An Architect in Novelist’s Clothes
NYRA talks to Kim Stanley Robinson, plus SOS Brutalism and Urban Warfare
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“Architecture Is the Clutch”
An interview with the author of The Ministry for the Future
by Matthew Allen and Kim Stanley Robinson
Matthew Allen: I’m curious what you think about the figure of the architect. You could say that an architect is like an author or a visionary—or perhaps an architect should be a bureaucrat or a planner?
Kim Stanley Robinson: I’m reminded of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There’s normal science, and then there’s paradigm-changing science. You might say that there’s the ordinary work of architecture that works with a normal set of standards, materials, and approaches—and then there will be something that destabilizes that and pushes somebody to come up with a new approach. Of course, the normal science or normal architecture keeps going on. I’m very interested in what you call bureaucratic architecture—we also need that. There’s room for both. In something as integral to civilization as architecture is, doesn’t that mean city design and therefore human ecology and biosphere management? I’m thinking of bio-architecture: building your buildings out of giant genetically modified sequoia trees or seashells. The weird interfaces that are going to look like science fiction stories—this idea that you “architect” space itself.
I also think of this culture’s idea of charismatic megafauna…. It’s a model where you personify a field by an individual in it—so you have Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright or Frank Gehry. There’s only room in the cultural imaginary for one or two per generation.
Monster Mash
On forgetting what Brutalism looked like and remembering what it actually offered
by Clare Fentress
Why are we still talking about Brutalism? It is a truism that nostalgia comes in cycles, and this resurgence has been in step with other resurrections of the ’60s and ’70s (see: endless variations on the bubble couch, disco period-piece blockbusters, bucket hats). But as these consumer trends start to fade, I wonder if there is something deep in the collective unconscious that has caused it to dredge up the memory of Brutalism in particular and refuse to loosen its grip. These are buildings, after all, that we are no longer allowed to build. We have neither the political will to manifest such robustly social architecture, nor the cheap labor and the blissful ignorance of the consequences of concrete to realize such form. There is much to mourn here: a monumentality that belongs to the public rather than to capital; buildings that celebrate both the line of the architect and the hand of the builder; pre-oil consciousness; a natural world that is rapidly mutating as the climate crisis marches onward, its effects distributed just as unevenly as the exploitative wealth creation that caused it.
War and City
Downtown LA represents an intentional failure of the built environment.
by Piper French
LA is ground zero for a particular militarized repression of the visible symptoms of wealth stratification that other cities are only just adopting. Perusing these photos, I thought of the sociologist Michel Agier’s essay “Between War and City,” which theorizes refugee camps as a novel urban hybrid caught within a perverse nexus of armed conflict and humanitarian action. The same dynamic is on display downtown: on one side, the violence of hyper inequality, rapid development, and the police; on the other, the missions and homeless services clustered around Skid Row—which, as Wolch explains, the city has intentionally confined to the area in a (failed) attempt to keep unhoused people from moving to other parts of the city. Like Agier’s sprawling encampments of the displaced, Downtown LA is somewhere between war and city; not for nothing did a visiting UN rapporteur compare Skid Row to a refugee camp in 2018. Désirée Van Hoek’s work beautifully captures these tensions in snapshots of police confrontation or a soup kitchen meal neatly laid out.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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