8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking Encrypting the Sun by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong

8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking Encrypting the Sun by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong. Edited by Stephen Zacks (Actar, Spring 2025)

Energy generated by nuclear fusion of the Sun reaches the surface of the Earth in 8 minutes and 20 seconds. 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds imagines an architecture based on renewable energy, caching forms of energy that are essentially inexhaustible and persistent, and virtually non-denumerable in quantity. It anticipates a post-scarcity era enabled and reorganized by a new form of housing that serves as an arbiter of post-sustainability human settlements. 

Proposing a new form of housing only achievable through advanced manufacturing we ask: “what if what was a housing asset becomes a new form of energy asset whose downstream by-product is shelter?” 


Metropolis 100 Community Design Student Projects

"These Students are Reclaiming Community Through Experimental Design: Future100 award–winning student projects reimagine what nurtures society—and what the traditional housing market neglects," Metropolis, June 2025.


Community is one of the most neglected dimensions of contemporary society, often overshadowed by the dominant belief that capital accumulation and consumption can fulfill our every need. A collection of projects from Future100 student portfolios highlights the essential role of noncommercial community spaces in fostering well-being. These projects rethink institutions that serve as third spaces or meeting places between home and work, offering opportunities for neighborhood residents to gather, strengthen social ties, and repair damage from past problematic legacies against communities of color. 

Several of these projects concentrate on amplifying community-based institutions. In her proposed renovation of a Lithuanian American social club in Providence, Rhode Island, RISD interior architecture graduate student Yerim Jang reimagines a public space that honors its heritage while expanding its relevance. Called Threads of Journeys, the community center features interactive exhibits and video oral histories to preserve the club’s history, while flexible, modular spaces invite diverse groups from the surrounding neighborhood to meet and collaborate.

In her reimagining of a historic farmers’ market in San Francisco at the nexus of the Bernal Heights neighborhood, a canyon, and a highway, California College of the Arts M.Arch student Layla Namak intervenes to expand the market’s role as an urban connector. Observing that the existing building didn’t encourage visitors to circulate throughout its interior, Namak proposes replacing it with a soaring, exuberantly daylit structure that pulls people through from one end to the other. Along with a food hall and stalls for produce vendors, the plan includes classrooms, social services, and a library to engage community users.

In the Little Caribbean area of Flatbush, Brooklyn, bachelor in architecture student Evelyn Krutoy at the City College of New York designed a community center in consultation with the GrowHouse neighborhood organization, with space for gardens, food vendors, art exhibitions, and educational exchange. Employing terra-cotta details and rich colors, Krutoy wove together a communal kitchen, café, coworking, classroom spaces, offices, and a rooftop garden–creating a design that sensitively addresses the urban design scale as well as the scale of the interior. 

For his design of a city block in Portland’s Albina neighborhood—previously razed for a never-built hospital—Cornell bachelor in architecture student Omar Leon integrates residential buildings and community spaces into a holistic concept of well-being that includes community gardening, green building, and healthy lifestyles. Instead of private backyards, the plan prioritizes shared central spaces. “Since the whole block was empty, the idea was to create those smaller communal spaces at the block level to create a community that was self-sufficient in a way,” says Leon.

At a similar urban scale in Los Angeles and New Orleans, Sci-Arc M.Arch recent graduate Michael Boldt and Tulane bachelor in architecture student Brandon Gicquel explore how housing developments can preserve and produce communities. For Boldt, that meant creating mixed-used residential spaces in L.A.’s Arts District on the site of a polluted rail yard that has been adopted as an ad hoc arts space. His design process involved using a 3D scan of the site with AI-driven regenerative design to grow buildings that also preserve shared artist spaces for fabrication, assembly, and living. 

Gicquel’s design borrows the vernacular of shotgun houses in New Orleans’s West Riverside neighborhood, rotating and stacking volumes around a central courtyard so that artists and musicians of different ages and cultural traditions have room to perform and show their work. “The emphasis shifts from the dwelling unit to the courtyard,” says Gicquel. “A community is generated as opposed to the isolated living approach that is often prevalent in suburban communities.”

Metropolis 100 Architecture Students on Healing Power of Water in Metropolis


"These Architecture Students Explore the Healing Power of Water: Design projects centered on water promote wellness, celebrate infrastructure, and reconnect communities with their environment," Metropolis, Jun. 6, 2025.

Five projects from this year’s METROPOLIS Future100 winners recognize water’s essential role in life, integrating the element into libraries, community centers, wellness retreats, and structures that showcase its impact. 

Several students centered their projects on water’s restorative qualities. Marianna Godfrey’s proposal for a wellness retreat at Sweetwater Creek State Park outside of Atlanta, Georgia, attempts to repair the legacies of Cherokee expulsion and slavery by using the ruins of a brick manufacturing plant and cotton mill that used forced labor to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The University of Michigan M. Arch student’s idea is to extend the intervention above a natural stream while providing views and access to the water. The wellness retreat frames the encounters with the natural world as opportunities for meditation for individual and group therapy. “There are significant studies that indicate that any kind of landscape, nature, and water is very helpful for healing, particularly for PTSD treatment,” says Godfrey.

Likewise, University of Texas interior design master’s student Winnie Lin revitalizes a senior living facility in Austin, incorporating a spa retreat, lap pools, jacuzzi, and children’s pool into the structure to help treat arthritis and enhance community access. “Pools are a heavy part of Austin life, and in that area, there was not an accessible pool to the public,” Lin says. “With a diagnosis of arthritis, not only does a pool make sense for seniors, but as a site context, it also fits with the rest of the community at large.”

L.E.S. Ecosocialist Utopias for ABC No Rio 45 at Emily Harvey Foundation

Emily Harvey Foundation, ABC No Rio 45, A Fire in the Forest of Possibilities. Is ‘What If’ Now ‘What Was’? A Walk through the Utopian Loisaida Past and Present, “L.E.S. Ecosocialist Utopias,” Apr. 19. 2025.



The Fascist Assault on Academic Freedom Relies on Thinly Supported Claims of Campus Anti-Semitism on Substack

 

"The Fascist Assault on Academic Freedom Relies on Thinly Supported Claims of Campus Anti-Semitism," Substack, Mar. 27, 2025.


The fascists needed to be able to pretend antisemitism was a real threat to Jewish people. Their victory—if they really won the election, to the extent that they managed to depress turnout and suppress the vote in key states, probably also hacking voting machines in select districts—depended on Israeli fascist Netanyahu and his genocidal alliance of Jewish bigots pursuing a one-sided war of bombing, starvation, human rights crimes, expulsion, systematic murder of journalists, and violence against Israeli domestic opposition. Hamas offered the perfect foil for this end of civilizational battle, having so severely violated the laws of war and norms of the international order that any level of violence would be excused by the ideological allies of Israel: Christian conservatives, right-wing fascists, and conventional middle-class Jews—the closet fascists of US democracy. Ostensibly liberal adherents to all of the basic norms of the US constitutional system, ardent believers in the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, freedom against unreasonable search and seizure, and due process—they would easily discard any and all safeguards against fascism if called to defend the purportedly threatened Jewish people.

This set the perfect stage for exploitation by right-wing movements in the US. At university campuses, the self-evident crimes of war being perpetrated by Israel, and the arms and funding being supplied by the US government—by a Democratic administration and with support from a majority of Congress in both parties, but with significant opposition only from the Democratic side—led to a militant anti-war movement, especially on college campuses. And what was the claim against these anti-genocide protesters? That some of them—or at least one of them, according to an extensive New York Times report on the Columbia University protests—sometimes said things that were anti-Semitic, or at any rate anti-Zionist, that sometimes crossed the normative discursive line and therefore were threatening to Jewish students, who had to be protected against speech. In other words, the rhetoric of the right, which became widely accepted by a mainstream press too afraid to investigate, ask questions, probe, and ultimately, tell the truth, was that the college student protesters and members of the anti-genocide, anti-war movement, were a physical threat to Jewish people themselves and therefore had to be violently repressed by the police. Indeed, it was widely claimed the protesters were sympathetic to Hamas, or at any rate said things that denied the right of Israel to exist. Was this a thought crime? Constitutional and human rights conventions were firmly on the side of the protesters. But the political class fell over themselves to prove their pro-Zionist, non-anti-Semitic bona fides. We were already far along the pathway to fascism by that point.

What came next was as outrageous and antidemocratic as anything since the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the late 1940s and 1950s. A pressure campaign led by right-wing Republicans and Jewish billionaire philanthropists, in a stunning abuse of power and influence, began to pressure university presidents to suppress free speech on college campus and to shut down anti-genocide protests. Leaders of universities were dragged in front of Congress and boards of trustees. If they had stood up for academic freedom, as their positions required of them, they had no other option other than to loudly proclaim the right to freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression that are essential to universities as institutions in Western society. Most of them utterly failed in their duty. They failed to defend their universities and abandoned the values of the university system itself. They brought in the police to violently arrest protesters and shut down campus speech. Those who complied and those who didn’t were fired. Yet those who complied behaved shamefully and left the university system itself exposed to repressive attacks that would follow the rise to power of the true fascists: the MAGA Republicans.

Meanwhile, how did the educated public respond to such a naked, unconstitutional attack on the fundamental principles of a free society? Let’s stipulate that for decades, misinformed conservative cable news viewers had been primed to believe that universities themselves were under attack from within by enemies of academic freedom. (Never mind that these same outlets were themselves opposed to the fundamentally liberal principles of free inquiry of the university system.) They had been told that freedom of speech was being systematically suppressed by so-called “woke” adherents of identity politics. These were the real fascists, viewers were told: the illiberal left no longer permitted free debate on college campuses. College campuses were too far extreme left, they were told. Those who disagreed with the “woke mafia” were being silenced and victimized, it was claimed.

So when a few ardently Zionist Jewish students claimed to have been harassed on campuses—it was never clear for what, how were they supposedly even identified as Jewish, what specifically happened, and in what context, only broad statements designed to evoke moral panic and reactionary responses—the unquestioning defenders of the “Jewish state” were quick to accept what amounted to a total victory of fascism over liberalism. They would defend the “Jewish people” at absolutely any price, completely deny the crimes of the genocidal state—playing coy linguistic games, mainly, to deflect from the overwhelming evidence and clear international conventions—and accept the total collapse of academic freedom and shocking assaults on freedom of expression. The anti-genocidal movement was largely composed of and substantially led by Jewish people. But the Jewish people had to be repressed to save the Jewish people.

The elephant in the room for those crying anti-Semitism is obviously the almost total absence of any evidence of harm to Jewish students or to Jewish people. Particularly compared to the current murder of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by the so-called “Jewish state,” along with the displacement of millions from their homes—not to mention countless other perpetual human rights abuses and violations that have continued unabated for going on a century. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League have spent more than a century claiming that anti-Semitism is everywhere, in recent years documenting supposed incidents on college campuses with a propagandistic zeal designed to uncritically corral Jewish American support for the so-called “Jewish state.” What evidence have they offered that all of this supposed anti-Semitism is not simply legitimate criticism of the self-proclaimed “Jewish state” committing crimes against humanity that should never be allowed to pass without being vigorously denounced? Very thin evidence. They report Jewish students “feeling threatened” and widely conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in their survey methodology, leaning into the confirmation bias of an organization specifically seeking to prove its own point.

Now that critics of Israel are being denied due process, arrested, and illegally deported, where are these supposedly ardent believers in rights of students to freedom of conscience, speech, and academic inquiry? If they really believed that the left had been unfairly suppressing the speech of on the part of the rightwing, they should surely be outraged that the inverse is happening, not just on the part of students—who have every right to independently organize and protest against speech they object to. Now the federal government itself has put its thumb on the scales to repress our constitutional rights. But we hear no objections from Republicans in Congress of these unconstitutional actions of the fascist Republican government. It turns out that they only wanted a monopoly on speech for themselves. One is reminded of free speech absolutists like Nat Hentoff, one-time columnist for the Village Voice, who for his entire career rejected those on the left who protested against conservative and reactionary speakers on campus, arguing that the antidote to reactionary voices was criticism—more speech, not less. Now more than ever it’s clear why he had a point.

Do Not Buy US Products Under This Government on Substack

 
"Do Not Buy US Products Under This Government," Substack, Mar. 10, 2025. 


In 1999, now-disgraced public television host Charlie Rose was interviewing German foreign minister Joschka Fischer of the eco-socialist Green Party, who had joined the coalition led by Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party governing Germany from 1998 to 2005. Having grown up in the aftermath of World War II in a time when US soldiers were a part of everyday life in Germany, becoming a leftist radical during the Vietnam War, Fischer reflected on the current crisis in Europe, in which NATO, led by the US military, was bombing Serbia in an effort to prevent the expulsion of Kosovar Albanians from Kosovo.

With a dry but charismatic statesmanship, Fischer expressed affection for the US. He didn’t fear the US’s superpower status. He felt that the average US citizen’s limited interest in the world was essentially a good thing. They were looking more on the “inside,” he said. He didn’t fear the US becoming a colonial empire occupying other countries because their ignorance of other places meant that Americans mainly cared about buying shit for themselves, getting fat, and fucking. At least that’s how I read into it. But a few years later, after the US’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Bush administration’s horrible failures, imperiled by their fundamental lack of anthropological understanding of cultural differences, Fischer’s tone changed. He regretted how “inside looking” the country was, and wished that “public opinion would look more to the outside.”
I have been remembering this conversation lately because of the so-called “America First” ideology of the current administration and its total contempt for alliances beyond the US. I spent the last two decades attempting to better grasp the changing patterns of urbanism and development that predominated in New York City between the late 1950s and our time. The closer you looked, the more you saw a familiar pattern. The ideology of the market fundamentalism—the idea that the free market was going to miraculously solve every human problem and meet every need without government regulation, investment, or oversight—little by little comes to completely overtake common sense in every realm of policy. This pervasive blind faith in the market—more than racism, more than Christian fundamentalism, more than the US’s imperial history, more than the decline in public education, more than systematic failures of media leading to a distorted understanding of the world—is what accounts for the current collapse of the US. The US is no longer functional because its citizens no longer believe in anything but the ideology of market fundamentalism.

Market fundamentalism is an ideology of capitalism that grew out of economists’ reaction against the rise of Nazism in Germany and Communism in the Soviet Union. It takes government itself to be the common enemy of the free market, and naively ignores all of the necessary conditions provided by governments that enable actually functional markets to perform in ways that are not destructive to the greater public interest.

It would be worth looking in close detail at the comments of the most vociferous defenders and champions of the unholy alliance of Trump and Musk. You tend to see a repeated pattern of blind faith in their “genius” and reference to their wealth itself as evidence of their righteousness. Belief in their profiteering off of the government is seen as a virtue in itself, not a reason for criticism. Right-wing toadies think billionaires are right because they are rich, ipso facto. This is the cult of market extremism. This is the reason why boycotts, strikes, divestment in US companies, reducing consumption, and anything that brings about market failure is the best way to fight the Nazi Republican fascists. Do not buy US products under this government.

Get Out If You Can Make No Compromise with the Nazi Republicans on Substack

 
"Get Out If You Can: Make No Compromise with the Nazi Republicans," Substack, Feb. 26, 2025. 


I have read a few recent articles published in mainstream US newspapers, written by expatriates cautioning Americans against going into exile in response to the atrocious US presidency. It’s worth exploring the other side: at what point would it be better to abandon the failed US state, to distance oneself from the constant stream of bullshit occupying the airwaves, to take a leave from the unending flood of anger necessarily experienced by anyone with common sense looking at the news: the nonstop human rights violations, the systematic destruction of liberal institutions, the efforts to undermine forms of governance providing any insulation against total control of our lives by market-fundamentalist extremists and the ruling party that I call, with precise accuracy, the Nazi Republicans. Their tendency to embrace the Hitler salute only confirms the overwhelming evidence offered by their words and actions. They told us who they are. Under no circumstances should this behavior be excused and rationalized.
Let’s put aside the peroration of evil deeds by the criminals in power and just call it like it is. On the face of it, we all know they are grifters whose only interest is theft of public resources and manipulation of policy for their own enrichment. And we know that the judicial system that should have long ago imprisoned them for various forms of fraud and misconduct is ill-equipped to produce the justice we long for. The billionaires have proven they can buy the justice system.

Our voices no longer matter, drowned out by bullshit, bought out by outrageous fictions invented to hide evidence that is plain for everyone to see. Yet we see it: we see the willingness of the so-called “Jewish state” to commit any form of human rights violation to exercise its colonial control over land it claims a God-given ownership of dating from 3,000 years ago, somehow entitling them to dispossess people’s home and bulldoze communities with a heritage equally longstanding. We see billionaires willing to commit every kind of calumny and disgrace to defame those who protest as “anti-Semitic,” including a majority of Jewish people.

Our speech has been stolen and violated by the willful ignorance of a justice system that chose to equate political campaign spending with free speech, turning wealth into an overwhelming silencer of the will of the majority of the people, most of whom can barely pay their rent and mortgages, and who effectively no longer have political representation in the US. The strongest possible way I can speak is by total rejection and non-participation in the garbage political system of the US.

This is why I have left the US, for now, and the life that I loved in my hometown of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a little corner of the world a couple of blocks from a decent public tennis court, where I was happy to live near a homeless shelter, public housing, my friend’s vintage store, and a really deep and meaningful community of people I felt connected to over the course of decades, eking out my existence as an independent writer on architecture and the city.
I came to Mexico City four weeks ago, initially as a trial, renting a room through Airbnb in San Miguel Chapultepec and renting out my room in East Williamsburg. (Then it turned out that one of Airbnb’s co-founders was also a Nazi collaborator. No part of our lives is free from rent-seeking oligarchs.) I had been studying Spanish fairly intensively for two years, about an hour-and-a-half every day, in the eventuality that I would feel compelled to leave the US after the last disastrous four years of Nazi Republican rule.

And I had become increasingly conscious that I was living at the footsteps of Latin America with barely any ability to experience the incredible richness and diversity of cultures within a few hours of air travel away. I sought out the most cosmopolitan city in Latin America, where I could live a similar lifestyle that I love, a cultural hub with a lively contemporary art scene, great food, people I can play tennis with every day, and the beginning of a community who I share values with, can discuss ideas with, can join for gallery walks and musical performances, dinners, and maybe, eventually, can have enough of a community to invite to my semi-annual solstice parties. All signs pointed to Mexico City. It’s all the more reaffirming that some of the earliest outrages of the Nazi Republicans and their biggest strategic failures have been against the Mexican government and people. I’m absolutely delighted to make common cause with the Mexican people against the Nazi Republican state.

I am well aware that this is not a choice available to most Americans. (I am tempted to say United States-ians, since America is a continent, and all of its people, North, South, and Central Americas, are Americans. Citizens of the US are estadounidense.) I am single, I work for myself, and I can do so anywhere in the world, as long as my editors continue to give me assignments and publishers books to write and edit. Failing that, I know how to build, paint, and fix things. My greatest heroes were expatriates who disassociated themselves from the violent states into which they were born, sometimes at great personal expense, and produced some of the most important, enduring work in modern arts and letters.

I cannot say how long I will be gone. For now, I have extended my trip until June. The news from the US does not give me much hope that it would be safe to return any time soon. I am happy to see the increase in protests and the small bits of truth-telling that periodically sneak through the profit-seeking corporations that own every form and channel of media through which our voices can be heard. I am glad that liberal nonprofits have been organizing to contest the regime’s illegal actions in court well before I imagined it was possible for such a disgusting government to be reelected.

Meanwhile, the rent here is easily half or a third of what it costs to live in the US—reminiscent of the style of living we used to enjoy on the East Side of Lansing in the early nineties, or in the illegal rooms built behind a theater on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late nineties. Around that time, the Clinton administration, compromising with the neo-conservative market-fundamentalist ideology that would become the dominant ideology of our time, essentially ended the production of new units of public housing, putting a stranglehold on the public sector’s ability to provide for the basic needs of citizens. Rents increased at twice the rate of inflation since that time.

Orchard House in Hudson Valley by IDSR Architecture in Dwell


"Budget Breakdown: The Foundation Is Also the Floor at This Shedlike $1.1M Hudson Valley Retreat: A concrete slab and corrugated metal siding root the energy-efficient home in an apple orchard with views of the Catskills," Dwell, February 14, 2025.


"Most of the architects of our generation were made aware of ecological concerns when we were brought up in school," says Rouhe, in part explaining why he and Ibañez de Sendadiano emphasize energy efficiency in their designs. (He’s a graduate of Southern California Institute of Architecture and Columbia University, and Ibañez de Sendadiano of Princeton.) "Still, there was a more formal agenda for the projects. Designing homes is more pragmatic in a way. It’s more utilitarian."

The Green Human Rights Agenda and the Future Democratic Majority on Substack

 

"The Green Human Rights Agenda and the Future Democratic Majority: An Unpublished Message from August 2024. Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle does not require abandoning all other groups and issues harmed by extremist Republican policies and governance," Substack, Feb. 13, 2025.


In a better world, leftists would have a majority party all our own to rally behind that adequately represents the outrage we feel about the criminal conduct of Israel in its expanding war, which appears determined to wipe out the possibility of Palestinian life within the territory it controls. That ideal party would endorse principles we hold to be sacrosanct and non-negotiable, such as human rights, the right to political representation, housing, and health care, and the prosecution of war crimes. But it would also have the realistic capacity to gain and exercise power. By this means, far before the current catastrophe, a government run by such a leftist party would have been withholding arms and aid to Israel, as well as to any power that systematically violated human rights.

France, for instance, has such a leftist party in La France Insoumise. Despite a functionally multiparty system and a substantial bloc of adherents, Les Insoumis have remained completely outside of power, with little influence on policy or governance. This makes voting for Les Insoumis, as a practical matter, an empty symbolic gesture. We should demand more from politics than performative gestures. We owe progressive allies more than symbolic votes that feel good to us personally and are ostensibly moral but have catastrophic consequences for them. Our political choices have the capacity to bring about specific changes, further higher principles, and prevent harm to billions of people. To act in a way that feels good personally but does irremediable harm to others is not moral behavior.

We should think strategically about political organizing. We need to be taking actions that have a probability of having an impact. We need to stop mindlessly marching and squatting in public space without a theory of how these actions bring about a change. Progressives, socialists, and anarchists of the past were deeply involved in movement building, going door to door for candidates, registering voters, and organizing coalitions of voters, even within coalitions with which they had profound disagreements, not sitting on the sidelines of electoral politics. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 candidacy left an important legacy of social democrats who form a powerful coalition in the House, despite some recent billionaire-funded defeats. This coalition should be supported and strengthened, not abandoned because of the impossibility—because of a lack of a governing majority and the current limited number of progressive congresspersons—of transforming the entire political system.

In the abstract, we always think better policies might pass if the Democrats had more “guts” when in power. Yet in practice, the Democrats’ governing majority in the last few decades has always been narrow, when it has existed. It has depended on conservative caucuses and center-right senators like Joe Manchin who were relatively pro-labor and populist, supplying the key majority vote for passage of health care reform, but whose reliance on local industries and conservative voters for political survival always blocked important green legislation. If we want to build a leftist governing majority, it will not be through a third-party candidacy but by building a bloc of leftist Democrats who caucus together—uniting together to influence policy—and who do so in a Democratic-majority context, in which Democrats have a majority in both houses of Congress and hold the presidency.

This may sound a bit obvious. Yet these political facts of life are frequently ignored and drowned out by leftist impetuousness and mysticism. The horrible failure of the Biden administration to restrain an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip and now Lebanon make it even more urgent to clearly articulate how a Democratic-majority government would function with a substantial governing majority, producing probable outcomes that can be strategized and realized within its apparatus. Put simply, the concept of a strong Democratic governing majority in all branches of government with a green social democratic pro-human rights caucus pushing for more radical changes is absolutely essential for leftist voters and activists to grasp and work toward. If you believe in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, it is absolutely irresponsible to abandon politics and advocate not to vote, or to vote for a third party. This is the clearest way to further embolden far-right-wing authoritarian governments like Netanyahu’s in Israel.

We need to talk about how a lack of a governing majority limits or makes possible progressive, leftist policies, and how failing to achieve a governing majority—or turning against the Democrats for their failures in its absence—makes things irremediably worse. We need to organize for a solid governing majority with a progressive, leftist wing, not just for one term but through a series of elections every two years, in order to produce lasting changes over multiple generations.

Raymond Jungles Redesigns Phipps Ocean Park in Landscape Architecture Magazine

"A South Florida Park Gets a Raymond Jungles Makeover: The redesign of a Palm Beach park will spread the word on native plants," Landscape Architecture Magazine, November 6, 2024.


Phipps Ocean Park is an 18-acre stretch of Palm Beach, in South Florida, donated to the public in 1948 by the Phipps family, heirs of Carnegie Steel partner Henry Phipps. Concerned by redevelopment on the island, the Phipps family was worried that public access to the beach was being lost. Today, Phipps Ocean Park is owned by Palm Beach County, but it is hidden from the street behind north and south parking lots on either side of a fire station. A row of imported palm trees and a handful of indigenous sable palms are most of what remains of the original dune.

When the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach began contemplating improvements to the grounds of the Little Red Schoolhouse, an 1886 one-room school relocated to the park in 1960, where it runs a living history program, its ambitions rapidly grew to include the surrounding landscape. “If we’re going to preserve our heritage, we need to be cognizant of the environmental issues at play,” says Amanda Skier, the foundation’s president and CEO.

Skier’s team hired the Miami-based landscape architect Raymond Jungles, FASLA, winner of the 2024 ASLA Design Medal, to craft a vision for a restored coastal ecosystem that could serve the foundation’s education and advocacy missions. Jungles brings an obvious passion for repopulating species often decimated by commercial developments. “I have a little bit of a subversive attitude,” Jungles says. “I want to bring the plants back that were there, and let those seeds be available to the squirrels and to the birds so that they can spread from where I’ve done my little landscape.”

Working with the ecological restoration specialist George Gann of the Institute for Regional Conservation, Jungles incorporated a matrix of local dune plants that will thrive together and uncover vistas. A topography of natural landforms recalls the original dunes of the Atlantic barrier island, and parking areas will include wide medians with shade trees. To highlight the importance of native dune plants and respond to their unavailability in commercial nurseries, the team is establishing the Coastal Restoration Center nursery within the park that will be run as an independent nonprofit in partnership with the Institute for Regional Conservation.

The center will grow local species and give them away for free. In effect, the park will be an evangelical wilderness, spreading the biodiversity gospel throughout the state. “We’ll know the project has been a success when every beach dune in Palm Beach has been restored,” Skier says.

Interviews with Ya-Ting Liu and Vishaan Chakrabarti, Oculus, Fall 2024


"Living in the Moment," Interviews with Ya-Ting Liu and Vishaan Chakrabarti, Oculus, Fall 2024. 


"I think about prioritizing public space management through what I call hardware, software, and “org-ware.” When it comes to hardware, it’s a lot of this capital stuff we were talking about at the be- ginning. Software gets into all the programming and maintenance work. Is it well maintained? Is it clean? Are interesting things happening in the space? That is critical, because you can build a brand-new plaza, but if it’s filled with trash, no one is going to use it. The software piece is just as important; it is not sexy, and hard to fund, but it is absolutely critical. The city relies on partners to do this work: business improvement districts, friends of parks groups, conservancies, neighborhood groups. But for partners who want to host an open street or do maintenance and programming, we make it very hard for them, so that’s been a real focus of ours. We need these partners—how do we make it easier for them?

And lastly, “org-ware” is more internal. How do you ensure this focus lasts through different administrations? The priority and emphasis always come from the mayor, deputy mayors, and senior levels of the administration. If the senior executive team is not focused on it, you won’t have a lot of juice or resources in your own office. The fact that the deputy mayor for operations has prioritized this has enabled us to do a lot in a short amount of time."

Atrium Architects, ATRIUM Vocabulary of Architecture, "Three Phases" essay, published by Tatlin

 


ATRIUM Vocabulary of Architecture, "Three Phases," Tatlin, 2024.

As one of the independent young offices emerging in Moscow in the 1990s, Atrium had to confront certain limits. When co-founder Anton Nadtochy graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute in 1994, writing on transformational grammar in the work of Peter Eisenman, his program was called the Theory and History of Soviet and Contemporary Foreign Architecture, where he studied constructivist and modern architecture, later working with one of its professors, Vlad Kirpichev, at his EDAS studio (www.edas-kirpichev.com). At the time, Russia was slowly opening to European and Japanese influences, which had benefitted from more competitive public design processes. But architects often say that limits animate form. Atrium’s response after the office’s 1994 founding by Vera Butko and Anton Nadtochy focused on materiality and complex geometries.

In Moscow as elsewhere, builders were figuring out how to construct theory-driven “paper architecture” that had up to then mostly been an academic provocation, rarely implemented in work-for-hire buildings. Inexpensive, off-the-shelf materials remained pervasive in interiors, but Atrium’s early projects were already raising the level of detail and space planning for corporate and private clients. The firm’s approach emphasized composition of open spatial volumes and geometries, which brought them high-profile commissions like the Novinsky Boulevard offices for Moscol company (1997–98) and the Moscow showroom for famous Italian designer furniture-maker Giulio Cappellini (2001–02). 

The Serebryany Bor (“Silver Pinery”) guest house (1999–2004), designed for a client familiar with recent European architecture through travel for business, may best embody the office’s first phase of building-scale work. Located within a nature preserve fifteen minutes from central Moscow, it used a syncopation of contrasting materials, textures, and color tones, as well as the overlapping of two distinct volumes, to explore the resonance of architectural form with its ecological context. Its core orthogonal volume is extensively glazed, softened by walls with wooden cladding, its balconies penetrated by and abutting two preserved pine trees. Around it, half-enclosed in a copper roof, wraps a curving concrete canopy that nods to Le Corbusier’s Ronchamps chapel and the deconstructivist architecture of the moment.

“The main formal strategy was interaction of different shapes, different forms, and every form has its own material, and also we tried to explore complicated geometrical shapes at the time,” Nadtochy says of their early work. “Also, we were very impressed by architectural deconstruction. We tried to create intensive, dynamic space.” 

In 2000, Nadtochy and Butko travelled to the Venice Architecture Biennale—the first taking place on a biennial cycle. The starchitect complex that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilboa had helped propel forward was gaining ground, and the exhibition, entitled Less Aesthetics, More Ethics, curated by Massimiliano Fuksas, was meant to rethink architecture on an urban and metropolitan scale. But for Atrium it represented a watershed in part for the ongoing prominence of form-makers—among them Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Wolf Prix, Thom Mayne, Peter Cook, Toyo Ito, Greg Lynn, Neil Denari, and Ben Van Berkel, . It launched the office on a new trajectory of sculptural architecture—equally influenced by 1960s figures such as Verner Panton, Luigi Colani, Antti Lovag and André Bloc—that sought to heighten aesthetic experience and anticipate another future. 

While the Barkli Park residential complex (2007–2013) in Moscow still reflected the first phase of its activities, combining apartments cantilevered over a sports facility into single fluctuating development, for the next decade or so, projects like the house in Gorky (2004–11), KVN (2012–13), and the Krasnodar Expo pavilion (2014–) found Atrium designing larger and larger structures, using light colors to express biomorphic forms. At the same time, the scale of the single-family home and radical transformations of apartment interiors also figured into the second phase of Atrium’s oeuvre in projects like private houses at Sosni Village and Malakhovka, and apartments in Obydensky Lane and Zhukovka Village, where the legacy of the deconstruction in architecture is expressed in the breaking open of spaces through refractive elements. The intersection of two shapes remained a method of iterating the relationship between a building’s functional core and its exterior expression, and they continued to balance sculptural gestures with contrasting textures of materials. They softened the hard-edge formalism of the overall composition at the Gorky house with warm tones of stained wood. In Barkli Park, the glazed and concrete formed are offset by red brick-clad volumes. In Krasnodar, the complex is a syncopation of glass with gray and white panels.

Atrium’s recent ambitions have gotten more expansive, thinking at the scale of entire development complexes, cities, and regions. In the competition for Olonkholand in the Arctic city of Yakutk, Lake Tuvatui in the Ural Mountain of Siberia, and a downtown development for Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, they developed schemes for connecting architecture and landscape to the identity of places and their meaning to local inhabitants, amplifying their cultural identities within the context of globalizing economic forces. 

“Symbolic structures are becoming more and more important, especially when we work in very specific regions,” Vera Butko says. “Now it’s becoming more and more important for us how to define local identity or create a new identity of a territory.”

This strategy is particularly apparent in Atrium’s competition for Tobolsk, a city in Siberia where vernacular log structures are identified with the history of the region. Atrium’s design for a multifunctional cultural center begins from an original wooden structure and extrudes it into a complex parametric form to house an open amphitheater, a coworking space, education/ afterschool programs, an auditorium for dancing and singing, and ultimately, a new city square with landscaped hills and parking below. It evokes the kind of urban space that Kevin Lynch wrote about in The Image of the City: not a solitary object but a moving set of parts, perceived from a variety of positions, fragmented by individual experiences; a composite, constantly modified by different users.

“This mix of simple shapes creates a new complicated architectural shape,” Nadtochy says. “We see it as a visible and clear symbol, but on the other hand, the spatial structure is not so simple. From a spatial point of view and in terms of movement inside the building, there are many rules of movement connected to the surrounding landscape.” 

Atrium’s most recent commissions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, and Almaty reflect an extended embrace of complexity and a multifaceted approach to design and project delivery, which has been met by public planning policies that encourage innovation of building silhouettes and shapes, beyond surface materials. “It’s a good trend, and we are very happy about it, because we were always thinking about shapes more than facades,” says Nadtochy. “Facades are just decoration. The visual diversity of this environment is important.”

In its Symbol complex of residential towers on the grounds of a former Serp and Molot (“Hammer and Sickle”) metal fabrication company and its Primavera towers on the site of the former Tushino airfield, both located just outside of Moscow, gentle curvatures of building envelopes and a play of light and dark materials on facades combine with urban design on the ground plane that recalls the best qualities of old historic cities, in which streetscapes flowed in sync with the sloping topography of rivers and landscapes. Atrium’s Pedestrian Green and Zil bridge projects in Almaty and Moscow equally fuse soothing non-orthogonal lines across urban infrastructures, softened by naturalized features and animated with lighting schemes that respond to the human need for greenery and visual stimulation. 

It’s a set of ideas that the office is applying even when it comes to an extensive school in Sochi, skyscrapers in Moscow, an all-seasons eco-gallery in St. Petersburg, speculative developments from its new office in the United Arab Emirates, and experiments in virtual interactive spaces for the first Metaverse Architectural Biennale. In the challenging environment of 2020s, Atrium has managed to not only survive but create dynamic work that engages public space and imagines another future. “The situation is very unstable,” says Nadtochy. “What could architecture be if it doesn’t have the restrictions which we have in real architecture?” 


Garden Dwelling in Gwalior, India by Studio Dashline in Dwell


"This Leafy Green Garden Dwelling in India Has an Endless Pool: Studio Dashline designs a lush home for a family in Gwalior with local materials, contemporary flourishes, and a stargazing aperture for nighttime swims," Dwell, August 19, 2024.


"The idea was to have a very seamless connection to nature because the existing landscape was already lush, and it had beautiful trees," says architect Dheeraj Bajaj of Studio Dashline. "We never wanted to extend our footprint out of the boundaries which were already there."

Paris Olympics Architecture in Metropolis, July 2024

 


"Is Paris’s Olympics Architecture Right-Sized for our Times? With its tight environmental targets, redevelopment of historic landmarks, and adaptable housing for athletes, Paris 2024 aims to make hosting the Olympics thrifty and useful to the city," Metropolis, July 24, 2024.


The renovation of Paris’s Grand Palais by Chatillon Architects turns the 1900 glass pavilion designed for that year’s World Expo into a show-stopping 21st century centerpiece for the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics. Together with the Olympic and Paralympic Village, planned by Une Fabrique de la Ville, which extends across a new pedestrian bridge from the near-Paris northern suburb of Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine to Saint-Denis, it’s part of a Paris Olympics scope of work envisaged as feathery light in its ecological footprint and eminently heavy on public services for city dwellers.

The $4.74 billion Paris 2024 plan advertises itself as “building less, better, and usefully.” It relies on existing structures, easily disassembled temporary pavilions, and urban interventions with an integral ongoing benefit to the metropolitan region. By building in a limited way tied to pre-existing urban development plans, the Paris Olympics committee is trying to avoid the multibillion-dollar debt trap hosting the games has incurred on cities like Beijing ($52.7B), Sochi ($59.7B), and Tokyo ($35B). Costs have reportedly climbed to at least $9.66 billion as of April, but that figure still counts as thrifty compared to other recent games. 

The overhauled building services of the $500 million Grand Palais project, for instance, radically updates a venue up-to-now mostly used for trade shows and fashion week events, and only in good seasonal weather. After the renovation, it’s becoming a year-round contemporary cultural center with planned exhibitions of Chiharu Shiota, Niki de Saint Phalle, Anthony Gourmley, Francis Alÿs, and Nan Goldin, along with trade shows, fashion events, and popular spectacles like tightrope walking. “We’re not making the restoration just to make the restauration of historical monuments,” says François Chatillon, a specialist in sensitive historic rehabilitation projects. “We are making the restoration for people to use it. Not only to make something beautiful but to increase capacity. Three thousand people came into the Palais before; tomorrow it will be 9,000 people.”

To add functionality to the Grand Palais, Chatillon Architects inserted a radiant-heated-and-cooled floor keeping the grandiose structure comfortable within five-to-seven feet above ground level. They discreetly hid the pipes, pumps, and wiring in a pink-pigmented concrete floor reminiscent of the earthy terrain that once accommodated equestrian transport. Interstitial glass walls between sections of the palace allow for simultaneous cultural-and-event programming while steadfastly maintaining openness and visibility. The exquisitely restored bronze-colored Art Nouveau staircase and new thermal windows express a devotion to the turn-of-the-19th-century designs of Henri Deglane, Albert Louvet, Albert Thomas, and Charles Girault with a contemporary frisson.

Mary Miss's Double Site threatened with demolition at Des Moines Art Center, Landscape Architecture Magazine, 2024

"Doubletalk on Double Site: Mary Miss has filed an injunction against the Des Moines Art Center to protect her work," Landscape Architecture Magazine, July 18, 2024.


Though women have been important contributors to the land art movement, their work has often gone underappreciated and underacknowledged. A court case against the Des Moines Art Center to protect one of Mary Miss’s major pieces, Greenwood Pond: Double Site, bears out how severely this blind spot could affect the legacy of an important sculptor who uses terrain as her material.

Commissioned in 1989 by Julia Brown Turrell, a well-known contemporary curator for the Des Moines Art Center, Miss conceived Greenwood Pond: Double Site as a demonstration wetland in the middle of Des Moines. The work was a commentary on the disappearance of wetlands throughout Iowa due to farmland drainage. Working with a community group and science center to plan the installation, she started building in 1994 and finished in 1996. A sloping wooden walkway slips down into the pond, traced along the shore by a gravel path with observation points and a pavilion that doubles as a shelter for ice skaters during winter months.

In December 2023, the Des Moines Art Center notified Miss of its plan to demolish the work. It had set aside $350,000 to drain the pond and remove its pavilion feature and distinctive arched boardwalk, replacing them with natural landscape and a walking path.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) called attention to the project’s deterioration as early as 2014, leading to a 2015 restoration. “It seems like the installation has had little or no maintenance for the better part of a decade,” says TCLF director Charles Birnbaum, FASLA. “They’ve been absentee landlords, and now they seem hell-bent on demolition.”

Following efforts to reach an understanding with Des Moines Art Center Director Kelly Baum, Miss filed a lawsuit in April to prevent the demolition. At a pretrial hearing, Baum, a former curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, claimed she had been unaware of the piece prior to her arrival at the institution. (The Des Moines Art Center did not respond to requests for comment.)

That lack of cognizance matches the decade of neglect Double Site suffered after 2015. At that time, Miss had requested the center produce a maintenance manual—a common practice for managing cultural landscapes—to enable it to better steward the work. That never happened. By fall 2023, an engineer surveying its condition cited “significant structural concerns” and recommended closing public access.