewed interest in his buildings, both in the mainstream culture and across architectural academia.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

There is an astonishing degree of complexity, order, and beauty in the natural world. Even so, and especially within the realm of living things, nothing is more complex than it needs to be to sustain its existence. Every aspect of the system serves a purpose. If it does not, the unneeded component eventually ceases to exist in future generations. Even with these constraints of resource and energy efficiency, we find boundless beauty and harmony in the natural world. Contrast nature’s “just the right amount of complexity” to the way many architects design buildings today. While nature is only as complex as it needs to be, architects and designers add excessive and inessential complexity to their buildings and landscapes when none is warranted.

This article was originally published on Common Edge as "When It Comes to Climate Change, Traditional Practice Is Broken."

Sustainable design in the United States is for many a sort of Rorschach test. The construction industry is either making steady progress toward the ultimate goal of a carbon-free building sector, or it’s moving entirely too slowly, missing key targets as the ecological clock keeps ticking. The perplexing truth to all of this is: both are ostensibly true. In recent decades the industry has become significantly more energy efficient. We’ve added building stock but flattened the energy curve. The cost of renewables continues to drop. But way more is required, much more quickly. At the same time, huge hurdles remain. Without a renewable grid and stringent energy codes, it’s hard to see how we can fully decarbonize the building sector in even 20 years, let alone at the timeline suggested by increasingly worried climate scientists. It’s the classic good news/bad news scenario (or vice-versa, depending on your mood).

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

From the hills behind the City Hall in my adopted hometown of Ventura, California, it’s less than 1,000 yards southward to the Pacific Ocean. This constrained piece of topography creates a small urban gem of a downtown: streetscapes, restaurants, stores, offices, residences, parking garages, and a beachfront promenade, all within eight or so square blocks, creating a lively streetlife that connects a historic downtown to the beach.

This article was originally published on Common Edge

In a Common Edge article, I briefly discussed a concept that I call the “Triple Bottom Lie,” which posits that more people, plus more consumption by each person, plus an economic system completely dependent on the aforementioned items, can just keep working forever, without consequences. Historically, the United States has accepted the economic shibboleth of endless growth because it reduced class conflict; a rising tide (supposedly) lifted all boats, rafts and yachts included. We are, however, approaching the limits of growth, from both a resource standpoint (we’re running out of raw materials) and a technological standpoint (our inventions are progressively less revolutionary).

This article was originally published on Common Edge as "Blair Kamin Ends His Run as Architecture Critic of the Chicago Tribune"

Last Friday, January 15, Blair Kamin ended his 28-year run as architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune. I have known and admired Kamin for almost two decades. His writing on architecture and the built environment was sharp and lucid; he was not afraid to offend the less than delicate sensibilities of those in power.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1999, Kamin was an activist critic, very much in the tradition of Ada Louise Huxtable and Allan Temko. Late last week, I reached out to Kamin to talk about the role of critics, and the end of his singular run.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

For most people, calling a place “sacred” designates it as an important location, one usually associated with spirituality. It might be the setting for religious rituals (the sacred space of a church, synagogue, or mosque), a spot where some event described as “miraculous” has occurred (such as the reported sighting of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, France, which became a pilgrimage site), or a place which held the body of deity (think of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built upon what is believed the be the tomb of Jesus Christ). 

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

In 2012, the Yale School of Architecture held a conference on the topic of drawing. It posed a couple of provocative questions: Was the study and practice of architecture already beyond it? Was it is even necessary to draw in order to be an architect? Mark Alan Hewitt’s new book, Draw in Order to See (ORO Editions), is a resounding affirmation that not only must architects draw, they cannot help but do so—it’s like breathing. The connection between the hand and the eye, between a soft pencil and a toothy sheaf of paper, is how architects, in fact, “see.”

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

I attended graduate school, in geography, in Tucson, Arizona, United States, in the late 1990s. Tucson draws fame from a number of things, including its Mexican-American heritage, its chimichangas, its sky islands, and its abundant population of saguaro cacti.

This article was originally published on Common Edge as "Presenting Architecture as Progressive, but Practicing Through Exclusion."

For a profession that likes to congratulate itself about how well-meaning it is, and sees itself as liberal, diverse, open, and progressive, British architecture has a serious problem with diversity of pretty much every kind. It is dominated by people from well-off backgrounds. It trains a lot of brilliant female architects but doesn’t pay them as much as men, and loses many of them after 30 when they are not supported in balancing work and family life. Its ethnic makeup is very, very white, considering that it’s 2020. A supposed beacon of success is the acceptance of the LGBTQ community within the field, but as with women and those from and religious and ethnic minorities, stories of unprofessional comments, inappropriate jokes, and insidious forms of jovially “innocent” othering and the diminution of identity-specific concerns abound.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Pretty much everyone hates waiting rooms. Here are four statistics about them from a survey administered by Software Advice, an Austin, Texas-based consultation group: 80% of respondents said being told the accurate wait time would either completely or somewhat minimize their frustration; 40% said they would be willing to see another physician if it meant a shorter waiting time; 20% would be willing to pay an extra fee for quicker service; and 97%—virtually all of us!—are frustrated by wait times. And now, waiting rooms, in addition to being some of the dreariest places on earth, have become one of the easiest places in the world to get sick.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles is the latest initiative spearheaded by Christopher Hawthorne, the Chief Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles. Since leaving his post as architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times in March 2018, Hawthorne has carved out a unique and surprisingly wide ranging role at City Hall. Recently I reached out to him to talk about his two-plus years in government, the latest “ideas” challenge (as he describes Low-Rise), and other issues facing Los Angeles.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

In 2005, while I was an architecture student at Columbia, visions of Bilbao danced through my classmates’ heads as they flocked to an architecture studio whose brief was to design an all-new Guggenheim Museum on Governors Island. I will admit that the prospect of exhibiting a spectacle for Columbia’s end-of-year show was seductive. But conducting field research for that class required only subway and ferry rides, while a studio offering in the historic preservation program promised a trip to Rome. I passed on creating another paper icon for New York and traveled to the Esposizione Universale Roma for one week that fall.

This article was originally published on Common Edge

I am a relative newcomer to the Midwest, and of all the things that have captured my enduring attention, one of them is water towers. In my adopted home state, Minnesota, they are everywhere. These top-heavy engineering marvels rise to well over 150 feet tall and assume all manner of shape and metallurgical prowess, from the pedesphere and fluted column structures, colloquially known as the “golf ball-on-a-tee” and “flashlight,” respectively, to the multicolumned spheroid and ellipsoid tanks that, as legend has it, were the targets of frantic gunfire during Orson Welles’ broadcast of “War of the Worlds.” I can attest that when the day’s twilight settles in, those multilegged towers—or, rather, their silhouettes—can appear otherworldly.

This article was originally published on Common Edge as "The Genius, Heart and Humility of Indian Architect B.V. Doshi"

I’m sitting in a busy suburban coffee-and-donut shop with the quiet, grandfatherly Indian architect, Jitendra Vaidya. When I started my life as an architecture intern in the late 90s, Jitendra was one of the most experienced technical designers I knew. Equally comfortable weighing the relative merits of various flashing details as he is discussing abstract design concepts, Jitendra is an old-school, universal architect. After more than half a century in a profession famous for grinding deadlines, Jitendra still maintains a joyful twinkle in his eye when he talks about architecture. So it’s no surprise that Jitendra is visibly animated today as he tells me about his teacher, the man who was just recognized as one of the world’s greatest living architects, B.V. Doshi.

This article was originally published on Common Edge

I spent four glorious days in Copenhagen in 2017 and left with an acute case of urban envy. (I kept thinking: It’s like..an American Portland—except better.) Why can’t we do cities like this in the United States? That’s the question an urban nerd like me asks while strolling the famously pedestrian-friendly streets, as hordes of impossibly blond and fit Danes bicycle briskly past.