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Kanye West's New Architecture Venture: Who, What, Why and... Really?

On Sunday evening, rapper Kanye West took to Twitter to announce the creation of a new architecture wing for his popular Yeezy company. With “Yeezy Home,” West is “looking for architects and industrial designers who want to make the world better,” leading to a flurry of speculation, excitement—and a certain amount of ridicule—across the online world.

Whether or not you welcome the news, or believe it will be realized, there is undoubtedly an interesting relationship between West and architecture which merits exploration, and which may provide clues as to Yeezy Home’s future, if indeed it has one. With that in mind, we dive into three questions: How likely is Yeezy Home to happen? What might the architecture of Yeezy Home look like? And how can architects get involved?

The Architecture of Chernobyl: Past, Present, and Future

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Abandoned amusement park, Pripyat. Image © Flickr user oinkylicious licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

April 26th saw the 32nd anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, with the explosion of the Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine causing the direct deaths of 31 people, the spreading of radioactive clouds across Europe, and the effective decommissioning of 19 miles of land in all directions from the plant. Thirty-two years later, a dual reading of the landscape is formed: one of engineering extremes, and one of eeriness and desolation.

As the anniversary of the disaster and its fallout passes, we have explored the past, present, and future of the architecture of Chernobyl, charting the journey of a landscape which has burned and smoldered, but may yet rise from the ashes.

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