When as an architecture student in the 1990s I visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Western Pennsylvania, the docent took notice of the number of women architecture students on the tour and asked, “why do you suppose there haven’t been any great women architects?” Virginia Wolfe’s argument about the impossibility of a female Shakespeare came... Continue Reading →
Like a Virgin
It is rare for a seasoned professor to get that jolt of excitement one gets from teaching a class for the very first time, but that’s exactly what happened this semester when I was asked to to teach a history of architecture class in a new program. The material covered by the class was in... Continue Reading →
Soderbergh’s Unsane
Part I: An office job It just so happened that I was reading about beauty pageants on the way to the movie theater, so I was already primed to think about what I might call “the expectation of charm.” It’s the sort of expectation that compels people to tell young women to smile. I always... Continue Reading →
Vito Acconci 1940-2017
I was honored to be part of his memorial yesterday at Pratt School of Architecture, in collaboration with Acconci Studio. I first encountered Vito’s work as a student in architecture school. There was a postcard in my mailbox announcing his upcoming lecture with a photograph of his “Adjustable Wall Bra.” I thought, a wall needs... Continue Reading →
What’s With the Egg Crate Roof?
Fly over New Haven, CT and on Chapel Street you will find a roof like no other. There are the pitched roofs of the nineteenth century and the flat asphalt roofs of the twentieth, and then there’s the roof of the Yale Center for British Art that looks like the bottom of an egg crate.... Continue Reading →
About Thom’s Question for Dominic
The question was why do you do a proper architecture section and then go back to more conceptual exercises and the answer has to do a little bit with the history of architecture and a lot with how I cook octopus. There are times in the history of architecture when we are very concerned with... Continue Reading →
School as a Magic Box
I’ve been feeling sad and angry and afraid and finally I wrote this for my first year architecture students who are designing a school for a fictional site in Manhattan. This is the studio course in which they learn about the integration of program and form—they are dealing with a complex program for the first... Continue Reading →
Tap Your Reptilian Brain
Design teachers have known forever that architecture is best made in a state of distraction. Knowing all the facts about site and program will only get designers so far. At some point we need to go forth confidently and make those design decisions without sweating the blow by blow requirements of the project. Words like... Continue Reading →
Party Like It’s 1999
My film and architecture project involves looking at film as if it were architecture and looking at architecture as if it were film; it also relies, in part, on the work of neurobiologist Antonio Damasio. I first knew of Damasio when he spoke at Sundance in January 2000. He was wearing light colored pants, I... Continue Reading →
