by Louis Postel 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…
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Adventures in Perception | Artist Youjin Moon
Will AI robots, robots with artificial intelligence, 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…
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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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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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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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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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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…
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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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The Underlying Pattern
Trump Plaza residents vowed they would do whatever it took to fight artist Michael Singer's South Cove Regeneration Project in West Palm Beach. His plan for “stepped tidal gardens along the seawall, tidal islands of mangroves and spartina” and other salt-marsh grasses, as well as sludge-filtering oyster reefs, would look like a swamp. Not the kind of artwork they had in mind…
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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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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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Five Easy Packing Pieces | Showboats, January 2017
Imagine tossing one of these babies in the overhead bin. Then dragging it along the quay with for a midnight triste. And, later, on a bet, trying to escape from one like Houdini, wrapped in chains. However difficult—even laughable— such feats are to imagine, boxy steamer trunks have upsides the design world’s just waking up to. Such luggage has the…
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Our Inner Cities | Louis Postel for New England Home, Feb 2017
How do you paint what’s going on inside your skull? Heidi Whitman hails from a long line of artists who make such invisible things visible. In 14th century Florence, the architect and painter Giotto di Bondone thawed out frozen-faced divines with a human warmth. Impressionists such as Mary Cassatt and Henri Matisse infused pictures with light and movement. Later, in the…
