It is increasingly clear that one of the major female architects of the 20th century was the Italian Lina Bo Bardi, who emigrated to Brazil in 1945 and made a name for herself there. But this claim is ...

Put the city up; tear the city down, put it up again; let us find a city. —Carl Sandburg, “The Windy City,” 1922 Chicago was a well-loved subject of writer Carl Sandburg. Committed to the working ...

If labor power—that is, a population’s potential to produce—was and is the most important form of “production,” the most central productive space is the house itself. Dogma, proposal for the ...

The architectural profession is in the midst of a long-overdue ethical reckoning. For years, it could ride the tidal wave of globalization to bigger and better commissions while still claiming that it ...

What is a home today? How do we reconcile our dire need for new housing with the fact that our needs will certainly change over time, and today’s buildings might soon be obsolete? How do we provide ...

Redesign, for decades stigmatized by Modernist purists as an inferior architectural specialty reserved for the artistically timid and creatively challenged, has finally become a legitimate part of ...

I grew up in a domestic world that seemed to hospitably reconfigure itself around our family’s evolving interests and enterprises. As my younger brother’s model horse and airplane collections expanded ...

The ubiquitous lumber product known as the 2×4 does not, in fact, measure two inches thick by four inches wide. The naming of this building material is the result of compromise between forestry ...

I begin with a confession: the first city I ever visited, outside of that big-shouldered metropolis close to my suburban Chicago home, was Walt Disney World. At least, the Florida theme park seemed ...

The ocean remains a glaring blind spot in the Western imagination. Catastrophic events remind us of its influence—a lost airplane, a shark attack, an oil spill, an underwater earthquake—but we tend to ...

Over the past three decades, international monopoly capital has increasingly challenged the authority of the nation-state, which still ostensibly embodies the democratic precepts of the free world. In ...

Perhaps the most telling thing I found is that the definition of a charrette has changed. Most professional architects now equate charrettes with interactive brainstorming sessions. These kinder, ...