Tina di Carlo

• 

  passages April 06, 2016

  Zaha Hadid (1950–2016)

  LONG BEFORE GAINING WORLDWIDE RENOWN for the London Aquatics Centre she designed for the 2012 Olympics or her MAXXI Museum in Rome, which opened in 2009, Zaha Hadid was at the vanguard of architecture. She was celebrated from the very start of her career, with her student thesis, Malevich’s Tektonik, in 1976–77—a concept for a fourteen-story hotel on Hungerford Bridge across the Thames, in which her architectural language was already inspired by Suprematism—and then as a legendary professor at the Architectural Association in London. In her initial years of teaching, in the early 1980s, she

• 

  architecture November 2014

  Bernard Tschumi’s retrospective

  “ARCHITECTURE IS the materialization of a concept.” This is just one of many polemical positions that Bernard Tschumi has articulated throughout his forty-year career, and it is the perfect summation of the celebrated architect’s position—capturing his conviction that his discipline is fundamentally about thinking, that building is first and foremost about ideas. But such a statement also leaves the definition of architecture uncertain, contingent on its material realization and on the vagaries of putting ideas into practice. Yet, the paradox is, perhaps, the real force behind Tschumi’s

• 

  architecture November 2013

  “Deconstructivist Architecture”

  IN NOVEMBER 1988, an obituary appeared in Texas Architect alongside a birth announcement: “DIED. Fred Postmodernist. BORN. Herman Deconstructivist.” The cause for both: the exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture,” which had run from June 23 to August 30 that summer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show was organized by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley with the assistance of Frederieke Taylor. It featured a selection of the museum’s holdings from the Russian avant-garde and ten architectural projects designed over the preceding decade. The architects were seven stars we know today:

• 

  previews January 2005

  Michael Maltzan

  Educated at Harvard Design School, Maltzan belongs to a generation of architects who relocated to LA from the East Coast. Here, four spaces will hold more than two hundred sectional drawings, DVDs, and process and large-scale models (including those for MoMA QNS and the Fresno Metropolitan Museum) from the past decade.

  The qualities of movement, light, and surface essential to Michael Maltzan's work inspired Carnegie curator Raymund Ryan to organize the first exhibition dedicated to the California-based architect. Educated at Harvard Design School, Maltzan belongs to a generation of architects who relocated to LA from the East Coast. While his work is more restrained and less technologically and mathematically driven than that of his peers, his contextual and phenomenological approach—resulting in topological extrusions—is no less pertinent to contemporary discourse. Here, four