How the new field of forensic architecture holds those accountable. first published in “Ask Louis” for GRAPHISOFT USA | April, 2020 What caused the Grenfell fire? Forensic Architecture rebuilt the past to find out. The London train, speeding from Hammersmith to Baker Street, frames the silhouette of architect Nick Masterton in its window. The white plastic enshrouding Grenfell Tower flies…
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Do Creative Minds Matter?
Once the curtains lifted and the explosive, starburst chandeliers had risen to the ceiling, Plácido Domingo, Renée Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky brought cheers and tears at the Met’s fiftieth anniversary gala at Lincoln Center this year. Baritone Hvorostovsky in a surprise return, despite a brain tumor, sang “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata” from Verdi’s Rigoletto.
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Bore No More
While your bridges and towers soar, your social media bores. What happens when an architecture or engineering partnership’s commitment to strength, utility, and beauty falls short digitally—adequate but hardly excellent? There are still many who could care less: “Our reputation speaks for itself.”, “It’s only a portfolio.”, It looks on a par with our competition.”, or “We’re not in the…
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Mamou-Mani, Maker
Like explorers heading their tiny craft upstream, a pair of bicyclists float over the sands of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. A dust storm shrouds them from 60,000 more inhabitants of their pop-up metropolis at the 2016 Burning Man Festival, known as Black Rock City. While the bicyclists advance left, a 30-foot dream-like, flame-shaped apparition approximately 30 feet high appears to…
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Ipso Prestbro
ArchitectureBoston Expo (ABX) 2016 last November was, as expected, the busiest, most bustling building industry event in the Northeast. And yet by closing day November 17, the aftershock of the national election had cast a pall over this liberal city, a gritty, torpid weather insinuating itself into the chasms of its convention center. Architects between workshops trooped past the exhibits,…
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Doris Sung’s Surly Strongman Robot
If you are one to break into architectural studios in the middle of the night, think twice about breaking into dO|Su in Los Angeles. There, its principal Doris Sung keeps her collection of critters, self-propelled, self-assembling, super-smart thermal bi-metal robots — requiring no batteries, just space enough to perform their backflips, scooches, summersaults and other behaviors that collectively would freak out any…
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A Straw in the Sky
For a miracle machine, capable of nudging humanity back from the rocky ledge of eco-suicide, it looks inauspicious—like a fridge with waffle-like filters finning the air. It’s the kind of thing Sears will gladly remove and replace. But hold on!
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Warm Cool Warm
What makes cities exciting, poetic, worth waking up for? The short answer is lights at night. At 1 a.m., a bedsheet hung up to dry in Venice reflects the moon over a canal (reflected once more in the water). We are enchanted, mesmerized. At 2 a.m., a smashed window in a forlorn Cleveland underpass twinkles like a star. We don’t back away, afraid,…
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Zillow Talk
er Kate Coughlin of Boston, MA has clients anyone would want: “They want to have a lot of fun. They are after a more light-hearted, family-friendly aesthetic…tired of all the heavy brown furniture. One very traditional client I am working with now just requested a neutral palette dotted with mid-century pieces for her new home in Aspen.”
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Is There Life Beyond Sustainability?
The 140-bed hospital complex stops time, like a long-lost friend you run into where you’d least expect to. In such a surprise occurrence, past and future appear to come to a standstill. Here, just outside Rwanda’s capital of Kigali, it’s impossible to ignore that the site once held a police outpost in the whirlwind of mass murder.
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Mix Master
In his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, studio last year Charles Goldman was reading the New York Times. After weighing its symbolic value as a “spreader of information,” he launched a series of “plop sculptures” out of mashed issues of the Times. “Then I left a bucket overnight by accident,” Goldman recalls. “In the morning I kicked it over. The contents had become solid, and…
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Messy, But Not Too
A 3,500-acre retreat in the Western Ghats of India: a 100-room lodge, a spa with 12 villas, cultural programming demonstrating the role of the music, art, and literature in promoting a sustainable way of life. A summons from the City of Philadelphia for growing grass over ten inches high around her house, as reported by Anne Raver in the New York…
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Provincetown Magazine Vol 1, No. 3
Here’s the entire issue of Provincetown Magazine vol 1, no. 3, 1997. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K_v1SOnkJM48CPhvo6oSN2bp4YkZF6Ga/view?usp=sharing Louis Postel, Editor in Chief, Founding Editor; Richard LeBlond, Stewart Weiner, Senior Editors; Candy Jernigan, art director, featuring Candy Jernigan’s cover; stories by Sheila Miles, EJ Ely Terry Kahn, Richard LeBlond, Dennis Dermody, Stewart Weiner (aka Lebreo), and “End of the World” by Gary Halgren More art by Gary…
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PIGGY’S OF PROVINCETOWN, FOREVER
You’re making dough burgers. You didn’t invent them, but you’re getting better at it. Nothing could be cheaper, and that’s the idea. You need those last coins for Piggys. “Who wants one?” you ask your moocher pals. No reaction as they pass the bottle. “Ingrates!” you mutter, flipping the dough on a paper plate heaping it with sugar. What happened…
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Fallen Leaves — A Vineyard House by Maryann Thompson Architects
by Louis Postel in BOSTON MAGAZINE https://www.bostonmagazine.com/2007/02/15/fallen-leaves/ Maximizing light, air, and space was Thompson’s main design test during the four-year project. The challenge was brought home to Thompson and project manager William Pevear on their first visit to the site—though it’s on the beachy “up-island” end, there was no ocean view at all. “And so William and I stood on…
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Mariko Kusumoto’s Surrealism
by Louis Postel in New England Home. Photos by Webb Chappell https://www.marikokusumoto.com/new-england-home
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DESIGN RE-VISION
AN ART COLLECTOR’S Penthouse by Maho Abe of Zen Associates, with David Glod, builder. by LOUIS POSTEL March 2007, originally published in BOSTON MAGAZINE (photography by Richard Mandelkorn). In a Cambridge penthouse, master cabinetmaker Paul Cusack carefully buffs a black lacquer credenza that he made 21 years ago and jokes with the homeowner about “lifetime guarantees.” He is fixing the…
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The Height of Depth with Painter Eric Aho
First Published in New England Home Text by Louis Postel Photography by Portrait by Eric Scott March 20, 2009 Alone on a Vermont hillside, painter Eric Aho conducts a symphony in texture, shape and color. Instead of a baton, he waves a long brush, dipping it into one pot and then another. He paints with the loose-limbed dexterity of a…
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Active Matters
I recall sitting on the grass in my chiton, waiting for my turn to throw the discus in our 4th-grade reenactment of the Olympic Games. Whereupon a swarm of red ants bit my butt! The pain and embarrassment sting to this day! Thank Zeus our quick-witted principal came to the rescue. One might think there’s a special place in…
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Adventures in Perception | Artist Youjin Moon
Will AI-driven robots replace designers and artists? Count on it, say the futurists. No one is immune. Not so fast, insist philosophers of art and design. They have long held that practitioners have something even the most gifted AI robot won’t be able to hack: an imagination. That is, artists and designers can create images, forms and spaces from that…
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The Blue Grid
“How about when someone doesn’t use Yelp or post on Instagram, then what?” interjected a cell phone interface designer standing in the back of a Design Museum pop-up breakfast event held in July. Rick Kuhn, the award-winning Design Director of the Boston office of Perkins + Will, paused at the lectern. He had been explaining how his team collected social…
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The Panelists | Graphisoft USA
When it comes to fire tests, boring is best. You roll apocalyptic fire directly into the face of some dumb panel of cross-lminated timber (CLT) and nothing happens! Flames lick the slab for hours, leaving only char, a blackened scab stubbornly insulating the multiple layers that shield the core. What does this remind you of from Boy Scout days past?…
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Copper Box with Green Roof
What if we lived in a world of and instead of but? That’s the world in which Adolfo Perez, architect, and Nathalie Ducrest, designer, created such a world in this Brookline addition. What is essentially a large new living room called for these two professionals to resolve any number of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. Though they had never worked…
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Women of the New Wave
One day, researcher Despina Stratigakos sat down with a group of women from a global architectural firm. “These women had attended excellent schools, and their work ethic was extreme, eating lunch and dinner at their desks,” recalls Stratigakos.” “But they weren’t moving up.” With predictable regularity, there would emerge a young man the women came to call the “Anointed One.”…
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The S.O.B. and The Hardhat
There are those not embarrassed to be called sidewalk superintendents: the millionaire in his unstructured blazer, the local loafer in his peppermint cable knit, the schoolgirl in her pleated skirt. Arms folded over authoritative chests, the sidewalk superintendents follow an I-beam as it’s hoisted to the 52nd floor, while a hardhat emerges before them like a god from a cage,…
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Architecture in the Age of Anxiety
If we don’t know who we are, how do we find the confidence to build things? And if our buildings won’t speak to us, how can we know what they are all about? Self-induced highs of perception just won’t get us get us to this point of understanding, according to architectural historian Mark Jarzombek. Nor, in his view, can we count…
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Idyll Wild | New England Home 2017
As earthmovers groaned and power saws whined, one of those giant turtles, the pride of Wellfleet, MA showed up at the site. It might be fairer to say, showed up not just at the site but one can only assume his site; a kettle pond occupied by his terrapene carolina line since the last Ice Age.
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Meet the Microbi(H)ome Family
by Louis Postel, first published by Graphisoft USA, June 2017 There’s a marine architect in London, a leading megayacht designer, who makes it a point to check out his clients’ socks, scarves, ties, autos, and book collections before submitting a single sketch. Similarly, his colleague and rival in Miami embeds himself in his clients’ social lives for weeks and months…
