LOST (AND FOUND) IN TRANSLATION
Swissness Applied, Edited by Nicole McIntosh and Jonathan Louie
Essay on the traveling exhibition “Swissness Applied” and it’s image-driven content that circumvents topics of architectural production, local building codes, along with the importation and translation of architectural styles.
ON BLANKNESS
Blank: Speculation on CLT, edited by Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara
An essay on the impact of CLT’s blank qualities and the aesthetic of “Blankness” in architecture’s visual culture. (Applied Research + Design Publishing/ORO Editions, 2022)
The Middle: On Freedom, Autonomy, and Pleasure
ACSA 2020 : OPEN : Cultural Artifacts and Intervention Panel
Explores how the broader geographic “middle” of America can provide a fruitful space for architectural experimentation as demonstrated by the renewed interest in historical typologies, crafted traditions, and post-industrial landscapes.
UNEarthing Gehry and Ruscha’s forgotten collboration
PIN-UP Magazine : DESERT (Spring/Summer)
Blurring more than just time and space, the desert blurs disciplinary boundaries, as evidenced by historian Sylvia Lavin in her exploration of an iconic yet unknown collaboration in the 1970s between two pivotal figures: Ed Ruscha, the poster-child of SoCal artists, and Frank Gehry, then outlier architect.
Screenplay: French 2d’s Kendall square GARAGE
Surface Design Journal
Can a parking garage be cinematic? French 2D, the women behind the curtain wall, transform the parking garage from ordinary urban infrastructure to a technicolor 26,000 square foot architectural adventure, proving that everyday architectures—such as parking garages—can deliver celluloid effects. Their Kendall Square Garage is a fresh example of how remnant infrastructures can perform as the protagonist in redevelopment schemes—one that doesn’t require rezoning or reprogramming of the structure itself. (Photo: John Horner)
THE contractor canon
A LOW-FI SPECULATION ON LOW-RES ARCHITECTURE
Pidgin 25
Deliberations on dumb details, The Home Depot, Normcore and Glossier—or, low-resolution architecture, materials and practices in the post-digital age.
curtain as wall
Interiors Journal : Volume 9 : Issue 1
As functional ornament, curtains commonly remain outside the traditional scope and canon of architecture, yet their spatial deployment demands (re)consideration. The necessary inclusion and subsequent erasure of these textiles in modernist architecture occurred in tandem with the proliferation of the free plan, the free façade and the curtain wall. This research highlights the role of curtains in iconic 20th-century projects and further considers how the modernist curtain evolved into unconventional contemporary variations—a soft architecture of flexible programming.
None MORE Black
ACSA 2019 : The Black Box : Becoming Digital Panel
Is color technical rather than compositional? An attempt to frame a current moment in the complex overlap of digital data and physical matter—“from screen to stone”—through the lens of three, highly specific colors: pink, blue and black.
The Deep end
POOL : Issue 3 : Party
What is the critical mode of the after-party? Given the recent resuscitation of certain disciplinary moods, it would seem we are currently surrounded by images of past architectures, glazed over with nostalgia for a future—any future—not yet encumbered by disciplinary baggage, resting at the deep end of Edie Sedgwick pool in Ciao! Manhattan.
SHOPS aren’t for shopping (anymore)
The Atlantic
Retail stores used to be places to buy things. Smartphones changed that, and retailers are struggling to invent new reasons, and methods, for shopping.
WORKING TO SCALE
LALA Magazine
A profile piece on THIS X THAT, an architectural consultancy working with young designers and artists in Los Angeles and abroad.
THE PAINT job
Source Books in Architecture 12 : Neil M. Denari
Reflections on the recent pink makeover of the formerly sea-foam green Alan-Voo House.
TECHNI/SOCIAL/COLOR
A chromatic architecture "map" of Los Angeles, which includes the populist pinks of Paul Smith's infamous Instagram-pink wall and Roberto Legorreta's Pershing Square colonnade; the boisterous blues of Church Scientology and Cesar Pelli's Pacific Design Center; the dreamy rainbows of West Hollywood's pride crosswalks and Sony Studio's commission by Tony Tasset.
ROMANTICS ANONYMOUS
A review of Los Angeles' recent acquisition, The Museum of Broken Relationships, ponders "What It Means to Love Today" through the relics of affection.
SCRAMBLED DESIRE
A brief examination on glitches - from the digital production technique of "breaking the tool" to its subsequent aesthetic impact in architectural representation, design objects and visual culture.
A DISCIPLINARY DEATH DRIVE
SOILED 06 : Deathscrapers
An architectural translation of self-destructive desires compares the psychological repetitive urge to consume drugs or engage in risky behavior with the repetitive trends in architectural representation, specifically two contemporary drawing techniques that push disciplinary speculation.
UN-HOUSE OF THE FUTURE
Reconsiders the Smithsons' House of the Future as an inverted typology, resulting in an inside-out alternative of programmatic function and diagrammatic dialect.
FLUID PLEASURE
A highlight of On The Road: Project LA's fourth pop-up exhibition produced Fluids Mashup, an Allan Kaprow happening of his 1967 Fluids happening, amid the magic hour light of Palm Springs.
POP(ULATING) PINK
VIA Issue 04 : Natures
Rose-tinted observations on the chromatic variations of pink and its lesser-known histories of iconic architecture in Los Angeles. This site-specific gradient includes R.M. Schindler's House on Kings Road (Salmon), Frank Gehry's own residence in Santa Monica (Mauve), Stephen Prina's "As He Remembered It" installation at LACMA (Honeysuckle), Johnston Marklee's Sale House in Venice (Magenta), and Neil Denari's Alan Voo House in Palms (Fuchsia).
OUT OF THE BLUE AND INTO THE PINK
Saturated Space @ The Architectural Association
Culturally known as the most kitsch and taboo colour, pink has been making a recent appearance in contemporary architecture. From book covers, installations, interiors, pop-up shelters and objects du jour, it seems fitting that pink is saturating contemporary discourse as the colour itself oscillates between natural and artificial, flesh and mechanization, innocence and sexuality.
ADDRESSING ARCHITECTURE
ON SIMULACRUM, TIME AND POCHÉ
Thesis for UCLA Critical Studies in Architecture
Architecture and Fashion both interrogate tectonic logic, structure, formal technique, and the human body. Divided into three parts exploring the simulacrum of the knock off, shifting production speeds, and the residual space of poché, brief detours through canonized histories lend theoretical insight to contemporary architecture and its chatter with fashion. Exploration into the alternative overlaps between these two fields attempts to find common clichés and a disciplinary swerve.
Architectural Confections: Delectable Essays
DELECTABLE ESSAYS
Thesis for OSU Architectural Studies in Criticism
A collection of essays on tasty architectural treats; close-readings of selected projects include UN Studio’s Agora Theatre, Pita & Bloom’s Pulse: Tendril Formations, Mark Foster Gage’s competition entry for the Estonian Academy of the Arts, among others.