a city of mirrors

    Downtown Houston in the 70s           In the average American city’s downtown, more than a fifth of total land is used solely for parking . In the most extreme cases, in places like Arlington, Texas, parking takes up almost half of the city’s area . By contrast, Central Park occupies only six percent of Manhattan’s land area . Despite these staggering numbers, forces both commercial and governmental have been constantly pushing developers to free up space for even more parking. Recently, however, several factors such the death of malls and the shift to online work have left many parking garage floors eerily quiet.  This is, primarily, a design issue. Our current parking systems are wildly inefficient and wasteful. A recent study showed that eight car spaces exist for every car in the United States. This is partially because developers tend to plan parking lots with more spaces than can usually be filled. Mall garages are designed to accommodat...

The Crystal Palace interior, public domain        The Great Exhibition of 1851 lasted five months and left behind a completely transformed society. Heralding several monumental shifts in design and architectural theory, The Crystal Palace [Paxton, Hyde Park, London, 1850-1851] was a new sort of exhibition space- one defined by massive scale and innovative materiality. Around half a century later, Frank Lloyd Wright would employ many of the same technologies and ideas when designing the Larkin Administration building [Wright, Larkin Administration Building, Buffalo, NY, 1904-06] Both buildings exemplify the use of architecture as a tool to standardize human behavior and productivity within the constraints of the machine. This is achieved through the introduction of mass produced building elements, as well as the development of new systems of organization and the introduction of new structural technologies that allow for open-plan, easily surveilled interiors. These co...

  Credit: Rick Guidice/NASA      One of the things that has always interested me about design history is tracing back the threads that made the modern world what it is today. There is something fascinating about reading the façade of a building and tracing back its features to a long-forgotten art movement, or listening to the story of how curb cuts came to be on the podcast 99% Invisible (https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/). However, it is easy to get so lost in the historical design decisions that changed everything to realize that choices of a similar magnitude are being made every day. And one area that I believe will change the future is the design of living spaces beyond Earth.     Designing on Earth means designing buildings that fit into the patchwork quilt of the built environment. It means designing within a societal structure that has existed for tens of thousands of years. This can be beautiful- there is something poetic abou...

      Recently, I visited Barcelona. What I saw there completely changed my view on the value of Art Nouveau as an architectural style. Before, Art Nouveau seemed like a strange and lovely historical oddity, beautiful but impractical for the modern world. Now, after seeing Art Nouveau bloom and vine its way across facades and banisters, I believe that Art Nouveau, or rather a new  form of it, is the future of architecture. I am working on a longer post on this topic, but in the meantime,  here  is a collection of some of the details that caught my eye.  Facade, Palau de la Música Catalana Metalwork detail Ceiling detail, Casa Batll ó Stairwell,  Casa Batll ó Attic Hallway,Casa Batll ó Glass panel detail, Casa Batll ó  Skylight detail, Casa Batll ó  Rooftop view, Casa Milá   Roof detail,Casa Milá  Gate Detail, Casa Milá  Ceiling painting, Casa Milá Facade, CosmoCaixa Science Museum  Outer wall, Parc Güell

    Once I observed a spaceship building, I couldn't stop seeing them . The Miller Outdoor Theater (above) is aimed directly upwards, poised delicately on a grassy slope like a paper airplane of steel. It is a dream of the future, a form that wouldn't look out of place soaring through the void in a sci-fi.      While this theater is a particularly dramatic example, I began noticing that buildings constructed in the sixties often pointed directly upwards in sharp, angular lines.       What were they reaching for?      This is a question that sent  me into a rabbit hole of architectural research. It all leads back to the sixties.     The sixties began with the first man going to space, and ended with the first astronauts setting foot on the moon. Suddenly, space was a place of strange and infinite worlds that existed beyond the imagination. It was a decade defined by dreaming of far away stars.  So perhaps it ...

       How do we design buildings around people?      This is a question that famed architect and proponent of modernism, Le Corbusier, sought to answer with his "Modular Man". Also known as Le Modular , this "man" consisted of a set of proportions and measurements.      At the time, World War II had just ended and reconstruction was taking place all across Europe, which presented architects with the opportunity to reshape the face of Western architecture. Le Corbusier saw this as his chance to revive the Classical tradition of creating buildings based on the golden ratio and human form . Buildings based on Le Modular would have counters at the perfect height, and cabinets that were always in reach.          While the idea of bringing human scale back into design is a commendable one, there was one major issue with Le Modular. That is, namely, that there is no one "human form". The Modular Man was based entirely...