Nikos Salingaros presents the case for demolishing a modernist eyesore in Rome and replacing it with a high-density, mixed-use New Urbanist neighborhood.
The Corviale building outside Rome is a social housing block that exemplifies the established Corbusian tradition of treating human beings as battery chickens. It was built during 1972-1982 as a single one-kilometer-long building. It is now estimated to house 6,000 people. Apologists who are nostalgic of Soviet-era social experiments continue to defend its paradigmatic modernist design on the grounds that every resident is EQUALLY oppressed in this inhuman environment, an ideal consistent with totalitarian notions of social equality. (source planetizin) Read more...

Yes, because they live in a pseudo-intellectual ghetto, says Malcolm Millais; while Piers Gough says architecture is far too important to be left to the public. Read more…

“Great lighting,” Mark Major says, “is not about walking into a place and saying, ‘What great lighting!’ It’s about walking in and saying, ‘What a great space!’” (source metropolis) Read more…

Real power remained elusive for even them.
Architecture, arguably for the first time in its history, found itself at the very center of American cultural and political life in the decade that is wrapping up. (source architecture lab) Read more…

A new collection of writing by the late Herbert Muschamp reveals, beneath his lavish praise for Gehry & Co., a surprising (and ambitious) reading of 20th century culture. Like the man himself, Hearts of the City: The Selected Writings of Herbert Muschamp (Knopf, $50) is going to offend a lot of people. The book is nearly 900 pages long, the vast bulk of it in the form of 1,500-word articles written during Muschamp’s 12-year stint as The New York Times’ architecture critic. Who deserves 900 pages? How dare he? (source architect) Read more…

The blob is eating architecture. In every architecture school and in every competition, oozing, bulging, tentacular forms grow, as if by magic, out of the click-clacking of myriads of computer keyboards and the invisible working of processors, promising an organic ecology that will one day replace the wasteland of our gridded reality. Don’t give in, don’t be seduced by silky strands of computer code, and don’t think that organic architecture is any better than Certified Organic Milk. It is worse. It will destroy our world or, what is more likely, condemn architecture to a continued existence in the margins of our culture. (source ¬¬architect magazine) Read more…