Numerus Klausus #23: Pritzker 2015 – Missed it by ‘this’ much

Back in March The Pritzker Award Committee announced that this year’s laureate would be Frei Otto. This was excellent news, especially for all megastructural-age nostalgics such as myself… if not for the unfortunate coincidence that Mr. Otto had sadly passed away a coupla days before that.

Numerus Klausus #21: Pimp my Warsaw

Click to Enlarge (or don’t. It’s up to you) (*) Yes, ‘Hanna’ is Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, Warsaw’s current mayor. If you live in Poland and you don’t think Warsaw is suffering from a case of  major -and pretty late- Bilbao-itis, drop me a line. The original cartoon can be found as originally published in the “Klaus Kube” section of Uncube

Numerus Klausus #13: Mars Attracts! (AKA: Mars One… and two, and three…)

Click to enlarge “More than 100,000 people have applied to be a part of the Mars One project, which aims to colonize the red planet starting in 2022. Out of the thousands, 40 people will be selected. Of the 40, just four will participate in the first passage to Mars, which is scheduled to leave in

Numerus Klausus #08: One of My Turns [An Homage to Mark Fisher]

Click to enlarge “He flew Tina Turner over her audience on a huge mechanical arm, drove U2 through their arena inside a mirror-studded lemon, and thrust the Rolling Stones between stages on a 45m-long telescopic bridge, complete with helicopter searchlights. The architect and set designer Mark Fisher, who has died aged 66 after a long

Numerus Klausus #05: Metropol Para-poli

Click to enlarge “Seville’s flashy new showcase is held together by extra-strong glue – but not quite enough to make its many parts connect. Oh my God, it’s an icon. How very last decade. Did the city of Seville not get the memo? Big, flashy buildings are out; hair shirts are in. Then again, building

Numerus Klausus #04: Cloud Encounters of the 911th Kind

Click to enlarge Dutch firm MVRDV has received harsh criticism since they revealed the proposal for two luxury residential towers in South Korea, named after its inspiration, The Cloud. The two towers are connected by a “pixilated cloud of additional program.” Critics are outraged, stating the design resembles the collapsing twin towers of the World

Numerus Klausus #03: Animal Farm / On Recycling

Click to enlarge Click to enlarge “Our Design for the Parrish Art Museum is a reinterpretation of a very Herzog & De Meuron typology, the traditional house form. What we like about this typology is that it is open for many different functions, places, and cultures. Each time this simple, almost banal form has become

Numerus Klausus #02: You’re so Kool

Click to Read Ok, let’s see if I can bring this back on trail. I really need to catch up with the blog. This comes from Uncube Magazine # 07 : Off-places. The published version is slightly different. In the same issue, there’s an interview with Gottfried Böhm by Florian Heilmeyer which is really worth

Tell me more! (Article for Conditions magazine #10: Gossip)

click to enlarge (…) Digging into the dirty laundry of the architectural star-system is, in any case, neither a recent phenomenon nor a curiosity exclusively circumscribed to today’s divas. The mouth-to-ear airing of our architectural heroes’ private sins has been an inevitable aside of their rise as idols. Small talk on the lower passions of

Koolhaas at the GSD: Current Preoccupations

Click to enlarge Earlier this month Rem Koolhaas returned to the Harvard GSD in order to give one of his infrequent and multitudinous conferences. Filed under the motto “current preoccupations”, the talk, which replayed Koolhaas’s October lecture at the Barbican, showcased a bunch of different issues taking place on and around OMA’s office. And so,