Positions - e-flux

Positions

A rhetorical space for claims to be made, risks to be taken, and experiments to be rigorously conducted. A platform for the most challenging, provocative, and critical texts being written in the field of architecture today.

Editors
Nick Axel
Nikolaus Hirsch
Anton Vidokle

Positions is an initiative by e-flux Architecture

31–42

Photograph of the Oculus posted on Instagram by the author on June 6, 2017.

Eva Hagberg

Memory, Hope, and Loss

Rafael Viñoly Architects, 432 Park Ave, 2011–2015. Photo: PeterSesar/Wikimedia Commons, 2017.

Pedro Gadanho

Five Meta-Reviews and Some Footnotes on the (Im)Pertinence of Architectural Criticism

The Fabulous Kiki Ball, 2018, as part of the exhibition Elements of Vogue: A Case Study in Radical Performance at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid. Photo: Patricia Nieto.

Andrés Jaque

Rearticulating the Social

Opening Autodesk Revit’s Basic Sample Project. All Autodesk screen shots reprinted courtesy of Autodesk, Inc.

Amelyn Ng

OOTB

Assaf Evron, O’Hare, 2018.

Dan Handel

Other Intoxications

The Women’s Building, by Deborah Berke Partners (2016–ongoing), as imaged by NoVo. This is the only public rendering that projects The Women’s Building as it might be. It was not prepared by Deborah Berke Partners.

feminist architecture collaborative

The Women, Young Men, and Other Buildings

Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten, Waldmeisterweg, 2019. Photo: Hélène Binet.

Charles Holland

Still Got Love for the Streets

The Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, designed by DMJM, in Start Trek: The Next Generation (1987) as the setting of Rubicun III, a planet characterized by abundant surface water, nitrogen and oxygen-based atmospheres, and the ability to support carbon-based plant and animal life, including a joyful, free-sex loving, humanoid species, called Edo.

Sylvia Lavin

Reclaiming Plant Architecture

Bas Princen, Retreat (Palekh), 2003. Framed photograph, 150 × 182 cm.

Nick Axel and Nikolaus Hirsch

Editorial—Thinking Through Buildings

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, The Duck and The Decorated Shed, 1972.

José Aragüez

Critical Imageability

RICA Studio, Pitch House, Madrid, Spain, 2007–2009. Photo: Roland Halbe.

Iñaqui Carnicero and Lorena del Río

Before and After

El Caballo, the equestrian statue of general Francisco Franco, in custody of the Ministry of Defense, with its head covered and sheathed by a metallic case inside the Navy's military arsenal in Ferrol. Photo: Spanish Ministry of Defense.

Marina Otero Verzier

Memory and Oblivion

21–30

Toyo Ito & Associates, Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai, 1995–2001, pictured with damages sustained from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Source: recorder311/YouTube.

Toyo Ito

Reconstruction and Ideology

Stefano Boeri Architetti, Forest City, conceptual masterplan, 2015.

Stefano Boeri

Inclusion/Exclusion

1973: Sorry, Out of Gas, installation view, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2007–2008. Photo © CCA.

Giovanna Borasi

Other Architectures

estudio Herreros with Daniel Bermúdez Architectos, ÁGORA-BOGOTÁ multiformat events center, Bogota, 2017. Photo: Javier Callejas.

Juan Herreros

Global Practice

Sou Fujimoto Architects, Nicolas Laisné, and Dimitri Roussel, Village Vertical, Paris, 2018–current. Rendering: Virgin Lemon.

Sou Fujimoto

At Scale

Matilde Cassani, Tutto, Manifesta 12, Palermo, 2018. Photo: Francesco Bellina.

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli

Pandora’s Box

Trinitite, the first manmade mineral as a result of US nuclear bomb testing. Photo: Enformable Nuclear News, 2014. Source: Gabriel Ruiz-Larrea, Green Glass Rocks and Red Clouds: Postnuclear Media Objects of the Anthropocene.

Paola Antonelli

Broken Nature

Adjaye Associates, Ghana National Cathedral, Accra, 2018–current. Courtesy of Adjaye Associates.

David Adjaye

Giving Form

Michael Sorkin

Certain Regulations Pertaining to Public Space in The City

Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin Architekten, Steinwies-/Irisstrasse Housing, Zürich-Hottingen, 2011–2015. Photo: Roland Bernath.

Adam Jasper

House Rules

11–20

Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis, Protocol 1: The Diagonal Commonhold, 2016. Design: Numa Merino Studio, based on the graphic design for the book Archipelago of Protocols (dpr-barcelona, 2016).

Aristide Antonas and Thanos Zartaloudis

Protocols for a Life of the Ordinary

Apichapong Weerasethakul, Uncle Bonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, film still, 2010.

Godofredo Pereira

Towards an Environmental Architecture

Freespace, the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Corderie dell'Arsenale, Venice, 2018. Photo: Irene Fanizza.

Alessandro Bava

This is not an exhibition

Coop Himmelblau, Astroballoon, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna, February 1969. Photo: Erwin Reichman. Courtesy of Coop Himmelb(l)au Archives.

Victoria Bugge Øye

On Astroballoons and Personal Bubbles

Munashichi, Future Economic View of Innocence, 2015.

Elvia Wilk

Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?

Junya Ishigami + Associates, House & Restaurant, Yamaguchi, Japan, 2018. Image © Junya Ishigami + Associates.

Beatrice Galilee

Freeness

Interior designs from a generative adversarial network (GAN). Image: Ian Goodfellow, 2018.

Alessandro Bava

Habitable Art

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effects of Good Government in the City, 1338–1339.

Mario Carpo

Republics of Makers

Adidas Speedfactory, Ansbach, Germany. Photo: Ériver Hijano.

Víctor Muñoz Sanz

Platform Architectures

Detail from a 1938 plan of public works in Kinshasa. The zone neutre is clearly marked on the right side, separating the European quarters (above) from the African one (below). Source: Fonds Service Cartographique, 374, Archives Africaines (Brussels).

Andrea Bagnato

Microscopic Colonialism

1–10

Plan of “indigenous” housing designed by François Bienvenu. From Chantiers, no. 3 (March 1933), 267.

Samia Henni

From “Indigenous” to “Muslim”

Photo: Hanna Photography.

Nicholas Korody

Mere Decorating

Mapped trees in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens as of August 25th 2017 on the NYC Street Tree Map.

Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe

The Offsetted

Photograph of the exhibition California: Designing Freedom at the Design Museum, London, 2017. Photo: Luke Hays.

Douglas Spencer

Architecture After California

The "Essenza" table, designed by Willem van Ast for Arco (1999). 18-foot-long variations of this table are featured in Apple Park, Cupertino, California, designed by Foster + Partners (2017).

Shannon Mattern

Sharing is Tables: Furniture for Digital Labor

Mexico City, June, 2017. Photo: V. Mitch McEwen.

V. Mitch McEwen

Profound Modernity

Philippe Rahm, The Hot Death, 2006.

Ross Exo Adams

Becoming-Infrastructural

Image: Brian Cash, Dan Glick-Unterman, Nathan Portlock, and Miguel Sanchez-Enkerlin.

Keller Easterling

Switch

Andreas Angelidakis, Unfinished concrete frame as national monument, 2009.

Andreas Angelidakis

Unauthorized

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Convention Hall project, Chicago, Illinois (Preliminary version: interior perspective), 1954. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Reinhold Martin

Pittsburgh, Paris, Charlottesville: The Infrastructure Question

Positions 31–42 21–30 11–20 1–10