To Read
Trouble with Terminators
Places Journal
Why not make buildings today as they once were made? This is actually a really good, really radical question.
Designing Indian Country
Places Journal
Suppose Native America is not over, that there is no “after colonialism.” How do we create public spaces that enable true contact between cultures?
The Architecture of Sports
Places Journal
From signature golf courses to street basketball courts: fields of play are laboratories of spatial invention.
Divide and Conquer
Places Journal
The abstract lines we’ve drawn across America — the Mason Dixon Line, the Transcontinental Railroad — still resonate in the cultural landscape of the nation.
Eadweard Muybridge’s Secret Cloud Collection
Places Journal
Is it possible to rephotograph a scene that never existed? The fake landscapes of “Eduardo Santiago” embody the complexities and contradictions of representational art.
The Corner of Lovecraft and Ballard
Places Journal
H.P. Lovecraft and J.G. Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, and both made the humble corner into a place of nightmares.
Death and Taxonomies
Places Journal
The habit of humanity has long been to fix the natural world on the end of a pin, to arrange all flora and fauna into a museum of death and order.
Spires and Gyres
Places Journal
Contemporary Jakarta is a megalopolis of monuments and mosques, towers and malls — spires and gyres. It is also a fiercely insistent projection of Indonesian independence.
The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas
Places Journal
The architect’s career embodies the inevitable contradictions in trying to marry art and capitalism, radicalism and pragmatism, icon-making and city-making.
Open and Shut
Places Journal
Two recent books offer compelling perspectives on the debate between private interest and public good. They also raise provocative questions about an activist agenda for the design disciplines.
Design and the Green New Deal
Places Journal
If landscape architects want to remake the world, we can start by remaking our discipline.
Mass Support
Places Journal
Dutch architect John Habraken saw the potential of industrialized building to democratize decision-making, to involve inhabitants in optimizing their homes for their own needs.
Disabling Modernism
Places Journal
During the first decade of the New Deal, modernist architects designed schools for disabled children that proposed radical visions of civic care.
The "Indianized" Landscape of Massachusetts
Places Journal
The inclusion of Native American names and sites in civic geography near Boston has obscured the violence of dispossession.
Seeing Sacagawea
Places Journal
Her name and likeness have served the mythology of American manifest destiny. What do we know of the emotional and intellectual presence of Sacagawea on the Lewis and Clark Trail?
Highways and Horizons
Places Journal
The Interstate Highway System created a national polity defined by circulation. To rethink the Interstates is to rethink the United States.