"The premise is that the services for the building, such as ducts, sewage pipes and lifts, are located on the exterior to maximise space in the interior. The style originated with Michael Webb's 1957 student project for a Furniture Manufacturers Association building in High Wycombe.[1][2][3] Webb coi..."
"Jackson Pollock's painting Number 1, 1949, is a swirl of multi-colored, spaghettied paint, dripped, flung and slung across a 5-by-8-foot canvas. It's a textured work — including nails and a bee (we'll get to that later) — and in the nearly 70 years since its creation, it's attracted a fair bit of dust, dirt and grime."
"That's where conservator Chris Stavroudis comes in: His job is to clean the painting using swabs, solvents, and tiny brushes. For the last several months, he's been hard at work, once a week, in full view of the public, in a gallery at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles."
"Pollock used all sorts of paints — oil paint, house paint, car paint, radiator paint — and they all aged and got dirty in different ways. Working with the Getty Conservation Institute, Stavroudis did tests to see what kind of cleaning was needed."
"It is also not surprising that Trump the architecture critic has no love for FBI HQ, one of the most reviled examples of the maligned Brutalist style. In the public imagination, capital-B Brutalism—the postwar fad named for béton brut, French for raw concrete, and defined by its heavy, cast-concrete forms—tends to be lumped in with both the shoddy, underfunded modernism of public housing projects and the space-age experiments that followed. As Julia Gatley and Stuart King write in Brutalism Resurgent, a 2016 anthology, brutalist came to be “a pejorative term used to describe monolithic buildings of raw concrete construction that impose themselves on their surroundings.” In the New York that shaped Trump’s aesthetics, that description would have suited affordable housing projects like Waterside Plaza, River Park Towers, Chatham Towers, and Tracey Towers—the antitheses of Trump’s new brand. The far right appears to be leading a broader backlash against architecture self-evidently built with 20th-century technology. Such structures, in addition to their perceived deviance from the “Western traditions” venerated by American fascists, represent the tastes and lifestyles of America’s treacherous urban elite. "
"Giant hats, portly pigs, and drive-thru donuts."
"Tim De Chant on why it's not a good idea to put trees on skyscrapers."
I never understood the appeal of McMansions. If you want to build a house of modern materials, why wouldn't you do a modern design rather then pretending to be old fashioned look make out of vinyl? Why wouldn't a modern home look more like Frank Lloyd Wright's designs, with lots of plate glass and long roof lines and lush landscaping around?
"Immortalized through photographs, drawings, and stories, buildings that have been demolished or completely renovated exist in the realm known as “lost architecture.” Either for economic or aesthetic reasons, the old gets torn down for the new, often to the disdain of community members and architects. But demolished buildings tell a story about the ever-changing politics of preservation—and often, they tell it far better than buildings that were actually preserved ever could. As the architectural landscape continues to change around us, it is important to recognize our past, even if its traces have been eliminated from the physical world."